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2017 Node.js User Survey and Beaker Browser_transcript.txt

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+**Mikeal Rogers:** Welcome to JS party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript. I'm Mikeal Rogers.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm Alex Sexton.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And our guest today is Paul Frazee. Say hi, Paul.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Hey, everybody.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. So we've got Paul on to talk about the Beaker Browser, which we'll get into a bit later, but first we're just gonna discuss this new Node.js user survey. Everybody heard about Node.js, everybody know what that's about?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Only if it's pronounced NodeDotJs...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, NodeDotJs. There actually is somebody very prominent who always says it that way... It just takes too long to say. I think that we can just call it Node.
+
+Anyway, so there was this great Node.js user survey; about 1,400 people were surveyed at the end of 2016. It took quite a while; I was still at the Foundation while this was happening, obviously, so it took a while to synthesize the results, but now finally all of the results and some big summaries and all the data are out there, and it's been getting a lot of traction. A lot of people are talking about it.
+
+Any initial thoughts or remarks about this from you all?
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Kind of interesting, 50% of people are using containers... That's a nice little insight there.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I always forget -- not everybody has listened to every podcast where we've talked about a survey, but there's a really good issue of the Changelog, actually, where me and Nadia came on and interviewed somebody about the GitHub survey... And one of the things that we got into was that it's very important to quantify -- you're never gonna get 100% of the people, and you're not even gonna get like a perfect distribution of people, so it's important to just quantify which section of the community that you've got in the survey, right?
+
+One really good thing in Node is because you know that the community is doubling every year, if you ask people how long they've been doing Node, you'll get a really good idea of what the distribution is of the people that you ended up surveying. With stuff like this you tend to get people that have been using the language like two years or more. That's a longer-term, slightly more engaged 25 percentile of the community. And of that section of the community, half of them are using containers... Which I think is not that surprising, but I guess kind of surprising.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Do you think it should be more, or less?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I think it's surprising just in that there's a lot of people using Node.js and just doing front-end stuff, and a bunch of them showed up in this. A big portion of the 50% that said no to containers just aren't doing any back-end stuff...
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Right, right.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[03:57\] And how many of them are just deploying with Now and they don't even know that that's in a container, right? There's already a lot of services that are like -- the containers are so hidden from you and so pushed down in the stack that you don't even know. Yeah, so that was a bit surprising... That's pretty huge, all things considered.
+
+I'm glad that the Foundation is talking about China a bit more. I tried to talk about this, but China is the fastest-growing section of Node.js users, and probably just developers in the world, to be honest. It's crazy. There are a lot of users in China. There's like over a million Node.js users in China now, which is something like 12% of the entire community. We picked up a bunch of them with the survey, so that was cool.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** We have a link that we'll probably share on the page if you're reading the summary, or something... The Hacker Noon kind of rolled up with some of the things, and I feel like they asked some questions about -- or rather they have like 39% of respondents are using containers for front-end development. Then they have some things like -- where is this? I've gotta zoom in... "Are you using Node primary development-focused, full stack, versus front-end?" and stuff like that. I feel like the number I want is "How many people only use Node during your build step, versus as a server?" \[laughter\] I think that number would be extremely interesting, and I don't think I see that here.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, you could figure it out from the data, though... Because they shared the data. There's a graph here that basically says "What is your focus?" and there's Back-end, Full Stack, Front-end, DevOps, Desktop Applications, Mobile, IoT and Security.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right, that's their job; they might program Python and then use Node for developer tools \[unintelligible 00:06:09.07\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, so these are all just checkboxes, right? What you really wanna know is how many people checked the front-end box and not the full stack or back-end box. How many people only checked the front-end box? That's the one we wanna know, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No, I don't need -- like, I'm a full stack developer, but I don't write Node servers at my job, like I do for fun, or whatever. But at my job, Stripe is a Ruby stack for the most part, so I mostly write Ruby if I'm writing back-end. So I would consider myself a full stack developer, but my day-to-day is writing JavaScript that either runs in Node as a build step, or JavaScript that runs in the browser.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, it looks like this question was posed in the context of using Node.js, not in the context of like "What kind of developer are you?"
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I would be interested in the exact wording...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I believe the wording was "How was your organization using Node.js? What is the focus of your Node.js usage, specifically?"
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, which is like -- full stack is just such a weird one, because it's like... If you click back-end and front-end, is that not just full stack? \[laughter\] Yeah, but it's interesting that the full stack metric here actually outpaces the front-end metric.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** What would you think it means if I just say I use Node.js for my front-end?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I like the desktop application, mobile and IoT stuff was on here too, because it makes front-end really mean JavaScript front-end. If your front-end is an Electron app, you're gonna click the desktop application box... So that's great.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[07:55\] Mikeal, I know you used to have numbers on downloads, but it still feels like based on what gets downloaded from npm, that over 50% of all use of npm is for building front-end tooling, right?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, the metrics on downloads from npm are a little bit harder to contextualize than you would think. What you kind of have to do is that you've gotta look at how much these things are depended on, and basically try to filter out what you would expect the number of just things being pulled in as a dep is from what you might call a edge dependency, like something that somebody directly pulls in and uses. Express is like an edge dependency. People don't add it as a dep in a module that they push up very often. And when they do, that module is probably like a full application.
+
+Express is a very good indicator of "How many downloads are happening for this particular web thing?" I think Yarn is an edge dependency that is probably an accurate interpretation of people that are probably doing some frontend stuff, that are touching one of those.
+
+But Babel gets pulled in by other toolchains, Webpack gets pulled in by other toolchains, and when you look at their download metrics, they can be pretty astronomical because they're sitting below the stack in so many different applications. So yeah, it's a little bit harder to quantify what's going on there... Also, the front-end dep chains appear to be longer -- the dep graphs appear to be longer than back-end, so that means that their download metrics are going to be dramatically larger just on average.
+
+A good example of this is like -- Request is depended on quite a bit, and it's depended on directly quite a bit, but there are small dependencies of Request, because it's broken into a bunch of modules, and those modules are depended on by almost nobody but Request, and they have astronomical download numbers.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** If you look at the top 10 JavaScript libraries that are distributed across the Alexa top one million, Yepnope is like number 12 or 8 or something like that; it's extremely high up there, and virtually no one put on their page, but Modernizr put it into Modernizr, and now it's one of the top scripts ever distributed on the internet... But I just leave that other part out whenever I tell people that I wrote it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Exactly. That's why I think that -- when you're trying to quantify people, download metrics are a really problematic metric to look at.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Can you give like several years of talks about download metrics?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, I'd give several years of talks about growth of package ecosystems and growth of users, and the users are quantified not by the download metrics.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's the spin... Every week, the spin...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, I actually -- so when the Foundation put out the eight million number of users, I was kind of on my way out of the Foundation, and people really went after it and were very skeptical of it... And I'm really confident in that number. There's a couple reasons for that. One is it's a very good number from npm that gives you a very good indication of actual users. It's basically like npmJs.org website impressions, unique users that have engaged over a particular amount... Over I think like a three months span. So it's a very good indication of how many people are engaging with the npm website.
+
+\[11:53\] You can even use npm without using the website, but chances are in a three-month period you're going to engage with it if you're a user... Unless you're in China. And there's a bunch of reasons for that, but before we get into that, we also have metrics on the NodeJS.org website, and because it's localized in so many different languages, it gives you a very good indication of the geographic distribution of Node users. It doesn't give you a great indication of how many users, because you can just user Node.js and never ever touch the Node.js website. There's not really a reason to go there. But it gives you a great distribution.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, just docs are on there.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, so we did not have metrics on the API documentation until about a month ago... \[laughter\] Yeah, so this is the website minus the API docs, because they're often in their own section. But anyway, because you have that 12% -- because you know that the market share is about 12% and you know that that market share is basically missing from the eight million number, you can go like "Oh, okay... Well, do we know how many independent users are in China?" It turns out that we do, because virtually every Node.js user in China is a part of this forum called cnodejs.org, which is basically like a forum where people are speaking in Chinese, and they're supporting each other, they're answering different tech questions, and a lot of the answers to those tech questions are just in time translations of different module or API documentation... But yeah, it's just a resource that virtually everybody is engaged in, and their metrics really do back that up. They can give us metrics on how many active users that they have, and then we can look at "Is that number 12% of that eight million number?" We've been able to do these correlations for years now, and the npm number has always just kind of tracked perfectly with what we think the user metrics are.
+
+So I'm much more confident in the number of users of Node.js metric that I've seen -- we have better data there than I think any other language has, I'll say that. Anyway, that's not really about this survey, but... \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I guess the reason I brought all that up is I'm skeptical a little bit of the data about -- because of the massive amount, what I assume is in the area of 50% of people who only use Node as their build tool, but still use Node, like, how does that skew this stuff?
+
+There aren't a ton of people doing builds inside of containers compared to people running servers in containers, I imagine, but... I mean, not that it's not done; I do it, personally, but it's just more overhead for building a static asset.
+
+What does the containers number go up to if you take out the build tool only people? I don't know, I just feel like because the two communities are there, it would be really much more interesting to see this data split on those two points.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So I did try to do this analysis once... Actually, there was a conference that you put together, I believe...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Correct. Front End Ops Conf.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, exactly. And one of the things that I did in that talk was that I parsed through GitHub data that figured out how many people are interacting with packages, and then I came up with some fuzzy ways to figure out if it's a frontend or a backend package...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** This is what I was talking about whenever I made the joke, like 10 minutes ago.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. It's not the greatest, but it was kind of good enough, and what you saw was that front-end packages had far more people engaging with them than back-end packages, and that their growth was actually a lot higher. npm - I don't know if they're getting this from their download metrics or if they have a way of determining front-end packages and then they can segment the users on the website, because that would give them a very good indication of how many people are only engaged in front-end stuff.
+
+\[16:10\] They've said that they estimate that a little over half of Node users are doing front-end stuff. I don't think that they have a great way to figure out if they're only doing front-end stuff, which I think is what you want...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, I mean, primarily it would be fine...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** ...but that's just really hard to determine. As Node.js becomes a build tool for anybody building a website, the web is definitely larger than people that write back-end, period. We know that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And there are a lot fewer options.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. One of the slides in this deck is just a bunch of logos, a ton of corporate logos for different companies, and at this point... Can we just put up an empty slide that says "People not using Node.js?" \[laughs\] Isn't that easier and more accurate?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... I'm always skeptical of those things, too. I'm old school, jQuery crew, but it was amazing how many logos were the same across Dojo, MooTools and jQuery's websites. It's like, "Oh yeah, IBM uses jQuery. IBM uses Dojo. IBM uses" -- well, IBM never used MooTools... \[laughter\] But I think I pushed at the time for jQuery to remove IBM's logo, because they were very clearly a Dojo shop. They had tons and tons of contributors to Dojo, and their marketing sites used jQuery, so it was like "Oh yeah, IBM uses jQuery", and I really didn't feel like that was fair.
+
+I'm interested does the skunkworks labs team, for people at X company use Node, or it's like the API that that company is known for built on Node? Because you could say Stripe uses Node for sure, but we don't have any production services - that I'm at least willing to mention here - that use Node. Does it make sense?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. This was something that when I was at the Foundation I had to talk with analysts a lot about. Analysts heard for years about how enterprises are adopting Ruby, and what it always was was like "Somebody is using a test framework somewhere written in Ruby", and it wasn't like they were actually moving off of Java, and it took a while to convince them that "No-no-no, people are building production applications with all of their traffic in these enterprises running through Node", this is not just like a thing in their front-end toolchain, although they do have it in their front-end toolchain somewhere.
+
+But I think outside of enterprise and outside of tech analysts that care about enterprise, a much more interesting story to me is what's happening with front-end development. I think that this very huge shift in how we build front-end applications and how much basically software infrastructure we're able to build up and evolve over time and continue to inter-depend on, that being applied to front-end use cases into the broader web is just a much more interesting story to me than people building microservices that are sitting in front of their old, ancient Java apps; that's not very interesting to me.
+
+I know that there's a lot of weird identity politics about "Node.js is back-end, and we're whatever framework is cool right now", but at the end of the day I think that one of the greatest successes for Node.js is going to be the change that happens in the front-end web, that is facilitated by the platform.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** \[20:04\] One of the interesting side effects to that is that it's also starting to really dominate my time in Bash... Because you have so many build tools that you're running from the command line that are just Node.js packages, but I'm starting to have a lot of commands showing up that people make, and it's an npm install. Right now, that's the main way I get new commands to use inside of my command line.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** One benefit is that it's cross-platform.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Cross-platform, exactly.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that's really the main benefit. One is that you have this dependency network that you can tap into. So you have all this software infrastructure, you don't have to build everything from scratch, but two is like --
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You know how to write Bash.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, you know how to write Bash... There's a lot of great things about Python, but Python never had - and still does not - have a great cross platform story. They're still pretty \[unintelligible 00:20:54.06\] on Windows, and so is Ruby, and so is -- like, a lot of languages just never really did the work to be a first-class citizen the way that Node did in 2012.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Of course, Windows is trying to change that with their UNIX stuff. I don't know, I haven't tried that - has anybody here tried that?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I have... It's not there yet. The problem is that like, as a subsystem, if you treat it like a better VM or something, it's quite good. But as soon as you wanna use it like a regular Windows thing and have it tap into that sub-file system, things go a little haywire.
+
+Anyway, I think one thing, Alex, to point out is that this survey definitely picked up a section of the community that is more back-end than what you would think of as the average. Look at the number of respondents that work with databases directly - that's really high. It's like 95%. I think it's the kind of people that wanted to spend 20 minutes filling out a Node.js survey are gonna be more like back-end people.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I mean, I'd be in the 5%. I don't think I ever touch production databases, at least.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I try to write a database about every month from scratch, but...
+
+**Paul Frazee:** You know, what I'd be interested to see is which databases people are using with Node.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** There was data in the survey that was conducted the prior year on that... A lot of MongoDB still.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** They're a billion dollar company now, right? I think they just hit it. Just insane...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, full unicorn status.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, wooot!? I mean, for what it's worth, Stripe does not use Node, it does use MongoDB.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Not to store financial transactions... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** We store them there... We just store them a couple other places, too. \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Frazee:** I've been hearing that Mongo has really ironed out a lot of those bugs at this point. I don't know if that's true, I haven't used them, but that's the story they're trying to get out there. It's like "Yeah, we had growing pains", but you know, they made a lot of money, they got to be as big as they are, and then they put in the engineering effort necessary to stop losing data. If that's true, there you go.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** The real thing was just like for the longest time - and maybe they've changed this, but even after they added good transactional integrity and they could make those kinds of claims, it wasn't enabled by default. And as soon as you enabled it -- MongoDB is pretty slow, and one of the reasons why people gravitated towards this for so long was because of these claims that they made about how fast it was.
+
+Some of them were quite absurd, though... I remember there was a blog post about how MongoDB is faster than Memcached for writes. The reason is because Memcached has a response when you write, and the protocol for MongoDB didn't have a response for write. You just write it to the socket and you're like "I bet it's stored." Basically, what this metric was testing is how fast can you write write messages to a socket.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[24:13\] UDP versus TCP... \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Yeah, the UDP of databases...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Stripe had a back-team for a little bit to do work on this, and for the most part he did this on his own.  Kyle Kingsbury, better known as Aphyr, has a tool called Jepsen, and Jepson tests this type of stuff on databases, and it has a series called "Call me maybe." If you search for "Aphyr Call Me Maybe", there's some really good stuff on how good Mongo is, with what settings... So essentially, in order to make Mongo safe, you have to put it on the absolute most max settings, even though three down is called "Guaranteed Safe", or something... \[laughter\] So you have to go two past Guaranteed Safe to get Guaranteed Safe. But I don't know how much is public or not, so I shouldn't say too much, but Stripe has been on MongoDB for a long time, and because we have a lot of dependencies there, we're slower to upgrade than someone who's using it as a pet project. And I think we've seen a lot of great performance improvements, even on point release updates to Mongo, and that's been encouraging, at least... But every few years we're like, "Should we keep this?"
+
+Generally, the benefits it gives are good enough, and we're good enough at keeping it up and we run enough game days to know that when it goes down, we can \[unintelligible 00:25:51.11\] In 3.2 they swapped out the underlying subsystem for something or other, and I think that made a huge difference.
+
+**Break:** \[26:09\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, so now we're gonna dive into the Beaker Browser. Paul, why don't you give us some history here? I know that you've been working on this for quite a while now, so give us some history of why you started the project, what the mission is, and then we'll get into some of the more recent developments.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Alright, cool. We started Beaker about a year and a month ago; we actually got started at the Decentralized Web Summit. Right before that, I had spent about two years working on Secure Scuttlebutt with Dominic Tarr. Secure Scuttlebutt is a peer-to-peer social network...
+
+\[28:16\] So Dominic had come up with this really cool, cryptographic network for exchanging different feeds of JSON, basically. The technology kind of feels like -- it's these logs of data, so it's almost like a Twitter, right? Everybody has their own feed, and they publish these JSON blobs, so we took that and said, "Okay, we could make a little peer-to-peer social network on that, and let's see what happens.
+
+So we got that to work, and we got a little community going, and it was really cool and definitely a great learning experience, but around the time - about a year ago - I was getting to the point where really one of the big goals I had was "How could we make it so other people could build on that tech?" Because the peer-to-peer stuff is really cool, but it's also like "Yeah, we have a peer-to-peer app, but it's not part of a platform, and it doesn't really change the situation that much." We wanna be able to have not just a peer-to-peer Twitter, but also peer-to-peer email, and a peer-to-peer Reddit, and a peer-to-peer whatever. You wanna get away entirely from the services model if you're interested in decentralization.
+
+So the stuff we had done with Secure Scuttlebutt was really cool, but it was hard for other developers to hook into the stack and start making their own apps. So I walked away from that and I was thinking "Okay, we have Electron now, and Electron is a really nice wrapper around Chromium", so it would be nice if we could just take that and just go ahead and build an entirely new browser off of it and then take some of these new protocols that people are working on (I've got a yelling cat out here) and just add them into the browser, make them new native web platform tech. You know what, I've gotta get this cat, give me a second.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Alright, that was hilarious.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** If only Rachel could be here...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yup...
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Right, so that was the idea. And when I started on it, I said "I'm gonna branch out from just Secure Scuttlebutt", I'll take a look at some of the other protocols that were being worked on, and the Decentralized Web Summit was a really good timing because it was a bunch of different protocol teams getting together to talk about what they were doing.
+
+IPFS was there, the Dat Project was there, I remember Mediachain, a couple of different blockchain-based things, Zooko was there with Zcash... So I talked to a lot of people, started to try to gauge interest for this idea, like "Hey, what if we had a browser we could throw all these things into?" So that's how I got started.
+
+It took maybe like six months to get a browser UI on top of Electron, get all the basics working, and then I integrated IPFS and Dat, and then over time I just took IPFS out and focused on that, and kept on packaging it and fixing it up, and now we have Beaker.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. You mentioned that there's a bunch of different protocols that people are experimenting with right now... Which ones have you gone down the rabbit hole of supporting and which ones have you kind of solidified at this point?
+
+**Paul Frazee:** \[31:40\] The three I could speak most authoritatively on would be Dat, Secure Scuttlebutt and IPFS. Dat and IPFS are basically variations on BitTorrent. They're really similar and they're both really solid technologies. I know about the different blockchains, at least like at an arm's distance I could tell you how they work, but I haven't gone too deep into them. I'm kind of waiting for the blockchains phase to stabilize a little bit and maybe get away from the proof-of-work; I'm not a huge fan of proof-of-work. But pretty much the two that I think are the most interesting right now are Dat and IPFS.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And do you support both of those protocols right now?
+
+**Paul Frazee:** No, actually not at the moment. This is an interesting thing, and actually we're really open to hearing from other people about this... Dat and IPFS are really, really similar. They both use the same mental model from BitTorrent, which is this idea that you have crypto addresses, so either like a hash of the content or a public key, and that is now like the basis of your URLs. Then you share some files on this network, and other people that download from you can then rehost for you. So as you have more peers in the network, there are more hosts for a piece of content, so the network sort of automatically scales up to make sure that any files that gets popular, you can find it quickly and nobody has to give away a lot of bandwidth.
+
+So they're so similar that for a while we supported both, but at one point we kind of stopped and said "How do we communicate to users which one they ought to use?", because maybe the biggest difference between them is that IPFS is really narrowly focused - or mainly focused, I'll say - on static pieces of content that are addressed by content hashes. I think they maybe tend to use a SHA-3 (don't quote me on that), and then Dat tends to focus much more on archives of data that change over time... So those are addressed by public use. Now, just saying that probably puts three or four people to sleep, so I don't know how we would say it inside the browser, that's like "Oh yeah, well obviously I wanna use IPFS for this particular case", so we ended up dropping it because we just didn't really understand how we'd be getting a lot of benefit to users other than the fact that you might be able to browse two protocols, and maybe the content that you wanna use is on IPFS and not Dat. So we're relatively happy with it right now its let us stay really focused and we're just gonna keep on -- we'll stay light on our feet; if IPFS end up blowing up, we'll get it in there.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's almost like you're just waiting for someone to send a pull request. \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, that's really interesting. So you said that Dat is very good at data that changes over time... I'm a regular web developer, I wanna shove my application into Dat and host it on this network - what does that workflow look like right now?
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Well, from the perspective of using the software, it feels a little bit like using Git, it feels a little bit like using npm. You have this area that's like your local staging area, so you could work on your website... Your website is just a folder on your computer somewhere, so you'll be working on it and making these local changes to it, and that's the staging area there and you can open it up on the browser and work on it, and then once you're happy with it, you hit the Publish button and that's pretty much the whole story. At that point, your browser, in the background, makes the changes available to the swarm, and anybody that's subscribed to that swarm (which happens if they visit their site), they'll pull down the updates you've made.
+
+The point that we're trying to hit is that it feels just like using tools that we're already super familiar with, so that the peer-to-peer network by and large is hidden from you, and if it's working really well, it should feel pretty magical.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So how similar would you say this is to season five of Silicon Valley?
+
+**Paul Frazee:** \[laughs\] You know, some pretty bad stuff goes down inside season five, I'm gonna say 99% same thing... We had to cover up a lot of scandals while we were working on this thing. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[36:11\] It's the better internet, right? That's what the current -- whatever. Anyways... I guess we talked a little bit about the what and the how, but in your least tinfoil hat way, explain why someone would be interested in using it.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Yeah, I think actually you've gotta throw away the tinfoil hat, right? Because the tinfoil hat version would be "It's censorship resistance, so the government can't take you down", or the other one would be -- I mean, there's some interesting things to be said about that, but the main reason that you take these techs and you put them into the browser is that you want to make it do new, cool things. So for Beaker with these peer-to-peer techs, you can create a website off of your computer, and it's just a button inside the browser. You just hit Make Me A New Website and it's gonna allocate a new domain for you, and then you can immediately share the link with somebody and you're done; you've created a whole new website.
+
+That principle ends up actually being really interesting, because because it's so easy to make a website like that, it actually even exposes some web APIs. So an application that you're using on your computer can actually then use the peer-to-peer network to publish files or to consume files, and that's how you set the start of a stack for building applications that don't need services at all. You're just having these totally peer-to-peer applications, and now you can have better personal privacy because you're exchanging files directly from one computer to another, and you can do some cool open source stuff, because whenever you're using the applications, all of the source code goes down onto your computer.
+
+You go to a Dat website, there's no service somewhere that you're having to talk to; you've got all the source code, so you can actually work that website and create a whole copy of it that you control, and you can just start modifying it right away.
+
+So the privacy story is really good, but so is the open source/open architecture story. If we can really flesh out that entire stack, we can get to the point where you don't have to use these databases that are on somebody's server somewhere, which is what you could call a data silo. It's somebody else's computer. Now you're just publishing content by writing it to your computer, and you control the keys that say that you're the author, and then other people get the files off of you and now you're totally in control of your presence on the web.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay, what-- I -- I'm trying to-- Hm, that was a really good sentence. \[laughter\] If I am malicious - let's talk about that. How many people do I have to pretend to be before I control your content maliciously, or something? Is there a quorum type situation, am I GPG signing everything I write so it's authenticated? What is that whole security system work like? Because if there are enough malicious people and a small enough site, it seems like they could kind of change all the content of that person's website, since they're sharing the bulk of it.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** The key there is that there's no number of people that would start to do that. It's not like there's a civil attack or anything that you could do to take over somebody's website. The way it works is that each website in the Dat network has a key pair, and the public key accesses the address of it. So instead of an IP address, you use a public key address. Then there's a private key, and that private key is controlled by whoever generated the site, and they keep that private key protected.
+
+\[39:55\] Anytime that they change the site, the sign the update that they push out into the network, so anybody that's looking for a website and wants to make sure that it's an authentic piece of content from that website, they check the signature of that content against the address of the site they try to look up.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I see. So the prime thing to know there is that the address is the public key, which means that you can't spoof a different private key... I mean, you could make a totally different website... So how recognizable are -- so if the website is just a public key, what stops me from, say, "Oh, here, go to Paul website" and it's just my website that is an exact copy of yours, but now it's my public key. Is there SSL certs, is there EV? How do we manage the whole identity situations? Ring of trust, that type of stuff.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** That's an interesting question, because we actually could start to get into ring of trust, or other trust ideas at some point. What we've done at the moment -- first of all, just to answer the very basic of your question... The public keys are 64 characters long; they're hex strings so you're never gonna be able to look at it and say "Yeah, that's the right address."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, right.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** I would argue that that's probably usually been the case also for IP addresses, too; similar story - you never would send out --
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right, which is why DNS is so important, with SSL certs, right?
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Right. So we don't have anything quite like SSL certs yet, because that's a whole big social enterprise to have SSL certs existing... So what we've done is we do have a DNS solution, and it's kind of a hack. Let me think how to describe this well... We make you run an HTTPS server; so if I have BeakerBrowser.com, you have to run an HTTPS server, and then under a .well-known folder you put it a file title "Dat", and this file has the key to the raw URL for the Dat that you wanna have at that address. So what happens is whenever I try to type into my browser "Dat://BeakerBrowser.com", what Beaker will do is it'll contact HTTPS://BeakerBrowser.com and it'll look for that well-known /dat file. If it's there, and if a valid Dat URL comes in with the content of that file, it'll then go ahead and say "Okay, that's the Dat address you're trying to look up."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So it kind of piggybacks off the centralized system just as a kind of verification system. It makes sense.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Yeah, yeah. It gives us the security we need, it's relatively easy to deploy... We thought about doing something with DNSSEC, but DNSSEC doesn't really have the adoption or the confidence in the community that I think really would make that a good long-term solution, and you can only use DNSSEC like three top-level domains; there's not a whole lot of adoption out there, so we decided that this would be a good compromise.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's cool. That's a tough problem to solve. So what is the premise -- you do this full-time as a business and you sell it off? Did you get a grant? Do you just have a bunch of money from the lottery and you're looking for fun?
+
+**Paul Frazee:** No lottery yet. Actually, I'm gonna break that up into two answers. The first - Code For Science is the team that's actually building the Dat protocol. They are a non-profit, they're grant-funded.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's Max still, or...?
+
+**Paul Frazee:** \[43:55\] That's Max Ogden, he runs that, and Mathias Buus is the lead protocol engineer, and you'll know him on the web as "Mafintosh." I think it's the Knight Foundation, Sloan Foundation and maybe others that have funded them.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation? I don't know if that's the same one \[unintelligible 00:44:20.08\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This week we're on NPR instead of The Changelog Network. \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Yeah, actually I don't know if it's the same one...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It is.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Okay, cool. They're non-profit; they're specifically focused on helping out (I would say) governments and academics scientists and things like that, help them with data archiving. That's the mission for the Code for Science and the mission for the Dep protocol. So we showed up with the Beaker project and really liked what they had done with the protocol and liked working with them, so we went ahead and said "Okay, we're gonna apply this into this browser, as well." So we're a separate group making the Beaker Browser. We're Blue Link Labs, we're a for-profit, and we're bootstrapped so far. It's myself and a co-founder, Tara Vancil, and we are planning -- basically, what we're done to try to fund ourselves is put together a public super-peer... This is a website Hashbase; you can find it on Hashbase.io.
+
+The idea with this is that this is a peer-to-peer network and it does really great with your content if you're popular. But if you don't have anybody that's subscribing to what you've done, if you turn off your computer you're not gonna be able to seed the files for it. So you need to have somebody on the network that you can trust to actually keep your content online.
+
+Hashbase is basically a peer up in the cloud that you can push the files to, and then you can comfortably turn your computer off and know that other people will still be able to find it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So it's kind of like a centralization of -- it's an unfortunate side effect, but I don't think it's a bad idea; it's a good idea. I think the decentralized thing is important not as a default thing, but not necessarily as a constant... Especially with content that goes out.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** I do actually agree with your point there that decentralization as the default is the good starting point. We actually have two answers for you on that, because I think there is a fair point \[unintelligible 00:46:50.02\] First of all, what we call Hashbase is a fungible service; fungible, like you can completely replace it at any point, and we think that's actually really important for this whole idea.
+
+It's similar to a federation, with the idea that one of the services that does it is just as good as one of the others, for the most part. Hashbase is open source, and we'll probably make variations that are totally compatible with it that are easier to self-deploy. And yeah, it is a service that is being run by somebody else, but you could easily jump off of our version of it and onto some other public peer service, some other super-peer service and nobody would even know, because what this service is offering you is totally in the background. There's no data silo on this thing, it's just a little utility that kind of handles work for you, hidden in the background. We think that's actually really important, because so much of what we're doing is geared towards decentralization, so we wanna make sure that people understand that.
+
+\[47:57\] The other answer that I have about the centralization aspect is that for my money I think probably where this all leads to is people being able to run service at home, like a little box, a piece of hardware that you can plug in and just forget about, but it'll keep your content online in the same way that a public super peer would, and then you have just a much better privacy store. You can have one of these home pieces of hardware sitting there and doing a search query for you and you wouldn't have to talk to Google for it. So that's the sort of thing that's gonna take some time, because you actually have to get the software put in the right place, and the hardware has to be built, or at least you have to find a good desktop somewhere.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And everyone puts it behind their 10-year-old Linksys router.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Exactly. And then ideally, they just forget about it. Because you don't have to keep it up to date, or anything.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. This has been great. I think we've gotta start wrapping up the show now, so we're gonna get into picks. Everybody have personal picks that they brought... Why don't we start with you, Alex?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** This week I'm gonna go with another internationalization pick. I think I started this season off with an internationalization pick, but -- GlobalizeJS is a collection of tools for number formatting, messaging formatting, and currency and all that kind of stuff. More importantly though it does parsing, which is one of the harder things to do. I'm typing in numbers that have commas as decimal points, and then trying to turn that into a number in JavaScript is a much harder thing that rendering formatting something with MomentJS, or something. The same is true of dates; it can parse dates in a similar way... And that's really difficult.
+
+That's been a lifesaver for me in my real job this week, and lately. It's completely backed off of the CLDR, which is the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository, and that's where they keep the standard set of all the locale information. It's great. It's what Twitter uses to localize their website, if that's helpful... It's actually a JavaScript Foundation project, previously the jQuery Foundation.
+
+Interestingly enough, the message format implementation inside of it is mine, that I wrote, but at Stripe we don't use that one, we pulled in a different one before we added Globalize, so we don't use my library... But it doesn't count. Alright, that's my pick.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Alright. Paul, do you have a pick for us today?
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Does this have to be a module? Can it be a service? What are the rules for this?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It can be anything. It can be a book, it can be a passion... It doesn't even have to be in tech.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oil powder...? \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Frazee:** You know what, give me a second. Can you do yours first and I'll think of something for you?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Sure, sure. Mine actually is in tech this time; I'm just gonna throw out non-tech things. It's called Semantic Release. I've just been kind of feeling the weight of maintaining a lot of modules that people use, and as I've been writing new codes and new modules, I've been thinking about ways that I can automate things a bit more up front and do some work up front to make the longer-term maintenance of it a lot easier. One thing that I've been using is this tool called Semantic Release.
+
+Basically, if you use Commitizen and do these proper commit messages, denoting features or fixes and stuff like that, Semantic Release will just automate the releases entirely. The pushed to npm and everything will just happen automatically. This is really great when you combine it with a couple other tools. For these new modules that I'm running I have 100% test coverage, and I point cover all that, and I'm using this cool tool called Commitizen, so there's actually like an npm command to write proper commit messages; using Husky, which is a way to install Git hooks into a project when you're messing around with it locally...
+
+\[52:20\] So you can kind of verify all this stuff and give people a really easy path to contribute, and then as I'm pulling in patches, I can tell if it's completely tested, and as soon as it lands with these proper commit messages, the entire release process is automated.
+
+It's really hard to get to this kind of level of nice tooling automation in existing projects, so it's not gonna help me out with requests any time soon, but I'm really loving it for my new projects... So check out Semantic Release on GitHub. Paul?
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Well, I don't think I've got a pick for you, but I will say I am enjoying watching Game of Thrones' last season. If you haven't heard about it, it's a little show on HBO... \[laughter\] Real fun. I highly recommend it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Yeah, I had not heard of it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Can you spell that?
+
+**Paul Frazee:** There's a guy George R.R. -- I don't know... Is it Martinez? I think... Look it up, it's pretty cool.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think it's Dinklage.
+
+**Paul Frazee:** Oh, yes!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Alright, that's our show. Thanks for everybody on the live stream and everybody listening at home. Thank you all! Goodbye!

AMA — BasicAttentionToken, Robotics, IDE's and Stuff_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,986 @@
+[0.00 --> 2.98]  Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly.
+[3.46 --> 5.50]  Learn more at Fastly.com.
+[5.86 --> 7.58]  And we're hosted on Linode servers.
+[7.98 --> 10.16]  Head to linode.com slash changelog.
+[12.04 --> 15.48]  This episode of GS Party is brought to you by Hired.
+[15.86 --> 20.02]  Hired matches outstanding people with the world's most innovative companies.
+[20.52 --> 23.68]  At Hired, your dream job is waiting to apply to you.
+[23.90 --> 27.22]  Instead of endlessly applying to companies hoping for the best,
+[27.22 --> 32.20]  Hired puts you in control of when and how you connect with interesting opportunities.
+[32.82 --> 35.68]  The best part is Hired is completely free to you.
+[36.08 --> 37.20]  It won't cost you anything.
+[37.66 --> 39.72]  In fact, they pay you to get hired.
+[40.10 --> 42.40]  Head to hired.com slash gsparty.
+[42.48 --> 43.12]  Don't Google it.
+[43.48 --> 46.48]  This URL is the only way to double the hiring bonus to $600.
+[47.14 --> 50.04]  Once again, hired.com slash gsparty.
+[50.20 --> 51.40]  And now on to the show.
+[57.22 --> 65.60]  Welcome to JS Party, a weekly celebration of JavaScript and the web.
+[65.94 --> 70.90]  Tune in live on Fridays at 3 p.m. U.S. Eastern at changelog.com slash live.
+[71.22 --> 73.40]  Join the community and Slack with us in real time.
+[73.52 --> 75.28]  Head to changelog.com slash community.
+[75.78 --> 76.42]  Follow us on Twitter.
+[76.52 --> 78.14]  We're at jspartyfm.
+[78.26 --> 79.52]  And now on to the show.
+[79.52 --> 86.14]  We're going to do a different show today, which is we had some kerfuffles on scheduling.
+[86.68 --> 90.50]  And we don't want to miss the show because we're all busy and we want to keep it rolling.
+[90.74 --> 92.44]  So ask us anything.
+[92.44 --> 99.22]  If you're on Twitter, if you're on some sort of social platform, if you're right here in Slack,
+[100.04 --> 101.22]  drop a note in there.
+[101.22 --> 106.92]  And I'm going to do my best to ask Rachel and Michael some questions about JavaScript,
+[107.18 --> 108.88]  the web platform, what we're going, what we're doing.
+[109.56 --> 113.82]  And, you know, Michael, maybe we can still talk about the ICO, which is unique.
+[114.44 --> 116.44]  Is this the first of its kind, initial coin offering?
+[117.30 --> 117.72]  No, no, no.
+[117.74 --> 119.60]  There's been other ICOs for other cryptocurrencies.
+[119.96 --> 123.22]  This is just, you know, one that's actually kind of related to JavaScript in the web
+[123.22 --> 128.96]  because it's an attention token that's going to be in the Brave browser that relates to like your,
+[128.96 --> 133.46]  it's like an, it's an alternative to advertising and does micropayments instead.
+[133.96 --> 135.60]  How do we, can we mine it now?
+[136.82 --> 137.44]  No, you can't.
+[137.46 --> 140.08]  I don't, I don't think you can mine it that way.
+[140.08 --> 151.06]  See, I didn't read the full thing that the headlines seemed to me as if Brave was generating funding through rather than IPO and ICO.
+[151.50 --> 152.32]  Yeah, they did.
+[152.50 --> 153.24]  Is that what's happening?
+[153.78 --> 153.92]  Yeah.
+[154.00 --> 157.14]  So, so what they did was they created a bunch of these coins.
+[157.14 --> 160.98]  I'm not sure how many total, but they released some of them.
+[161.24 --> 165.78]  And other companies have done a very similar thing where, you know, they want to get a coin onto the market.
+[165.90 --> 171.46]  So they mine a bunch of it and then they say, okay, we're going to offer this to the, like this set amount of this coin to the public.
+[172.36 --> 176.14]  And then those go like on the open market and people buy them.
+[176.14 --> 182.62]  And then now, now that those coins are in the open market, there's additional kind of speculation and trading on top of it.
+[182.78 --> 184.78]  So they made 35 million.
+[184.96 --> 190.32]  I think that the current market cap on the coins that went out is like a little under a hundred million.
+[190.48 --> 195.56]  So the people that bought them actually, you know, have, I think, tripled the value so far.
+[195.56 --> 203.92]  So is this becoming a way for people to go about raising funding in a different way or is this unique to Brave or how they operate them in a browser?
+[204.80 --> 206.46]  So it does a couple of things, right?
+[206.50 --> 212.16]  So when you have certain types of these coins, you want to get a bunch of value injected into the network.
+[212.16 --> 216.58]  So you do a big public offering and then you've kind of bootstrapped a bunch of value around it.
+[216.58 --> 221.12]  Or you can, you know, give a bunch of these coins out and then get that money.
+[221.62 --> 226.56]  Now, the way that that's treated by the IRS is like just straight up capital gains.
+[227.50 --> 231.06]  So you're going to get a pretty big tax penalty unless you do.
+[231.40 --> 240.72]  And I imagine that everybody who's raising more than a couple million dollars on these ICOs is probably doing this where they're filing some kind of company offshore to avoid some of those tax penalties.
+[242.12 --> 242.56]  Yeah.
+[242.56 --> 248.04]  Do we want this to be in the pre-show or somehow meld this into the ending?
+[248.06 --> 249.78]  I thought we were, we're live.
+[249.88 --> 250.30]  We're live.
+[250.40 --> 250.88]  Okay, fine.
+[250.94 --> 251.24]  We're live.
+[251.54 --> 252.16]  Put that in.
+[252.50 --> 252.86]  Yeah.
+[252.98 --> 253.86]  You can just edit it.
+[253.86 --> 254.40]  We'll do it live.
+[254.76 --> 255.78]  We'll do it live.
+[255.86 --> 259.70]  So listeners of this particular JS party, it's a different type of show.
+[260.14 --> 261.38]  Normally you never hear me.
+[261.80 --> 271.12]  I'm just behind the scenes hoping that everything goes well and keeping the mice on the spinners.
+[271.12 --> 273.26]  You know, creating electricity and stuff.
+[273.44 --> 274.88]  What does that mean?
+[275.64 --> 277.24]  You know, the mouse race.
+[278.08 --> 278.38]  I don't.
+[278.84 --> 280.18]  I was thinking fidget spinners.
+[280.28 --> 281.44]  I thought this was like a millennial.
+[281.56 --> 281.84]  Yeah, me too.
+[282.28 --> 282.76]  Well, sure.
+[282.92 --> 285.02]  The mice are standing on the fidget spinners.
+[285.92 --> 291.16]  And that's creating electromagnetism, which turns into electricity, powers the house.
+[291.36 --> 292.36]  Who does that?
+[292.86 --> 293.94]  Well, some people do.
+[293.96 --> 294.74]  Is that a real thing?
+[294.74 --> 298.22]  Uh, where do they do that at?
+[298.26 --> 304.74]  They did that in, uh, in neighbors to the movie.
+[306.40 --> 310.66]  Remember they were trying to like take down the sorority and they pulled the power and
+[310.66 --> 315.64]  it kept going because they had all the minions in the other room riding like, you know, unicycles
+[315.64 --> 318.16]  or whatever, uh, stationary bikes.
+[318.16 --> 320.20]  We definitely are keeping this in.
+[320.44 --> 321.20]  This has to be it.
+[321.50 --> 323.44]  That's how we power the house, you know?
+[324.76 --> 331.06]  So this, but back to this, uh, this unique thing, uh, basic attention token.
+[332.60 --> 335.28]  It's so foreign to me, you know, Ethereum based.
+[335.42 --> 336.34]  We've done shows on this.
+[336.44 --> 337.16]  I get it.
+[337.44 --> 338.50]  I understand blockchain.
+[338.70 --> 340.26]  I understand cryptocurrencies.
+[340.26 --> 343.72]  I keep hearing more and more that they're coming of age.
+[343.82 --> 348.14]  They're about to be mainstream where they are mainstream and just there's a small mainstream
+[348.14 --> 353.84]  who knows what's the state like where, where are coin in general being used?
+[353.90 --> 355.84]  How, what is the state of this ecosystem?
+[356.52 --> 357.08]  Cryptocurrency.
+[357.32 --> 357.56]  The dark web.
+[358.24 --> 359.08]  The dark web.
+[359.30 --> 359.48]  I have no idea.
+[360.04 --> 360.52]  I don't know.
+[360.58 --> 361.98]  I don't know anything about this.
+[362.12 --> 366.70]  I know that like libertarians like Bitcoin and that's about it.
+[366.70 --> 372.88]  Um, I mean, yeah, it depends on what you mean by that, right?
+[372.96 --> 375.64]  Like, so there's a bunch of different coins now.
+[376.00 --> 384.00]  Um, I think that the primary ones right now are probably Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin.
+[384.68 --> 386.26]  Um, Dogecoin.
+[387.22 --> 390.40]  Dogecoin is, is not, I think a major player at this point.
+[390.52 --> 392.52]  I have 75,000.
+[393.14 --> 393.92]  They better.
+[394.40 --> 395.68]  You have 75,000 Dogecoins?
+[396.14 --> 396.46]  Yeah.
+[396.46 --> 398.16]  Those are probably worth something actually.
+[398.78 --> 399.70]  No, it's not.
+[399.80 --> 401.58]  It's worth like $20 maybe.
+[401.78 --> 406.90]  It's the only, I like, it was the only one that compelled me to like figure out how to
+[406.90 --> 409.36]  do mining and I was like, cool.
+[409.52 --> 411.18]  And it's worth nothing.
+[411.74 --> 412.62]  Oh, you mined them.
+[412.72 --> 412.84]  Wow.
+[412.92 --> 413.12]  Okay.
+[413.40 --> 415.04]  Um, I mean, I've bought some of them.
+[415.30 --> 420.20]  Um, I think honestly, like if you're just out with friends and you want to transfer some
+[420.20 --> 425.10]  money between people, um, it is surprisingly the easiest way to do that currently.
+[425.10 --> 428.94]  Like if you just have, um, uh, what's the app called?
+[429.00 --> 429.88]  Let me look at my phone.
+[430.22 --> 430.62]  Coinbase.
+[430.76 --> 434.08]  If you just have like Coinbase on your phone, you can just use your phones to transfer money.
+[434.52 --> 437.08]  Um, and it's, it's like almost instantaneous.
+[437.22 --> 441.22]  Bitcoin takes like 10 minutes, but it's, you know, it's, it's actually just kind of a better
+[441.22 --> 442.46]  way to trade around money like that.
+[442.46 --> 447.74]  And you're seeing more and more services set up support for accepting Bitcoin as currency.
+[447.74 --> 450.72]  So, um, Bitcoin and, and some other currencies as well.
+[450.72 --> 457.00]  So what I was talking about before with, um, if you pull out it out in cash, you, you've
+[457.00 --> 458.46]  made capital gains on that money.
+[458.78 --> 464.00]  Um, so there's a lot of incentive to just keep the money being exchanged for other value
+[464.00 --> 464.98]  inside of the system.
+[464.98 --> 470.94]  Um, because it's not being treated as a currency, which is a weird thing to think about, which
+[470.94 --> 475.20]  is like by not treating it as a currency, you've actually, um, inflated people's use
+[475.20 --> 478.36]  of the currency in a way because they don't want to play the capital gains.
+[478.62 --> 482.52]  So what you're saying is when you pull it out, so you take it from, you take it out in cash,
+[482.52 --> 482.94]  right?
+[482.98 --> 487.90]  When you turn it into your denomination, U S whatever, Deutsch, whatever, wherever you're
+[487.90 --> 491.44]  at, whatever your currency is, you turn it into what we consider maybe real dollars.
+[491.44 --> 496.24]  I don't know, real, real cash at that point, you could be subject to capital gains.
+[496.70 --> 497.10]  Yes.
+[497.22 --> 497.46]  Yes.
+[497.80 --> 502.36]  And like, and I mean, and, and this also translates if you transfer it to other property and sell
+[502.36 --> 502.86]  that property.
+[502.86 --> 506.52]  So there actually is a company right now doing mortgages in Bitcoin.
+[506.94 --> 513.64]  And, um, if you, but, but if you buy that house, so here, say you put $5 into Bitcoin really
+[513.64 --> 516.14]  early on, that's worth a half a million dollars.
+[516.14 --> 522.22]  And so you buy a half a million dollar house with Bitcoin, um, with, with that mortgage.
+[522.62 --> 525.30]  Um, you're good until you sell that house.
+[525.30 --> 529.14]  And then when you sell that house, you owe capital gains from the $5 that you were initially
+[529.14 --> 532.02]  put into, into the, the currency.
+[533.02 --> 533.50]  Right.
+[533.90 --> 536.20]  You defer it by buying property.
+[536.40 --> 536.84]  Yeah.
+[536.92 --> 539.42]  I mean, you, yeah, you defer it by exchanging property.
+[539.42 --> 545.98]  Um, so the way, the way that, that the SEC looks at, um, and, and the IRS looks at, um,
+[546.44 --> 548.08]  cryptocurrencies is that they are property.
+[548.20 --> 550.12]  So they're digital property that you own.
+[550.46 --> 554.48]  They are, they, they fall under, uh, the laws about beanie babies and things like that.
+[554.48 --> 554.98]  That makes sense.
+[555.12 --> 558.36]  So that's a good way to put it because there's still coins.
+[558.36 --> 562.62]  You know, when you think about the name, the term, they're meant to signify currency of
+[562.62 --> 566.46]  some sort, some sort of worth, some sort of value, but they're obviously not physical.
+[566.46 --> 568.42]  You know, you can't touch your Bitcoin.
+[569.48 --> 574.88]  Maybe you could, if you're really lucky, but I don't know, you know, but then they're just
+[574.88 --> 579.42]  simply things you happen to take ownership in Michael, you own yours.
+[579.50 --> 580.84]  I own mine, right.
+[580.88 --> 581.66]  Do you own yours?
+[581.92 --> 586.82]  And once you use those, when you, once you exchange that value for something else, it,
+[586.88 --> 588.10]  uh, it translates.
+[588.54 --> 594.50]  So it's like stock in a way too, cause you buy it at a certain price and it may be worth
+[594.50 --> 596.44]  something more or potentially less.
+[597.12 --> 597.48]  Right.
+[597.52 --> 600.82]  But so stocks are regulated quite a bit differently and looked at a little bit.
+[600.96 --> 601.20]  Sure.
+[601.36 --> 602.96]  But the concept of the main, that's what I mean by that.
+[603.00 --> 606.94]  Not so much the full on regulations of stocks, just more like the principle of you buy to
+[606.94 --> 611.06]  the certain rates, let's say a dollar and a month later it goes up and it's now a dollar
+[611.06 --> 611.36]  50.
+[611.36 --> 614.98]  So the value could go up or could go down based on when you came in.
+[615.60 --> 617.70]  This also happens to your currency in your pocket.
+[618.04 --> 618.64]  There's inflation.
+[619.00 --> 623.64]  There's, there's currency exchanges and how valuable your currency is compared to other currencies.
+[623.64 --> 628.88]  Like I've, I've run into this a lot because I have a stack of money from other countries
+[628.88 --> 630.88]  so that when I land in those countries, I can spend it.
+[631.34 --> 635.58]  And this has not been a very good last five years to be holding currency, not in dollars.
+[635.66 --> 637.20]  So that's kind of sucked.
+[637.76 --> 637.98]  Anyway.
+[637.98 --> 643.36]  Um, so for blockchains, there's this whole side of things that's like currency speculation
+[643.36 --> 649.82]  and, and, and it's, it's a lot of, uh, sensibly gambling, like fun gambling, um, a lot of money
+[649.82 --> 654.64]  flowing into it and gambling on, you know, this, these exponential increases in the value
+[654.64 --> 655.48]  of these digital coins.
+[655.84 --> 661.54]  Um, but the underlying technology can solve a lot of problems outside of just currency
+[661.54 --> 662.04]  exchange.
+[662.56 --> 662.96]  Right.
+[662.96 --> 666.70]  And, and, and outside of just like, you know, things that we need the currency to do.
+[666.80 --> 673.42]  So there's an element of transparency and provability that without a centralized owner
+[673.42 --> 676.38]  that is really important for a bunch of different use cases.
+[676.52 --> 681.98]  And so the use case that brave is going after with this basic attention token is essentially
+[681.98 --> 682.74]  the ad market.
+[682.86 --> 688.60]  So if you've ever read a bunch about the advertising market, especially online, there's a huge amount
+[688.60 --> 691.36]  of fraud, huge amount of kind of fake clicks.
+[691.36 --> 696.94]  There's everything from click farms to, you know, people just generating, you know, crazy
+[696.94 --> 700.98]  wild numbers for, you know, what has and has not happened on, on different services and
+[700.98 --> 701.14]  whatnot.
+[701.32 --> 707.04]  So you really want to, if you want to try to solve that, you need something that is provable
+[707.04 --> 711.46]  and has a lot of these elements of transparency and provability kind of baked in.
+[712.02 --> 715.04]  So, um, what they're looking at is this basic attention token.
+[715.44 --> 719.68]  And so this is, you know, a provable way to show that you spent some attention on something.
+[719.68 --> 724.82]  And so that could be used to prove that you, um, saw an advertisement or saw some content.
+[725.16 --> 729.08]  Or I think what they're, they're probably betting on a little bit more than that is,
+[729.20 --> 735.52]  um, you can prove that people spent time on a site and then you can inject capital and
+[735.52 --> 738.02]  money into where you spend your attention.
+[738.02 --> 740.52]  And that can be doled out as micro payments to those sites.
+[740.52 --> 743.86]  So if you've used a brave browser that they already have this feature baked in where you
+[743.86 --> 745.14]  can do these micro payments.
+[745.14 --> 751.16]  Um, and so you can say, look, like I don't want to deal with advertising on websites.
+[751.16 --> 753.88]  Like I hate all that kind of stuff, but I do want to support content creators.
+[753.88 --> 757.46]  So I'm going to pour 20 bucks a month into wherever I spend my time.
+[757.68 --> 761.52]  And what happens is that brave tracks that in a way that is anonymized and protects your
+[761.52 --> 761.88]  privacy.
+[762.24 --> 766.26]  Um, but also like allows them to kind of dole out some of that to, to all these different
+[766.26 --> 767.52]  places where you're spending your time.
+[768.10 --> 769.04]  That's pretty interesting.
+[769.04 --> 771.78]  That ends up being a lot more money.
+[772.08 --> 777.12]  I think for the users that put money into that system, if you're only putting $5, um,
+[777.18 --> 780.70]  the sites that you go to are going to end up making more money than they would from advertising
+[780.70 --> 781.14]  on that.
+[781.20 --> 786.26]  I mean, advertising, you have to reach hundreds of thousands of people in order to make a
+[786.26 --> 787.16]  menial amount of money.
+[787.16 --> 788.22]  So, yeah.
+[788.48 --> 792.24]  And, um, the upcoming JS party.
+[792.24 --> 793.88]  So we're, we're on that show now.
+[793.88 --> 800.44]  Um, but episode 15, which, uh, includes Kyle Simpson, he mentioned something about where
+[800.44 --> 801.92]  we place our value at.
+[801.94 --> 808.48]  And we talk a bit about this subject, not in particular, but like how, how users spend
+[808.48 --> 809.30]  their time on the web.
+[809.36 --> 815.42]  You know, the, the, the conversation was basically the chasm between native applications and web
+[815.42 --> 820.68]  applications and how we often put them together when maybe they should be divided because of
+[820.68 --> 827.56]  things like bandwidth and whatnot, inherent costs that just simply are maybe basically
+[827.56 --> 830.72]  attained to, to bandwidth and the cost of bandwidth.
+[830.72 --> 835.06]  So people in the U S don't typically have that issue because we have unlimited everything
+[835.06 --> 839.46]  basically, but in other parts of the world, there's metered, you know, metered access to
+[839.46 --> 839.76]  the internet.
+[839.98 --> 843.16]  So the weight of things get a lot more expensive.
+[843.16 --> 844.98]  So that was a conversation on there.
+[845.02 --> 849.46]  And then also on a request for commencement, you probably remember this with Brennan and I
+[849.46 --> 852.32]  talking about that, you know, he's the founder of brave.
+[852.42 --> 854.98]  So it would make sense to have this conversation with him back on that show.
+[855.06 --> 861.24]  But we talked a bit about the early days of funding the web and he talked a bit about how
+[861.24 --> 863.76]  it was all advertising driven.
+[863.94 --> 868.94]  The browsers were, you know, I'm summarizing to some degree from my memory, but basically
+[868.94 --> 875.30]  the history of browsers had this speckled history of, of advertising paying for a lot
+[875.30 --> 875.80]  of things.
+[876.34 --> 883.00]  And it's kind of interesting to see now where he's at and this basic attention token being
+[883.00 --> 887.58]  a thing where you can say, like you just said, put 20 bucks in and that money goes to where
+[887.58 --> 888.50]  you spend your time on the internet.
+[889.30 --> 889.70]  Yeah.
+[889.78 --> 893.86]  I mean, I think what he's really dealing with and he's had to confront pretty head on is
+[893.86 --> 902.02]  that having this indirect market to fund browsers and the web through advertising has, has also
+[902.02 --> 905.44]  created a huge market for fraud and malware and a bunch of other stuff.
+[905.64 --> 909.74]  And, um, it's, it's only gotten worse and everything that we've tried to do to try to,
+[909.74 --> 911.90]  you know, make it a little better, hasn't really worked.
+[912.40 --> 917.38]  Um, and so he's, you know, brave is pretty proactively blocking tracking and blocking
+[917.38 --> 918.14]  advertisements.
+[918.76 --> 922.72]  Um, and just saying like, no, we're going to go with a different way to try to fund the
+[922.72 --> 925.98]  web here and, and remove a lot of this, uh, malware and stuff.
+[925.98 --> 931.04]  A lot of people are using Patreon or patron, Patreon, mostly content creators.
+[931.28 --> 940.98]  And what bums me out is seeing crazily enthusiastic content creators pointing to, and basically begging
+[940.98 --> 945.36]  their, their listeners or their audience or whatever to say, support me.
+[945.36 --> 949.92]  And you go to their Patreon and they're getting like 13 bucks a month, right?
+[949.92 --> 954.56]  Like nothing upsets me more than seeing sure.
+[954.66 --> 956.66]  Maybe it's amateur content, so to speak.
+[956.68 --> 961.76]  And I say that loosely because it's not like mainstream media content, for example, like
+[961.76 --> 964.34]  highly polished 16, 20 people behind it.
+[964.42 --> 968.66]  It's one person, two people, maybe, but there's somebody who's out there doing something on
+[968.66 --> 970.20]  the web that's of value to others.
+[970.58 --> 975.06]  And they're essentially asking their audience to support it.
+[975.26 --> 978.18]  And you go to that Patreon page and it's like 13 bucks a month.
+[978.18 --> 979.90]  Like that's, that's horrible.
+[980.34 --> 981.00]  It's not working.
+[982.12 --> 987.82]  Well, I think that when you look at how to fund content and we look at this a lot when
+[987.82 --> 991.40]  we're talking about how to fund open source and how to have a sustainability strategy for
+[991.40 --> 995.80]  open source, but you know, the, the world of content and art is, is, you know, as big
+[995.80 --> 1001.64]  and dynamic, there's, there's not one way to fund things and there's not content that,
+[1001.70 --> 1006.60]  you know, necessarily appeals to, you know, every way of funding, right?
+[1006.60 --> 1011.22]  So it works really well for certain kinds of artists that have a really personal following.
+[1011.68 --> 1016.12]  Um, uh, and you know, a small but dedicated following, I'd say.
+[1016.44 --> 1020.10]  Um, I think that if you were making a couple million dollars a month on Patreon, you would
+[1020.10 --> 1024.12]  probably stop getting new people putting in money regardless of how much the content.
+[1024.50 --> 1026.32]  13 bucks though, Mike, that's like horrible.
+[1026.86 --> 1031.00]  I know, but there's also a lot of people making like a living, um, on Patreon as well.
+[1031.00 --> 1031.42]  There are.
+[1031.58 --> 1035.92]  Um, and, and those people that are making 13, you know, there may be a reason for that,
+[1035.96 --> 1036.20]  right?
+[1036.20 --> 1040.52]  Like there, there may be a perception that that person is, is already being rewarded in
+[1040.52 --> 1043.58]  some other way or other people are actually paying for that content.
+[1043.58 --> 1046.98]  And like, I've seen people on Patreon do this where like they, they make content and then
+[1046.98 --> 1049.18]  the people that give them money on Patreon don't even get that content.
+[1049.26 --> 1051.58]  They have to buy it through like iTunes or something.
+[1051.58 --> 1056.46]  Um, and so like when you have that kind of stuff going on, like you, you know, people
+[1056.46 --> 1057.42]  are just less incentivized.
+[1057.52 --> 1059.62]  So I think it's going to work for some people and not for others.
+[1059.62 --> 1063.68]  And to, to broaden it back out to blockchain in general, I think that there, you know,
+[1063.70 --> 1068.22]  wherever you have, you know, transactions that you need to, to make transparent and you
+[1068.22 --> 1071.68]  need to have some provability, there's a bunch of different use cases for that.
+[1072.00 --> 1074.00]  Um, and a bunch of different things that we can do there.
+[1074.32 --> 1079.14]  Uh, of course, you know, this, this being the tech industry, there's been a huge flood
+[1079.14 --> 1083.16]  of money from venture capital and from, and a lot of hype from kind of everywhere that,
+[1083.48 --> 1085.38]  you know, the blockchain is the solution to everything.
+[1085.38 --> 1090.52]  And so if you have a startup and an idea and you add the word blockchain or AI to it, you
+[1090.52 --> 1091.76]  will just get more money right now.
+[1091.88 --> 1094.36]  And so there's a lot of, it's very, very overhyped.
+[1094.56 --> 1099.20]  Um, but you know, there are a bunch of new things that we can do that we couldn't do before.
+[1099.60 --> 1103.78]  And eventually those are the things that are really going to kind of shape new products
+[1103.78 --> 1104.86]  and services, stuff like that.
+[1105.24 --> 1106.98]  Let's, let's get off of blockchain for a while.
+[1107.16 --> 1107.34]  Yeah.
+[1107.34 --> 1108.08]  Let's, let's, let's move on.
+[1108.08 --> 1113.42]  I'll end that by just saying my, my thought was that, was that if this basic attention
+[1113.42 --> 1122.08]  token is a, a chance to push the web in a way where your attention speaks for itself and
+[1122.08 --> 1130.54]  pays for itself, so to speak, is a better direction of a model hypothetically than a beggar slash
+[1130.54 --> 1132.22]  will you support me model?
+[1133.08 --> 1133.34]  Right.
+[1137.34 --> 1147.28]  This episode is brought to you by TopTile, a global network of top freelance software developers,
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+[1214.04 --> 1215.14]  And back to the show.
+[1232.24 --> 1235.50]  We've got some robotics topics to talk about.
+[1235.50 --> 1239.74]  Now, Rachel, I understand that you're a purveyor of robotics.
+[1239.90 --> 1240.86]  You like this stuff.
+[1241.28 --> 1241.90]  I dabble.
+[1242.12 --> 1242.70]  You dabble.
+[1243.54 --> 1245.52]  Sometimes you might even have fun doing it.
+[1245.56 --> 1246.04]  What do you think?
+[1246.78 --> 1247.12]  Yeah.
+[1247.66 --> 1250.90]  So I saw the question that was asked.
+[1251.38 --> 1258.58]  And so the reason that I use JavaScript in robotics is because I know JavaScript.
+[1258.58 --> 1269.68]  I don't know if I need to get into something that is, you know, a little bit more specific
+[1269.68 --> 1270.24]  to see.
+[1270.38 --> 1273.28]  I can work my way around it, but I can't write it from scratch.
+[1273.76 --> 1279.54]  So basically, like, the reason that I think JavaScript is good for robotics and embedded
+[1279.54 --> 1284.70]  hardware is because of the community that is involved that is available to the NodeBots
+[1284.70 --> 1285.18]  community.
+[1286.00 --> 1288.52]  The Johnny Five site is amazing.
+[1288.64 --> 1289.92]  The documentation is great.
+[1290.42 --> 1296.30]  When I say robotics, too, I don't mean, like, very intense, giant things.
+[1296.62 --> 1299.34]  This is just, like, hobbyist-level stuff.
+[1299.34 --> 1305.14]  So, like, small little, you know, the sumo bots that can push each other out of circles
+[1305.14 --> 1306.48]  or play soccer.
+[1307.14 --> 1314.50]  And it's not like we're not changing the world, like, inventing anything that's going
+[1314.50 --> 1319.62]  to, like, revolutionize the way that modern machinery is made with JavaScript robotics,
+[1319.76 --> 1320.34]  I don't think.
+[1320.34 --> 1327.72]  But I think that it's a really interesting way to help people that are wanting to learn
+[1327.72 --> 1329.56]  how to write Node.
+[1330.18 --> 1336.48]  And, you know, maybe they're just not grasping the way that it works with building a single-page
+[1336.48 --> 1337.08]  application.
+[1337.80 --> 1343.74]  And I really like the way that the tangibility of, you know, even just taking a breadboard
+[1343.74 --> 1349.20]  with LEDs and hooking it up to an Arduino and being able to write JavaScript, you can get
+[1349.20 --> 1350.02]  stuff to happen.
+[1350.96 --> 1357.98]  Not to mention, like, using LEDs for visualizing different types of loops is really a great
+[1357.98 --> 1359.48]  way to help understand it.
+[1359.56 --> 1363.20]  It helped me understand how that kind of stuff was done.
+[1363.88 --> 1369.98]  In terms of, like, performance-based stuff, obviously, you know, C is going to be faster
+[1369.98 --> 1372.02]  than Node stuff.
+[1372.02 --> 1379.68]  But I feel like all of the stuff that I've built hasn't really had any issues with the
+[1379.68 --> 1387.34]  runtime or any, like, lag of whenever I, you know, do whatever action A triggers action B.
+[1387.64 --> 1394.14]  So, I mean, the performance differences aren't really big enough to make a difference for
+[1394.14 --> 1397.70]  that, at least the hobby-level stuff that I do with it.
+[1397.70 --> 1397.82]  Yeah.
+[1398.28 --> 1402.84]  Well, and also, I think that there's a little bit of a difference between IoT and robotics,
+[1403.10 --> 1403.28]  right?
+[1403.38 --> 1404.16]  Yeah, definitely.
+[1404.84 --> 1407.94]  Like, a lot of the IoT stuff, like, oh, yeah, you do have these use cases where you need
+[1407.94 --> 1411.14]  it to be super low power because it's got to be on a little battery for a year.
+[1411.42 --> 1415.50]  But with robotics, like, you need, you're going to be pretty high power anyway because you're
+[1415.50 --> 1418.18]  doing these pretty big movements and moving around heavy things.
+[1418.18 --> 1422.18]  And so that means that you're going to have a higher-powered onboard device and you can run,
+[1422.28 --> 1425.48]  you know, Node just as well as anything else that runs on that little embedded system.
+[1425.48 --> 1426.14]  So, yep.
+[1426.24 --> 1430.56]  It would seem to me, too, that going the route of C versus going the route of JavaScript,
+[1430.84 --> 1434.08]  one might be a higher slash lower barrier to entry.
+[1434.24 --> 1438.52]  Like, you might have to have a lot of systems knowledge, maybe a lot of, like, just deeper
+[1438.52 --> 1442.44]  knowledge about programming that C would require, whereas JavaScript, you can sort of, like,
+[1442.46 --> 1443.16]  run that anywhere.
+[1443.24 --> 1444.68]  It's a little bit easier to get involved.
+[1445.54 --> 1449.32]  Dare I even say maybe a slightly larger, more welcoming community, so it's a little easier
+[1449.32 --> 1451.62]  to find your place to fit in.
+[1452.72 --> 1452.92]  Yeah.
+[1453.14 --> 1457.52]  That seems like a pretty standard thing to think about as well.
+[1458.56 --> 1463.44]  I think, I mean, so because I came from lower-level languages and I watched kind of higher-level
+[1463.44 --> 1470.16]  languages take over and really, like, get a lot more people using them than lower-level
+[1470.16 --> 1470.56]  languages.
+[1470.56 --> 1474.50]  It's always hilarious to me when people from higher-level languages start to get into lower-level
+[1474.50 --> 1480.46]  languages, because they really ignore a lot of the things that higher-level languages
+[1480.46 --> 1481.34]  do for you.
+[1481.86 --> 1486.42]  Like, it's just so easy to make mistakes in C. Mistakes that, like, will still be compiled
+[1486.42 --> 1491.66]  and your program will still run, but will, you know, introduce a security vulnerability
+[1491.66 --> 1492.98]  or a memory leak.
+[1493.98 --> 1499.68]  It's very hard to make good, reliable programs in CMC++.
+[1499.68 --> 1506.60]  And that's why we build higher-order languages, so that you can stay within some extra boundaries
+[1506.60 --> 1511.00]  that will make it not just easier to program, but also easier to not make mistakes.
+[1511.80 --> 1518.48]  Yeah, I feel like a lot of the libraries that allow people to get started with NodeBots,
+[1519.02 --> 1523.86]  like, takes the mistake-making part of the process out of it.
+[1523.94 --> 1527.00]  Like, the mistakes that you're going to make when you're doing it is more likely going to
+[1527.00 --> 1531.48]  be your wiring than the programs that you're writing, because so much of the sensors and
+[1531.48 --> 1534.16]  modules that you're using already have the code written.
+[1534.36 --> 1538.36]  You can pretty much just, like, copy and paste a ton of it, and you're ready to go.
+[1538.48 --> 1543.72]  And then you just have to, you know, learn a little bit about electricity and how circuits
+[1543.72 --> 1548.28]  work, and then you can start combining things to make a lot more dynamic stuff.
+[1548.28 --> 1555.58]  Can we rewind a bit and talk a bit about the chasm or the difference between learning JavaScript
+[1555.58 --> 1560.56]  in a single-page web application scenario versus, let's say, robotics, where you mentioned
+[1560.56 --> 1563.64]  interesting things around loops and blinking lights?
+[1563.84 --> 1565.22]  Why is it different?
+[1565.34 --> 1566.48]  What's different about it?
+[1567.32 --> 1570.14]  For me, it's like a learning style thing.
+[1570.50 --> 1576.48]  Some people are okay with grasping a concept, and some people just really need to visualize
+[1576.48 --> 1579.60]  what they're doing in order to understand it.
+[1580.66 --> 1588.24]  For me, like, I'm a super visual learner, and I think that's why I was so taken to, you
+[1588.24 --> 1593.56]  know, the JavaScript robotics stuff, because I could, I mean, I've been programming, this
+[1593.56 --> 1600.02]  is like, I've been programming for, I don't know, almost half my life, and I'm a shitty
+[1600.02 --> 1600.62]  programmer.
+[1601.02 --> 1604.30]  I don't know, like, data structures.
+[1604.30 --> 1605.94]  I don't understand those things.
+[1606.70 --> 1611.16]  I just know what I know from repetition and building stuff.
+[1611.96 --> 1616.42]  And I don't know, it's just nice when you can touch something that you've built versus
+[1616.42 --> 1621.26]  just, like, looking, I guess you could touch a computer screen, but it's a little bit different.
+[1622.66 --> 1623.56]  I don't know.
+[1624.30 --> 1629.42]  Yeah, I think a more interesting question is actually, like, what is similar about, like,
+[1629.54 --> 1632.04]  UI programming in the browser to robotics in JavaScript?
+[1632.04 --> 1635.46]  Because I think there's actually more similarities than differences.
+[1636.14 --> 1639.74]  And when you look at a lot of the languages that people have built specifically for IoT,
+[1640.18 --> 1645.68]  they're taking a lot of these, like, threading patterns that we have for, basically, people
+[1645.68 --> 1648.68]  have written for desktop programming and operating system programming and a lot of low-level
+[1648.68 --> 1649.00]  stuff.
+[1649.52 --> 1653.54]  And it's interesting that JavaScript in the browser didn't go that direction.
+[1653.68 --> 1656.00]  They went the direction of events.
+[1656.00 --> 1662.70]  You know, we talk a lot about asynchronous programming now, but just basic DOM events,
+[1662.78 --> 1662.90]  right?
+[1662.98 --> 1664.68]  Like, when you click on something, something happens.
+[1665.66 --> 1667.32]  That's how robotics work.
+[1667.62 --> 1670.14]  And that's how JavaScript robotics work.
+[1670.34 --> 1672.08]  And it's actually very similar.
+[1672.74 --> 1677.70]  And I feel like UI people actually have an easier time onboarding than people that are used
+[1677.70 --> 1681.42]  to, like, you know, threaded C++ programming that try to move into this evented environment.
+[1681.42 --> 1684.74]  It depends on, like, the onboarding, obviously.
+[1685.10 --> 1690.96]  Like, if you can set somebody up with good documentation, then yeah, that's good.
+[1691.54 --> 1697.34]  I feel like even five years ago, there was still not great documentation for a ton of,
+[1697.34 --> 1699.28]  like, front-end UI stuff.
+[1699.98 --> 1702.14]  At least I didn't have a good time with it.
+[1702.14 --> 1709.92]  So if you're getting into JavaScript robotics or JavaScript hardware stuff in general, there's
+[1709.92 --> 1711.98]  a lot of libraries out there, like everything in NPM.
+[1712.44 --> 1716.04]  There's maybe even more embedded systems that support this.
+[1716.74 --> 1719.26]  It's like the Atari 2600 days of computing.
+[1719.42 --> 1721.84]  Everybody's got their own, you know, specialized board.
+[1723.50 --> 1725.40]  You mess with a lot of these, Rachel.
+[1725.50 --> 1730.68]  Like, what do you recommend that people pick up as a first introductory set of hardware?
+[1730.68 --> 1732.60]  And what libraries would you point them at?
+[1733.10 --> 1740.70]  I think that if you don't know anything about hardware at all and you're wanting to get started,
+[1740.90 --> 1746.62]  the best thing that I would suggest is the Johnny 5 starter kit that comes with a TESL.
+[1746.74 --> 1747.96]  You can get it on SparkFun.
+[1747.96 --> 1756.38]  I mean, the benefit of the TESL versus an Arduino is, like, the Arduino you're going to have to flash
+[1756.38 --> 1757.28]  with custom firmware.
+[1757.50 --> 1762.80]  And if it's your first time using that kind of board, you might not necessarily know how to do that.
+[1762.86 --> 1765.76]  But the TESL just comes and it's ready to go, essentially.
+[1765.98 --> 1771.90]  You've got, you just plug it into your computer and you can either, you know, run the code from your machine
+[1771.90 --> 1775.48]  the same way that you do with your Arduino and other boards.
+[1775.60 --> 1780.22]  Or you can just push the code up to the TESL so it runs on the actual board,
+[1780.32 --> 1785.90]  which is more similar to, like, the boards that have embedded systems on them,
+[1786.44 --> 1787.50]  which is really great.
+[1787.74 --> 1790.98]  So, plus, it's ready for Node out of the bat.
+[1791.32 --> 1793.86]  And the projects that I think it gives you to build are,
+[1794.30 --> 1795.86]  there's, like, a little robot one.
+[1795.92 --> 1797.08]  It comes with DC motors.
+[1797.08 --> 1802.16]  I honestly just get the kits now because, like, whenever you go to conferences or something
+[1802.16 --> 1804.86]  and there's people giving stuff away for swag,
+[1804.94 --> 1808.82]  I just break everything apart into individual components I can use later.
+[1809.00 --> 1814.08]  But there's a whole bunch of documentation that comes with it that helps you get up and running.
+[1814.62 --> 1817.32]  The other libraries that you can use are,
+[1818.06 --> 1824.56]  Brian Hughes has a library that allows you to use JavaScript for the Raspberry Pi,
+[1824.56 --> 1829.58]  which I only recently started using a Raspberry Pi.
+[1829.96 --> 1835.72]  The new Model 3 makes it a lot easier to be able to use without having to, you know,
+[1835.80 --> 1838.28]  plug it into your router or SSH into it
+[1838.28 --> 1843.20]  because you can use something called Pi Bakery to start your card up.
+[1843.38 --> 1849.38]  So it already has the Raspbian operating system on it.
+[1849.38 --> 1852.18]  And then you can configure this thing called VNC Viewer,
+[1852.30 --> 1858.58]  which lets you essentially, it's like a virtual machine on your computer
+[1858.58 --> 1861.24]  that you're actually logged into the Raspberry Pi with.
+[1861.28 --> 1864.20]  So you see the whole Linux operating system.
+[1864.20 --> 1875.04]  And I actually just built this cool gallery out of a 32 by 32 LED matrix using a Raspberry Pi.
+[1875.04 --> 1879.00]  And I'm running Node on the Pi.
+[1879.18 --> 1884.30]  And I'm also running Node on a single page app that's hosted on Azure.
+[1884.92 --> 1888.04]  And the way that it works is you...
+[1888.56 --> 1892.74]  Okay, so there's not a lot of good Node libraries for the LED matrix.
+[1893.08 --> 1898.60]  So all I did was install the C library that already works for displaying art on the matrix.
+[1898.82 --> 1903.40]  And instead, I have the Node application listening over the IoT hub on Azure.
+[1903.40 --> 1908.20]  And it just runs the C shell commands whenever it gets the message to display art,
+[1908.32 --> 1909.98]  which is kind of hacky and cheating.
+[1910.30 --> 1915.68]  But there's a lot of ways that you can jump in and use Node with a lot of things.
+[1916.44 --> 1917.62]  I love those hacks.
+[1918.12 --> 1919.96]  Those are the best hacks. I love that stuff.
+[1919.96 --> 1925.02]  It's like, I kind of inadvertently built the world's hackiest Node library
+[1925.02 --> 1926.94]  for displaying art on an LED matrix.
+[1927.64 --> 1929.76]  So you can too.
+[1930.62 --> 1931.70]  What else do we got?
+[1931.70 --> 1935.76]  So the point of an Ask Us Anything kind of show is people asking questions.
+[1935.86 --> 1940.42]  But I guess Michael and I might have some questions, which we've already shared a few.
+[1940.70 --> 1945.10]  You can ask us questions not about JavaScript as long as they're safe for work.
+[1945.32 --> 1945.76]  That's true.
+[1946.34 --> 1948.46]  We have many, many interests.
+[1949.28 --> 1952.24]  I'm taking a break from bread making, so no bread making questions.
+[1952.26 --> 1954.12]  I was just going to say, ask Michael about bread.
+[1954.64 --> 1956.56]  No, no. Got to take a break from that.
+[1956.56 --> 1962.52]  I can tell you all about ketosis, but I can't tell you about bread right now.
+[1962.98 --> 1963.22]  Ketosis.
+[1964.14 --> 1965.74]  There's a question about IDEs.
+[1966.52 --> 1968.68]  So I've never used IDEs.
+[1968.82 --> 1970.78]  I've always just used straightforward editors.
+[1970.78 --> 1976.36]  But I've always been a little bit jealous of some of the features that nice IDEs have.
+[1977.50 --> 1982.10]  And eventually, I made my way to Visual Studio Code.
+[1982.54 --> 1986.90]  And Visual Studio Code is great because it is an editor, but it has a lot of the features
+[1986.90 --> 1988.54]  that I've always wanted from IDEs.
+[1988.60 --> 1990.08]  So I use code now.
+[1990.62 --> 1993.28]  I also use code, but I work at Microsoft.
+[1993.28 --> 1995.82]  Did you use it before when you worked there?
+[1996.56 --> 2000.68]  No, I used Sublime Text.
+[2002.56 --> 2005.12]  But honestly, it doesn't really feel that different.
+[2006.46 --> 2017.02]  Yeah, I actually use Visual Studio Code with a bunch of syntax plugins for JavaScript and
+[2017.02 --> 2019.22]  node debugging stuff.
+[2019.22 --> 2022.34]  It's great because the library...
+[2022.34 --> 2025.50]  I'm on my Mac right now as I type this, so I can't even open...
+[2025.50 --> 2028.50]  Well, I don't have it installed on here because I just use this for the podcast.
+[2028.84 --> 2029.60]  But...
+[2029.60 --> 2031.72]  Whoa, that was a weird noise.
+[2032.12 --> 2033.06]  It's really good.
+[2033.40 --> 2034.22]  It doesn't...
+[2034.92 --> 2036.28]  I've seen...
+[2036.28 --> 2038.74]  So Michael's looking for a new computer right now.
+[2039.34 --> 2041.50]  And he's asking people,
+[2041.74 --> 2044.66]  you know, what should I get?
+[2045.10 --> 2046.40]  Well, he just wants a laptop.
+[2046.40 --> 2052.52]  But the reason I bring this up is because he said it on Facebook and some guy in his comments
+[2052.52 --> 2056.32]  was like, ugh, dev work on a Windows machine.
+[2056.86 --> 2059.90]  And I just wanted to be like, have you even tried?
+[2060.12 --> 2062.44]  Because, I don't know.
+[2062.52 --> 2066.46]  It's just so nice, especially with Git for...
+[2066.46 --> 2068.38]  I don't know how to say this word correctly.
+[2068.58 --> 2069.50]  Is it Ubuntu?
+[2069.76 --> 2070.18]  Ubuntu?
+[2070.82 --> 2071.00]  Ubuntu.
+[2071.00 --> 2071.32]  Whatever.
+[2071.90 --> 2072.06]  Yeah.
+[2072.20 --> 2076.96]  The bash for that on Windows is fantastic.
+[2077.52 --> 2081.16]  I have it running inside of Hyper, which is great.
+[2081.70 --> 2087.54]  And so, like, my terminal and my code editor are beautiful and they run great and they're fast.
+[2088.82 --> 2089.06]  Yeah.
+[2089.74 --> 2091.06]  I think, like...
+[2091.06 --> 2093.94]  Yeah, that was a weird comment, especially because, like...
+[2093.94 --> 2099.24]  I mean, we have statistics on this from NPM, but there are more Windows users of NPM and Node.js
+[2099.24 --> 2100.54]  than there are Mac users.
+[2101.02 --> 2101.34]  So, just...
+[2101.34 --> 2101.66]  Really?
+[2101.90 --> 2103.02]  Just marinate on that for a minute.
+[2103.14 --> 2103.30]  Yeah.
+[2103.46 --> 2104.30]  That's very surprising.
+[2104.74 --> 2107.98]  I think that they're a little bit less vocal on Twitter.
+[2108.56 --> 2110.96]  But, yeah, there's a lot of Windows.
+[2111.10 --> 2112.72]  There's a lot of people that do development on Windows.
+[2112.72 --> 2114.10]  Like, a very huge amount.
+[2114.70 --> 2119.08]  And one of the secrets to Node's growth, even early on, was having really quality Windows support.
+[2119.08 --> 2125.50]  Which, like, I don't think that people appreciate how different it is than, say, Python or Ruby or a lot of these other languages.
+[2125.76 --> 2126.84]  Like, it's really first class.
+[2127.74 --> 2130.14]  But before we get off of IDEs, I did want to just...
+[2130.14 --> 2136.78]  I want to get a list of your extensions, Rachel, because I just found some new interesting extensions that I'm really happy about.
+[2137.32 --> 2137.72]  Oh!
+[2138.26 --> 2144.22]  So, you can put at installed into the extensions thing, and that'll show you the ones you have installed.
+[2144.60 --> 2147.50]  So, I have the JS standard linter installed.
+[2147.50 --> 2153.34]  I have NPM IntelliSense, so that'll actually do auto-completion for the NPM packages that you have.
+[2154.48 --> 2156.68]  And, obviously, like, the regular kind of IntelliSense.
+[2157.80 --> 2160.44]  Also, search node modules, I think, is really cool.
+[2160.92 --> 2166.06]  It actually, like, searches your node modules directory for auto-completion as well.
+[2166.84 --> 2167.98]  I have a...
+[2167.98 --> 2168.96]  Sorry, you're not done.
+[2169.08 --> 2169.42]  Go ahead.
+[2169.48 --> 2169.68]  Go ahead.
+[2170.00 --> 2170.28]  Go ahead.
+[2170.38 --> 2170.58]  Go ahead.
+[2170.58 --> 2182.74]  I have this Markdown Preview one that's, like, super nice because I write a lot of documentation for the projects that I do, and it lets me preview it right in the window, which is cool.
+[2182.88 --> 2189.50]  I don't have to, like, open it up or push it up before I check out what it looks like.
+[2190.14 --> 2190.88]  Yeah, what a pain, right?
+[2190.92 --> 2194.66]  To ship to GitHub or something like that just to get a preview of your Markdown file.
+[2195.86 --> 2196.02]  No.
+[2196.32 --> 2197.04]  That's not how you do it.
+[2197.04 --> 2199.96]  How do I see what my settings are, Michael?
+[2200.74 --> 2202.46]  Or how do I see which extensions I have?
+[2202.86 --> 2210.04]  So, when you click on that extensions thing in the left sidebar, at installed, we'll show you your installed if you put that in the search.
+[2210.98 --> 2215.16]  Another one that I just installed recently that I'm loving is called Virgin Lens.
+[2216.62 --> 2217.94]  It's so webby and great.
+[2217.94 --> 2222.22]  So, basically, when you pull up your package JSON, it looks at all of the depths that you have.
+[2222.22 --> 2231.78]  And on top of the depth says if there's newer versions, like, within this range, if there are newer versions, if there's, like, a newer current version that you're not getting because of your package thing.
+[2232.08 --> 2236.52]  And each of those are just links, and when you click them, it updates the version in your package JSON.
+[2236.78 --> 2237.98]  It's super nice.
+[2237.98 --> 2242.54]  So, I have a lot.
+[2242.80 --> 2243.40]  Well, not a lot.
+[2243.58 --> 2257.48]  I have, since I also do a bunch of, like, styling stuff, I have color highlight, which whenever you type hex colors in your browser, it shows you what the color is around it, which is kind of nice.
+[2258.80 --> 2260.26]  I thought that was default.
+[2261.10 --> 2262.40]  I thought that was just on by default.
+[2262.88 --> 2263.08]  Okay.
+[2263.80 --> 2264.82]  I don't think so.
+[2264.82 --> 2270.32]  I have the Dracula official theme installed because it's my favorite theme.
+[2271.04 --> 2272.36]  It's so nice.
+[2272.36 --> 2273.06]  I thought that it's official.
+[2274.24 --> 2276.62]  Well, it's because people try and use the name.
+[2276.74 --> 2278.62]  It's, like, a really popular theme.
+[2278.96 --> 2279.86]  It's really pretty.
+[2280.44 --> 2281.30]  It's nice.
+[2281.70 --> 2285.36]  I have an HTML snippets one, which is similar to, like, Emmett.
+[2285.36 --> 2296.16]  And then I have, like, SAS and Python and ESLint and also Babel ES6, ES7 syntax coloring one.
+[2297.62 --> 2298.72]  And that's it.
+[2298.78 --> 2302.04]  I should probably actually delete all these and start new.
+[2303.56 --> 2304.84]  But, yeah, those are mine.
+[2304.84 --> 2310.58]  I actually talked to Zenor Rocha about some backstory on Dracula, which is pretty interesting.
+[2311.54 --> 2312.08]  Oh, cool.
+[2312.34 --> 2312.60]  Yeah.
+[2312.66 --> 2319.66]  On episode 248 of the Change Log, we talked to him about sort of like his open source lessons learned.
+[2319.88 --> 2319.96]  Right.
+[2319.96 --> 2326.70]  Like, his first introduction to open source was this jQuery boilerplate project.
+[2326.84 --> 2328.06]  And so this is back in the day.
+[2328.64 --> 2337.82]  And the very first, I guess, pull request was one that deleted all of his code and said start again because it was crap, basically.
+[2338.22 --> 2340.88]  So it was a horrible introduction to open source, basically.
+[2340.88 --> 2340.96]  Exactly.
+[2341.84 --> 2343.04]  We talked through that.
+[2343.12 --> 2353.12]  And then finally we got to this scenario where he was talking about just how he had, you know, his passion for making an editor look good.
+[2353.44 --> 2357.92]  And he come up with this theme, Dracula, and how it's just blown up since then.
+[2358.02 --> 2362.76]  Like, he started off with one and now it's been, you know, transplanted to everything, basically.
+[2362.86 --> 2363.04]  Yeah.
+[2363.04 --> 2363.64]  Vim, anything.
+[2364.28 --> 2364.46]  Yeah.
+[2364.52 --> 2370.02]  If you go to the Dracula site, it tells you all of the different places you can get it.
+[2370.40 --> 2370.80]  Yeah.
+[2371.54 --> 2374.50]  Dracula theme.com is the URL.
+[2374.84 --> 2379.88]  So if you're tracking that on a listener, if you're in the Slack, boom, there it is.
+[2380.60 --> 2382.10]  That's a pretty interesting project.
+[2382.20 --> 2388.40]  And it's funny that you did say official because there are many, many imitators, not often duplicators.
+[2388.78 --> 2400.40]  I also recently switched my font for programming to operator mono, which is not cheap, but it's beautiful.
+[2400.40 --> 2402.14]  And it's really easy on the eyes.
+[2403.10 --> 2412.30]  Back to the, I guess, somewhat of a surprise for developers on Windows to have an easy time.
+[2412.54 --> 2415.18]  Wasn't there a time, though, where it was harder for them?
+[2415.18 --> 2418.80]  I know maybe in the Ruby space, at least there was.
+[2418.80 --> 2423.96]  And this is like late 2008, 2009 timeframe, 2006.
+[2424.18 --> 2426.46]  It was like not easy to get set up.
+[2426.46 --> 2431.76]  It really depends on the language that you write and what you needed to do.
+[2431.76 --> 2435.36]  Because I've always had a Mac and a PC.
+[2435.72 --> 2438.24]  And I've always programmed on both of them.
+[2438.44 --> 2438.74]  Easily.
+[2439.04 --> 2439.44]  No problem.
+[2439.44 --> 2439.68]  Yeah.
+[2440.00 --> 2440.48]  Easily.
+[2440.58 --> 2441.12]  No problem.
+[2441.12 --> 2445.90]  I mean, maybe the stuff on my PC wasn't as attractive looking.
+[2446.12 --> 2452.52]  And it was a little bit harder to keep .files equal across operating systems.
+[2452.86 --> 2456.80]  But in the past few years, I haven't felt that way at all.
+[2457.02 --> 2462.22]  I mean, also, I mean, I have the access to people that work on VS Code.
+[2462.52 --> 2469.10]  So if I can't figure something out or if I want it to look better, I can message them and be like, help, please.
+[2469.10 --> 2469.30]  Please.
+[2470.30 --> 2474.62]  What do you think's changed for Windows, the platform?
+[2475.24 --> 2478.78]  I think it's 100% Microsoft being more involved with open source.
+[2479.02 --> 2480.80]  VS Code is completely open source.
+[2481.00 --> 2481.88]  It's written in TypeScript.
+[2482.30 --> 2486.38]  So it's really easy for people to make custom stuff for it.
+[2486.78 --> 2487.44]  That's my opinion.
+[2487.58 --> 2488.94]  Michael might have a better one.
+[2489.02 --> 2489.72]  What do you think, Michael?
+[2490.64 --> 2497.70]  I think that there's a larger transformation at Microsoft where they're moving from a platform company to a product company again.
+[2497.70 --> 2500.20]  So early Microsoft made products.
+[2500.36 --> 2501.80]  They made languages for other people's computers.
+[2502.08 --> 2505.54]  They made spreadsheets and Word applications.
+[2505.92 --> 2509.30]  And then at some point, they gained a monopoly over the operating system.
+[2509.40 --> 2515.14]  And they started to just kind of get lazy with product and strong arm everybody into just being on their platform.
+[2515.14 --> 2521.18]  And now that they've lost those monopolies in platform, they've turned everything around.
+[2521.26 --> 2525.58]  And Santi's really turned it all around to be a product company.
+[2526.04 --> 2528.98]  And now to be a product company, you have to make things that people love.
+[2530.02 --> 2534.76]  And I'm continually surprised by the things that I love from Microsoft.
+[2534.76 --> 2537.56]  I use Outlook on iOS right now.
+[2537.70 --> 2539.38]  It's great, actually.
+[2539.60 --> 2539.82]  Really?
+[2539.92 --> 2541.76]  It's a really good mobile email.
+[2541.84 --> 2542.64]  Yeah, it's crazy.
+[2543.22 --> 2547.14]  The fact that I'm using a Visual Studio editor still blows my mind.
+[2547.40 --> 2554.10]  If you told 1999 Michael that that would happen and that they wouldn't be using Vim, he'd punch you in the face.
+[2555.88 --> 2556.96]  I'm so violent.
+[2556.96 --> 2560.52]  Oh, 1999 Michael had no scruples.
+[2561.42 --> 2563.24]  So, anyway.
+[2564.44 --> 2565.18]  That's funny.
+[2565.34 --> 2566.00]  Yeah, yeah.
+[2566.08 --> 2571.74]  I kind of feel the same way because my transition to Mac came from Windows, obviously, which would make sense.
+[2571.94 --> 2575.18]  And it was from a place where I just couldn't afford.
+[2575.72 --> 2579.06]  And even today, I still can't afford the Mac machines.
+[2579.18 --> 2580.58]  They're still crazy expensive.
+[2581.46 --> 2583.54]  And so it comes from, one, an economic standpoint.
+[2584.08 --> 2586.12]  Surface Pros are not cheap.
+[2586.12 --> 2588.12]  I haven't compared the prices.
+[2588.80 --> 2590.34]  They're really nice hardware, though, too.
+[2590.48 --> 2592.08]  I mean, that's really surprising.
+[2592.20 --> 2595.56]  I haven't seen Microsoft make hardware that good, like, basically ever.
+[2596.96 --> 2601.60]  It's funny because I have heard complaints about the Surface Pros, but all of the complaints have been in software.
+[2601.94 --> 2604.42]  Or they've been, like, operating system things that people don't like about Windows.
+[2604.70 --> 2607.58]  I haven't heard anyone, not a single person, complain about the hardware.
+[2608.34 --> 2613.12]  Well, that's the thing, though, is that I think Microsoft has sort of, like, kept this bad name or this bruise.
+[2613.12 --> 2619.16]  They got punched in the face as the 1999 Michael would have done.
+[2619.38 --> 2622.32]  Punched Microsoft in the face because it just wasn't adding up.
+[2622.82 --> 2627.50]  And they were walking around with a fake black eye or something like that because it's not really there anymore.
+[2627.66 --> 2629.12]  It's sort of done.
+[2629.12 --> 2630.94]  I bought my mic just now, by the way.
+[2631.52 --> 2632.28]  That was a lot of rumble.
+[2634.22 --> 2635.24]  It's just not there anymore.
+[2635.34 --> 2643.26]  So, like, they've changed, but everyone keeps the previous opinion about them, even though it may not be warranted.
+[2643.30 --> 2645.70]  Like, the person in the Facebook comment you mentioned, you know, like that.
+[2645.70 --> 2654.52]  Well, I know that, like, one of the things that people, like, harp on Microsoft a lot for is everyone's, like, blue screen of death.
+[2654.64 --> 2655.52]  It's so horrible.
+[2655.68 --> 2660.84]  And, like, people love to take pictures of stuff out in the wild that have the blue screen of death on.
+[2660.96 --> 2663.36]  And they can just be like, ha ha, look at Microsoft.
+[2663.36 --> 2680.26]  Except I don't think that people realize that the reason there's a blue screen of death there is more often than not the reason because since they've made it so accessible for people to build their own custom stuff for Windows,
+[2680.66 --> 2685.78]  the blue screen of death is Windows as an operating system telling you that there is a problem.
+[2686.38 --> 2691.24]  And it's usually because of software that you're using that wasn't built by Microsoft.
+[2691.24 --> 2693.92]  Microsoft. So, it's, like, doing you a favor.
+[2695.76 --> 2701.60]  Yeah, I mean, also, like, if there is a blue screen, I think that they stopped doing that, like, 10 years ago in their operating system.
+[2701.88 --> 2705.30]  So, these dumb kiosks have 10-year-old operating systems.
+[2705.46 --> 2706.74]  Of course, they're awful.
+[2707.40 --> 2709.14]  Of course, they wrote awful software on top of it.
+[2709.14 --> 2711.26]  I've also gotten the kernel panic on a Mac before.
+[2711.26 --> 2717.24]  So, it's not like it's happened maybe a small handful of times my whole entire use of a Mac ever.
+[2717.34 --> 2718.98]  But I've seen that, too, you know.
+[2718.98 --> 2722.82]  Also, kernel panics on Linux are, like, just part of using Linux.
+[2723.12 --> 2726.44]  It's not like this is, like, a solved problem there.
+[2726.58 --> 2726.88]  Right.
+[2727.74 --> 2741.14]  So, what I hear you saying is that if you haven't in a while, revisit your opinion on Microsoft or Windows or any of their new devices out there as a platform for developers.
+[2741.14 --> 2743.56]  I mean, obviously, I'm going to say yes.
+[2744.24 --> 2744.44]  But.
+[2744.78 --> 2749.62]  Well, you know, say it from, you know, the true heart of Rachel versus the I work from Microsoft Rachel.
+[2750.14 --> 2751.78]  I mean, I don't bullshit.
+[2752.20 --> 2755.22]  So, if it wasn't good, I wouldn't say try it.
+[2756.12 --> 2756.74]  Well, there you go.
+[2756.74 --> 2768.20]  And I know that the people that are working on this stuff that are the tools for the developers are, like, legitimately super into feedback and wanting to know what the community wants.
+[2768.20 --> 2775.22]  And since it's since there's, like, repositories on GitHub for all this stuff, if there's something you don't like, make an issue.
+[2775.42 --> 2777.76]  Like, let it be known to the people that are working on it.
+[2778.16 --> 2787.64]  They would much rather hear from you and, like, official channels than read about somebody being like, I hate VS Code on Twitter or something, because that's not going to help.
+[2787.64 --> 2798.78]  We actually linked out to something on the new stack over the weekend in our weekly email about Microsoft's transition, basically, over these years.
+[2798.82 --> 2801.20]  And we've kind of covered that to quite a degree.
+[2801.44 --> 2808.22]  I can remember talking to R&S and a couple others at Nune Interactive recently.
+[2808.56 --> 2811.78]  And these are, like, 10-year veterans at Microsoft, right?
+[2811.78 --> 2817.86]  They've been there for a while, enough to see the two different sides that others may assume might be there.
+[2818.32 --> 2829.78]  The side where you said before, Michael, where they're, and I think you said it too, Rachel, where their focus is on developers, their focus is on open source, their focus is on products versus a platform.
+[2830.38 --> 2839.12]  And you can see that transition happening not only on the outside as what we get from them, but also the transition on the inside from employees.
+[2839.12 --> 2844.78]  And I remember Arnish saying, he was like, it was Gaurav, actually, Gaurav Seth.
+[2845.24 --> 2850.10]  He said, I've been there 11 years, and the last few years have been the best years ever.
+[2850.54 --> 2859.08]  And I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he seemed to be coming from a place where I may not have been here much longer if it didn't change.
+[2859.08 --> 2861.18]  That seemed to be the sentiment.
+[2861.36 --> 2862.38]  He didn't say that, though.
+[2863.06 --> 2875.26]  But it was like, Microsoft has changed so much for me as a developer to change to make me enjoy my job, allow me to do cool stuff with Chakra Core and fun stuff with Node and do stuff in the community.
+[2875.44 --> 2877.24]  Whereas before, it was never like that.
+[2878.10 --> 2878.26]  Yeah.
+[2879.66 --> 2881.24]  I've heard that from a bunch of people.
+[2882.10 --> 2882.90]  More questions!
+[2884.24 --> 2884.60]  Yeah.
+[2884.60 --> 2888.76]  System76 Lemur right now, talking more about hardware.
+[2889.20 --> 2891.72]  That's from Peter Benjamin.
+[2893.34 --> 2896.42]  What is a System76 Lemur?
+[2897.26 --> 2900.16]  It's Linux laptops.
+[2900.82 --> 2901.52]  Oh, interesting.
+[2902.74 --> 2907.94]  That Intel Core i7 is the chipset that they use in the new Surface Pro as well.
+[2908.72 --> 2909.08]  Cool.
+[2909.08 --> 2910.74]  Um, okay.
+[2911.02 --> 2914.70]  If you go to any conference where MS has a presence, you definitely get that vibe.
+[2914.78 --> 2915.46]  Oh, that's a comment.
+[2915.54 --> 2916.16]  That's not a question.
+[2916.32 --> 2916.72]  That's not a comment.
+[2916.72 --> 2919.64]  Yeah, that's why there's not a question mark at the end.
+[2919.74 --> 2920.06]  Yeah.
+[2920.56 --> 2921.92]  Where's the question marks?
+[2922.58 --> 2923.32]  All right, everybody.
+[2923.68 --> 2925.26]  You gotta ask us more questions.
+[2925.88 --> 2928.96]  I gotta go in four minutes, so...
+[2928.96 --> 2929.98]  Ooh, four minutes.
+[2930.22 --> 2931.60]  Let's do random picks.
+[2931.98 --> 2935.14]  I'm going to a party in a 70-room Gothic mansion.
+[2935.70 --> 2936.78]  Must be there on time.
+[2937.58 --> 2937.84]  Yeah.
+[2937.84 --> 2939.38]  Must eat in advance.
+[2940.18 --> 2941.62]  I do need to eat in advance.
+[2941.62 --> 2942.42]  Makeup's gonna be perfect.
+[2943.20 --> 2943.68]  Obviously.
+[2944.14 --> 2945.20]  On point, right?
+[2945.36 --> 2947.98]  I hate the phrase on point so much.
+[2948.32 --> 2949.22]  Not on point?
+[2951.36 --> 2954.64]  What's your version of on point?
+[2955.98 --> 2956.50]  Spectacular?
+[2957.98 --> 2958.58]  Rad.
+[2959.08 --> 2959.52]  I don't know.
+[2959.72 --> 2959.84]  Rad.
+[2959.92 --> 2960.48]  Okay, rad.
+[2961.14 --> 2961.32]  Yeah.
+[2961.58 --> 2962.50]  Makeup's gotta be rad.
+[2962.98 --> 2964.48]  I forgot we're back in the 80s again.
+[2965.28 --> 2966.92]  I'm always in the 80s.
+[2966.92 --> 2968.16]  Man, I grew up in the 80s, okay?
+[2968.26 --> 2969.76]  So, I want to go back so bad.
+[2969.84 --> 2971.10]  If I hear 80s music...
+[2971.10 --> 2971.50]  Oh, yeah.
+[2971.50 --> 2972.76]  There was a question about...
+[2972.76 --> 2973.10]  You know what?
+[2973.14 --> 2977.76]  There was a question about server-side rendering earlier that Michael can answer, and then I'll
+[2977.76 --> 2978.18]  leave.
+[2979.38 --> 2980.44]  Um, hold on.
+[2980.44 --> 2983.16]  I don't do any server-side rendering, so I'm actually really bad at this.
+[2983.22 --> 2984.62]  I think that's really an Alex question.
+[2984.98 --> 2987.82]  Like, we need to get Alex on to talk about that kind of stuff.
+[2988.48 --> 2989.94]  Oh, they wanted to know about...
+[2989.94 --> 2990.82]  Well, where is Alex?
+[2990.88 --> 2991.66]  Is he home yet?
+[2993.02 --> 2993.72]  Probably not.
+[2994.18 --> 2995.16]  He's probably listening.
+[2995.54 --> 2996.28]  On his drive.
+[2996.36 --> 2998.62]  Neither of us know anything about...
+[2998.62 --> 3001.42]  Well, Michael probably knows something about server-side rendering.
+[3001.42 --> 3005.66]  Um, I don't.
+[3006.66 --> 3010.60]  How about we do two minutes of random picks, and Rich, you can begin.
+[3010.88 --> 3011.46]  What do you think?
+[3012.22 --> 3018.38]  Uh, my random pick is actually going to be, um, a CFP that's open that people should apply
+[3018.38 --> 3020.30]  to, because it seems neat.
+[3020.68 --> 3021.74]  And it's in Tokyo.
+[3022.54 --> 3025.08]  Uh, so it's NodeFest Tokyo.
+[3025.58 --> 3026.42]  And, yeah.
+[3026.88 --> 3027.22]  Apply.
+[3027.86 --> 3028.30]  I don't know.
+[3029.16 --> 3029.68]  What else?
+[3030.22 --> 3030.82]  I've been there.
+[3030.92 --> 3031.46]  It's great.
+[3031.78 --> 3032.46]  Everybody should go.
+[3032.88 --> 3033.84]  I've also been...
+[3033.84 --> 3036.38]  Well, you've been to NodeFest Tokyo, or you've been to Tokyo?
+[3036.96 --> 3038.00]  No, I've been to NodeFest Tokyo.
+[3038.10 --> 3039.90]  I went to the first two or three.
+[3040.16 --> 3040.66]  Something like that.
+[3040.66 --> 3040.88]  Nice.
+[3040.88 --> 3043.32]  It's one of the oldest Node conferences, actually.
+[3043.48 --> 3043.80]  People don't realize it.
+[3043.80 --> 3044.68]  I did not know that.
+[3045.30 --> 3047.28]  But, yeah, it started the same year that I started NodeConf.
+[3048.50 --> 3048.86]  Wow.
+[3050.18 --> 3050.58]  Cool.
+[3050.96 --> 3054.14]  Um, I guess the other thing, I actually was looking at...
+[3054.14 --> 3059.70]  There's this cool procedural generation subreddit where they just talk about procedural generation.
+[3059.98 --> 3060.88]  Hold on, I'm going to burp.
+[3061.96 --> 3064.16]  I muted myself for the benefit of you all.
+[3064.16 --> 3070.70]  Um, so there's this library that I just linked in the channel called Too Loud that, uh,
+[3070.70 --> 3072.70]  lets you do noise functions.
+[3073.42 --> 3077.48]  Um, there's like Perlin noise and Simplex noise and a bunch of other stuff.
+[3077.48 --> 3084.62]  And it's really good for generating tile sets or any other kind of, uh, random procedural stuff that you need.
+[3084.66 --> 3086.06]  And it makes like canvas tiles.
+[3086.30 --> 3087.50]  It's pretty cool.
+[3088.10 --> 3088.60]  Cool.
+[3089.04 --> 3089.70]  Really cool.
+[3090.24 --> 3091.26]  And now I'm leaving.
+[3091.26 --> 3092.26]  Okay.
+[3093.88 --> 3094.36]  Bye, Rachel.
+[3094.84 --> 3095.88]  Have a good weekend.
+[3096.10 --> 3096.38]  Bye.
+[3097.32 --> 3097.58]  Bye.
+[3098.58 --> 3099.52]  What about you, Michael?
+[3100.78 --> 3102.60]  Um, let me think.
+[3102.84 --> 3103.32]  Uh, okay.
+[3103.50 --> 3106.76]  So there's a project called Leaflet.js.
+[3107.16 --> 3112.48]  It's a pretty amazing JavaScript, um, library for doing everything you ever wanted to do with maps.
+[3112.48 --> 3119.10]  So embedding maps that work on mobile and desktop, all the interactions, putting points in all that cool stuff.
+[3119.10 --> 3131.90]  Um, there's this great company, uh, Mapzen that's, uh, like a, a sort of cheaper and, and, um, slightly easier to use, uh, alternative to Mapbox for embedding maps and things and interacting with them.
+[3131.90 --> 3134.84]  And, uh, they use this library as their, their base.
+[3134.92 --> 3140.04]  And then they, they provide a bunch of tiles and services for doing, um, like smart routing and stuff.
+[3140.14 --> 3149.24]  So I've been building a little, you know, app in my spare time for fun with that library, uh, and was just really, really impressed with how far along this Leaflet.js thing is.
+[3149.32 --> 3152.62]  Like it, it does literally everything.
+[3152.92 --> 3157.34]  Um, and I mean, for, for a task this huge, you kind of have to be a big framework.
+[3157.34 --> 3166.58]  Um, but as far as, you know, big frameworks and, and big, big piles of code go, um, it's, it's really actually easy to use and not very, uh, obtuse.
+[3167.90 --> 3168.38]  Yeah.
+[3169.02 --> 3174.00]  Well, my, uh, my pick will be something to tease up some future content for us.
+[3174.00 --> 3178.72]  So there was a blog post on the Heroku blog talking about the rise of Kotlin.
+[3178.94 --> 3185.62]  And we just recorded an episode this week, which will go out in about three weeks because we have a small backlog.
+[3185.62 --> 3189.54]  And, uh, I'm pretty excited about this.
+[3189.58 --> 3191.34]  It's a, it was, it was a fun conversation.
+[3191.96 --> 3195.76]  My son's crying in the background cause it's, uh, it's time.
+[3196.60 --> 3209.32]  And, but, uh, but the, the, the fun thing about Kotlin is it's very interesting in terms of how it's come about from a, a third party product company, so to speak.
+[3209.32 --> 3212.50]  Like it comes from JetBrains and we talked about ID, IDEs earlier.
+[3212.94 --> 3215.76]  They're like the experts of creating IDEs.
+[3216.02 --> 3222.10]  And so rather than Kotlin become being like Swift is to Apple, Kotlin is to Google.
+[3222.24 --> 3223.08]  It's not that way.
+[3223.12 --> 3225.50]  It's, it's actually JetBrains, a third party.
+[3225.50 --> 3236.26]  So it's a really interesting how this language came about really interesting about how it's solving some interesting things on the JVM and the powers giving to Android developers to have an alternative to, to Java.
+[3236.42 --> 3237.72]  And, uh, it's a fun show.
+[3237.84 --> 3239.94]  So that is a good article.
+[3240.06 --> 3245.36]  I'll link it in the show notes to go and check out and prep for our show coming up on Kotlin.
+[3246.02 --> 3246.50]  Awesome.
+[3247.02 --> 3247.68]  All right.
+[3248.16 --> 3249.04]  Good stuff.
+[3249.04 --> 3255.96]  And with that, that is the ask me anything random live show of JS party.
+[3256.08 --> 3258.16]  This was probably the most random show we've done so far.
+[3258.28 --> 3259.92]  So thanks for tuning in.
+[3259.92 --> 3262.76]  And for those in Slack, thanks for hanging out.
+[3265.40 --> 3266.14]  All right.
+[3266.20 --> 3268.78]  Thank you for tuning into JS party this week.
+[3268.94 --> 3272.80]  Thanks also to our sponsors, top tile century and hired.
+[3272.96 --> 3277.34]  Also thanks to fastly, our bandwidth partner at the facet.com to learn more.
+[3277.34 --> 3280.42]  We host everything we do on Linode servers.
+[3280.54 --> 3282.54]  Head to lino.com slash change log.
+[3282.70 --> 3283.56]  Check them out.
+[3283.66 --> 3284.46]  Support the show.
+[3284.54 --> 3288.66]  This show is produced by myself, Adam Stachowiak and edited by Jonathan Youngblood.
+[3288.82 --> 3293.22]  And the awesome music you've been hearing is produced by the mysterious break master cylinder.
+[3293.70 --> 3296.98]  We do the show live every Friday at 3 PM.
+[3297.02 --> 3298.84]  U S Eastern noon Pacific.
+[3298.84 --> 3304.90]  So join us at change law.com slash live Slack with us in real time.
+[3304.90 --> 3306.72]  Head to change law.com slash community.
+[3306.96 --> 3308.22]  We'll see you again next week.
+[3308.54 --> 3309.34]  Thanks for listening.
+[3309.34 --> 3339.32]  We'll see you again next week.
+[3339.82 --> 3339.84]  Bye.
+[3346.76 --> 3347.38]  Bye.
+[3347.38 --> 3349.62]  Bye.
+[3349.78 --> 3350.02]  Bye.
+[3350.46 --> 3351.06]  Bye.
+[3351.52 --> 3351.54]  Bye.
+[3351.54 --> 3351.56]  Bye.
+[3351.80 --> 3352.20]  Bye.
+[3352.20 --> 3352.32]  Bye.
+[3352.58 --> 3352.78]  Bye.
+[3353.24 --> 3353.68]  Bye.
+[3353.68 --> 3353.72]  Bye.
+[3353.72 --> 3353.90]  Bye.
+[3354.80 --> 3355.16]  Bye.
+[3355.16 --> 3355.38]  Bye.
+[3355.48 --> 3357.30]  Bye.
+[3358.82 --> 3359.26]  Bye.
+[3359.26 --> 3359.46]  Bye.
+[3359.64 --> 3360.68]  Bye.
+[3360.74 --> 3361.28]  Bye.
+[3361.34 --> 3361.56]  Bye.
+[3361.76 --> 3361.84]  Bye.
+[3361.88 --> 3362.40]  Bye.
+[3362.40 --> 3362.92]  Bye.
+[3363.12 --> 3363.88]  Bye.
+[3363.88 --> 3364.42]  Bye.
+[3367.04 --> 3369.12]  Bye.

AMA — BasicAttentionToken, Robotics, IDE's and Stuff_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,438 @@
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're gonna do a different show today, which is we had some kerfuffles on scheduling, and we don't wanna miss the show, because we're all busy and we wanna keep it rolling... So ask us anything. if you're on Twitter, if you're on some sort of social platform, if you're right here in Slack, drop a note in there and I'm gonna do my best to ask Rachel and Mikeal some questions about JavaScript, the web platform, where we're going, what we're doing...
+
+Mikeal, maybe we can still talk about the ICO, which is unique... Is it the first of its kind, the Initial Coin Offering?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, there's been other ICOs for the cryptocurrencies... This is just one that's actually kind of related to JavaScript and the web, because it's an attention token that's gonna be in the Brave browser, that relates to your -- it's an alternative to advertising, and it does micropayments instead.
+
+**Rachel White:** Can we mine it now?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I don't think you can mine it that way.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I didn't read the full thing... The headline seemed to me as if Brave was generating funding through rather than an IPO, an ICO.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, they did.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that what is happening?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So what they did was they created a bunch of these coins - I'm not sure how many in total - but they've released some of them. Other companies have done a very similar thing, where they wanna get a coin onto the market, so they mine a bunch of it, and then they say "Okay, we're gonna offer this set amount of this coin to the public", and then those go on the open market and people buy them. And now that those coins are in the open market, there's additional speculation and trading on top of it.
+
+They made 35 million. I think the current market cap on the coins that went out is a little under 100 million... The people that bought them actually have tripled the value so far.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So is this becoming a way for people to go about raising funding in a different way, or is this unique to Brave or how they operate the browser?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It does a couple things - when you have certain types of these coins, you wanna get a bunch of value injected into the network, so you do a big public offering, and then you kind of bootstrap a bunch of value around it. Or you can give a bunch of these coins out and then get that money.
+
+Now, the way that that's treated by the IRS is just straight up capital gains, so you're gonna get a pretty big tax penalty unless you do -- and I imagine that everybody who's raising more than a couple million dollars on these ICOs is probably doing this where they're filing some kind of company off-shore to avoid some of those tax penalties.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[04:03\] So we want this to be in the pre-show, or somehow meld this into the ending production?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I thought we were live...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're live! Okay, fine, we're live!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, let's just put that in.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, you can just edit it in --
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We'll do it live!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We'll do it live! So listeners of this particular JS Party, it's a different type of show. Normally you never hear me; I'm just behind the scenes, hoping that everything goes well, and keeping the mice on the spinners, you know? Creating electricity, and stuff...
+
+**Rachel White:** What does that mean?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, the mice race.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I was thinking fidget spinners. I thought this was like a millennial reference.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, me too... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, sure, the mice are standing on the fidget spinners, and that's creating electromagnetism, which turns into electricity, powers the house...
+
+**Rachel White:** Who does that? Is that a real thing?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where do they do that at? They did that in Neighbors II... The movie. \[laughter\] Remember they were trying to take down the sorority and they pulled the power, and it kept going because they had all the minions in the other room riding unicycles, or whatever? Stationery bikes...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We definitely are keeping this in. This has to be in.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's how we power the house, you know? So back to this unique thing - basic attention token... It's so foreign to me. Ethereum-based, we've done shows on this - I get it; I understand blockchain, I understand cryptocurrencies, I keep hearing more and more that they're coming of age, they're about to be mainstream, or they are mainstream and there's a small mainstream, who knows...? What's the state? Where are coin in general being used? What is the state of this cryptocurrency system?
+
+**Rachel White:** The dark web... \[laughter\] I have no idea. I don't know anything about this. I know that libertarians like Bitcoin, and that's about it. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it depends on what you mean by that. So there's a bunch of different coins now... I think that the primary ones right now are probably Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin...
+
+**Rachel White:** Dogecoin...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Dogecoin I think is not a major player at this point...
+
+**Rachel White:** I have 75,000. It'd better...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You have 75,000 Dogecoins? Those are probably worth something, actually...
+
+**Rachel White:** No, it's not. It's worth like $20 maybe. It was the only one that compelled me to figure out how to do mining, and I was like "Cool!", and it's worth nothing.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, you mined them... Okay. I mean, I've bought some of them... I think honestly if you're just out with friends and you want to transfer some money between people, it is surprisingly the easiest way to do that currently. If you just have -- what's the app called? Coinbase. If you just have Coinbase on your phone, you can just use your phones to transfer money, and it's almost instantaneous. Bitcoin takes like 10 minutes. It's actually kind of a better way to trade around money like that... And you're seeing more and more services set up support for accepting Bitcoin as currency... Bitcoin and some other currencies, as well.
+
+What I was talking about before with -- if you pull it out in cash, you've made capital gains on that money, so there's a lot of incentive to just keep the money being exchanged for other value inside of the system, because it's not being treated as a currency, which is a weird thing to think about - by not treating it as a currency, you've actually inflated people's use of the currency in a way, because they don't want to pay the capital gains.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So what you're saying is when you pull it out -- you take it from...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You take it out in cash...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:02\] Right, when you turn it into your denomination - USD, EUR, or whatever your currency is - you turn it into what we consider maybe real dollars, real cash... At that point you could be subject to capital gains?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes. This also translates if you transfer to other property and then sell that property.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, of course.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** There actually is a company right now doing mortgages in Bitcoin, but if you buy that house, it's -- say you put $5 into Bitcoin really early on, and that's worth half a million dollars. So you buy a half a million dollar house with Bitcoin, with that mortgage, you're good until you sell that house. Then when you sell that house, you owe capital gains from the $5 that you initially put into the currency.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You defer it by buying property.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, you defer it by exchanging property. So the way that the SEC and the IRS looks at cryptocurrencies is that they are property; they are digital property that you own. They fall under the laws Beanie Babies, and things like that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That makes sense. That's a good way to put it, because they're still coins, when you think about the name, the term - they're meant to signify currency of some sort; some sort of worth, some sort of value... But they're obviously not physical; you can't touch your Bitcoin. Maybe you could, if you're really lucky, but I don't know...
+
+But they're just simply things you happen to take ownership in - Mikeal, you own yours, I own mine, Rachel you own yours - and once you exchange that value for something else, it translates. So it's like stock in a way too, because you buy it at a certain price, and it may be worth something worth, or potentially less.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, but stocks are regulated quite a bit differently and looked at quite a bit differently.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure, but the concept domain, that's what I mean by that. Not so much the full-on regulations of stocks, just more like the principle of "You buy it at a certain rate - let's say a dollar - and a month later it goes up and it's now 1,50." So the value could go up or it could go down based on when you came in.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This also happens to your currency in your pocket. There's inflation, there's currency exchanges, and how valuable your currency is when compared to other currencies... I've run into this a lot, because I have a stack of money from other countries, so that when I land in those countries, I can spend it... And this has not been a very good last five years to be holding currency not in dollars, so that kind of sucked.
+
+Anyway, so for blockchains there's this whole side of things that's like currency speculation, and it's a lot of ostensibly gambling, like fun gambling, a lot of money flowing into it, and gambling on these exponential increases in the value of these digital coins. But the underlying technology can solve a lot of problems outside of just currency exchange, and outside of just things that we need a currency to do.
+
+There's an element of transparency and provability without a centralized owner that is really important for a bunch of use cases. What Brave is going after with this basic attention token is essentially the ad market. If you've ever read a bunch about the advertising market, especially online, there's a huge amount of fraud, a huge amount of fake clicks... There's everything from click farms to people just generating crazy wild numbers for what has and has not happened on different services and what not.
+If you wanna try to solve that, you need something that is provable and has a lot of these elements of transparency and provability baked in... So what they're looking at is this basic attention token. This is a provable way to show that you spent some attention on something. That could be used to prove that you saw an advertisement or saw some content... Or what they're probably betting on a little bit more than that is you can prove that people spend time on a site, and then you can inject capital and money into where you spend your attention, and that can be doled out as micropayments to those sites.
+
+\[12:19\] If you've used the Brave browser, they already have this feature baked in where you can do these micropayments. You can say "Look, I don't wanna deal with advertisements on website, I hate all that kind of stuff, but I do wanna support content creators, so I'm gonna pour $20/month into wherever I spend my time." What happens is that Brave tracks that in a way that is anonymized and protects your privacy, but it also allows them to dole out some of that to all these different places where you're spending your time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's pretty interesting.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That ends up being a lot more money, I think, for the users that put money into that system; if you're only putting in $5, the sites that you go to are going to end up making more money than they would from advertising on that. I mean, advertising - you can to reach hundreds of thousands of people in order to make a menial amount of money.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. In the upcoming JS Party... We're on that show now, but episode 15, which includes Kyle Simpson - he mentions something about where we place our value add, and we talk a bit about this subject... Not in particular, but how users spend their time on the web; the conversation was basically the chasm between native applications and web applications, and how we often put them together when maybe they should be divided because of things like bandwidth, and what not... Inherent costs that basically attain to bandwidth and the cost of bandwidth. People in the U.S. don't typically have that issue because we have unlimited everything, basically, but in other parts of the world there's metered access to internet, so the weight of things gets a lot more expensive... So that was a conversation on there.
+
+Then also on Request For Commits - you probably remember this - with Brendan Eich, talking about that. He's the founder of Brave, so it would make sense to have this conversation with him back on that show. We talked a bit about the early days of founding the web, and he talked a bit about how it was all advertising-driven; I'm summarizing to some degree from my memory, but basically the history of browsers had this speckled history of advertising paying for a lot of things... And it's kind of interesting to see now where he's at, and this basic attention token being a thing where, like you just said, you can put $20 in and that money goes to where you spend your time on the internet.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, I think what he's really dealing with and he has had to confront pretty head on is that having this indirect market to found browsers and the web through advertising has also created a huge market for fraud and malware and a bunch of other stuff, and it's only gotten worse, and everything that we've tried to do to try to make it a little better hasn't really worked. Brave is pretty proactively tracking and blocking advertisements and just saying "No, we're gonna go with a different way to fund the web here and remove a lot of this malware."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A lot of people are using Patreon, mostly content creators, and what bums me out is seeing crazily enthusiastic content creators pointing to and basically begging their listeners or their audience, "Support Me!", and you go to their Patreon and they're getting $13/month. Nothing upsets me more than seeing -- sure, maybe it's amateur content, so to speak, and I say that loosely because it's not like mainstream media content, for example, like highly polished, 16-20 behind it... It's one person, two people maybe, but there's somebody who's out there doing something on the web that's of value to others, and they're essentially asking their audience to support it, and they go to that Patreon page and it's like $13/month. That's horrible. That's not working.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[16:20\] I think that when you look at how to fund content -- and we look at those a lot when we're talking about how to fund open source and how to have a sustainability strategy for open source... But the world of content and art is as big and dynamic, and there's not one way to fund things, and there's not content that necessarily appeals to every way of funding. So it works really well for certain kinds of artists that have a really personal following, a small but dedicated following, I'd say.
+
+I think that if you were making a couple million dollars a month on Patreon you would probably stop getting new people putting in money, regardless of how much the content costs to make.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, but $13 - that's horrible.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I know, but there's also a lot of people making a living on Patreon, as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's true, there are.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And those people that are making $13, there may be a reason for that. There may be a perception that that person is already being rewarded in some other way, or other people are actually paying for that content... I've seen people on Patreon do this, where they make content and then the people that give them money on Patreon don't even get that content, they just buy it through iTunes, or something... When you have that kind of stuff going on, people are just less incentivized. So I think it's gonna work for some people and not for others.
+
+To broaden it back out to blockchain in general, I think wherever you have transactions that you need to make transparent and you need to have some provability, there's a bunch of different use cases for that, and a bunch of different things that we can do there.
+
+Of course, this being the tech industry, there's been a huge flood of money from venture capital and a lot of hype from everywhere that blockchain is the solution to everything, so if you have a startup, an idea, and then you add the word "blockchain" or "AI" to it, you will just get more money right now... So it's very overhyped, but there are a bunch of news things that we can do that we couldn't do before, and eventually those are the things that are really gonna shape new products and services.
+
+Let's get off of blockchain for a while, let's move on...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I'll end up by just saying my thought was that if this basic attention token is a chance to push the web in a way where your attention speaks for itself and pays for itself, so to speak, is a better direction of a model, hypothetically, than the beggar/"Will you support me?" model.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right.
+
+**Break:** \[18:51\] to \[20:30\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We've got some robotics topics to talk about. Rachel, I understand that you're a purveyor of robotics, you like this stuff.
+
+**Rachel White:** I dabble.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You dabble, and sometimes you might even have fun doing it... What do you think?
+
+**Rachel White:** I saw the question that was asked... So the reason that I use JavaScript in robotics is because I know JavaScript; I don't know C. If I need to get into something that is a little bit more specific to C, I can work my way around it, but I can't write it from scratch.
+
+Basically, the reason that I think JavaScript is good for robotics and embedded hardware is because of the community that is involved that is available to the NodeBots community. The Johnny-Five site is amazing, the documentation is great...
+
+When I say robotics too, I don't mean like very intense, giant things... This is just like hobbies-level stuff, so like small little -- there's sumo bots that can push each other out of circles, or play soccer... We're not changing the world, inventing anything that's going to revolutionize the way that modern machinery is made with JavaScript robotics, I don't think, but I think that it's a really interesting way to help people that are wanting to learn how to write Node, and maybe they're just not grasping the way that it works with building a single-page application.
+
+I really like the way that the tangibility of even just taking a breadboard with LEDs and hooking it up to an Arduino and being able to write JavaScript you can get stuff to happen... Not to mention using LEDs for visualizing different types of loops is really a great way to help understand it. It helped me understand how that kind of stuff was done.
+
+In terms of performance-based stuff, obviously C is gonna be faster than Node stuff, but I feel like all of the stuff that I've built hasn't really had any issues with the runtime, or any lag whenever I do whatever "action A triggers action B." The performance differences aren't really big enough to make a difference for at least the hobby-level stuff that I do with it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And also I think that there's a little bit of a difference between IoT and robotics, right?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, definitely.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** A lot of the IoT stuff - like yeah, you do have these use cases where you need it to be super low power, because it's gotta be on a little battery for a year, but with robotics you're gonna be pretty high-power anyway, because you're doing these pretty big movements and moving around heavy things, so that means they are gonna have a higher powered onboard device and you can run Node just as well as anything else that runs on that little embedded system.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It would seem to me too that going the route of C versus going the route of JavaScript, one might be a higher/lower barrier to entry. You might have to have a lot of systems knowledge, maybe a lot of deeper knowledge about programming that C would require, whereas JavaScript - you can sort of run that anywhere; it's a little bit easier to get involved, and dare I even say maybe a slightly larger, more welcoming community, so it's a little easier to find your place to fit in. That seems like a pretty standard thing to think about as well.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[24:15\] Because I came from lower-level languages and I watched higher-level languages take over and get a lot more people using them than the lower-level languages, it's always hilarious to me when people from higher-level languages start to get into lower-level languages... Because they really ignore a lot of the things that higher-level languages do for you. It's just so easy to make mistakes in C; mistakes that will still be compiled and your program will still run, but will introduce a security vulnerability, or a memory leak... It's very hard to make good, reliable programs in C and C++, and that's why we built higher-order languages, so that you can stay within some extra boundaries that will make it not just easier to program, but also easier to not make mistakes.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I feel like a lot of the libraries that allow people to get started with NodeBots take the mistake-making part of the process out of it. The mistakes that you're gonna make when you're doing it is more like -- they're going to be your wiring, then the programs that you're writing, because so much of the sensors and modules that you're using already have the code written. You can pretty much just like copy/paste a ton of it and you're ready to go, and then you just have to learn a little bit about electricity and how circuits work, and then you can start combining things to make a lot more dynamic stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can we rewind a bit and talk a bit about the chasm or the difference between learning JavaScript and a single-page web application scenario, versus let's say robotics, where you mentioned interesting things around loops, and blinking lights... Why is it different? What's different about it?
+
+**Rachel White:** For me it's a learning style thing. Some people are okay with grasping a concept, and some people just really need to visualize what they're doing in order to understand it.
+
+For me, I'm a super visual learner, and I think that's why I was so taken to the JavaScript robotics stuff, because I could -- I mean, I've been programming for almost half of my life, and I'm a s\*\*\*\*y programmer; I don't know data structures, I don't understand those things... I just know what I know from repetition and building stuff.
+
+It's just nice when you can touch something that you've built, versus just looking at -- I guess you could touch a computer screen, but it's a little bit different. I don't know...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think a more interesting question is actually "What is similar about UI programming the browser to robotics in JavaScript?", because I think there's actually more similarities than differences. And when you look at a lot of the languages that people have built specifically for IoT, they're taking a lot of these threading patterns that we have for -- basically, people have written for desktop programming and operating system programming, a lot of low-level stuff, and it's interesting that JavaScript and the browser didn't go that direction; they went the direction of events. We talk a lot about asynchronous programming now, but just basic DOM events, like when you click on something, something happens. That's how robotics work, and that's how JavaScript robotics work, and it's actually very similar.
+
+I feel like UI people actually have an easier time on-boarding than people that are used to threaded C++ programming that try to move into this evented environment.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[27:59\] It depends on the on-boarding, obviously. If you can set somebody up with good documentation, then yeah, that's good. I feel like even five years ago there was still not great documentation for a ton of front-end UI stuff... At least I didn't have a good time with it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** If you're getting into JavaScript for robotics - or JavaScript hardware stuff in general - there's a lot of libraries out there, everything in npm; there's maybe even more embedded systems that support this. It's like the Atari 2600 days of computing, everybody's got their own specialized board...
+
+You mess with a lot of these, Rachel. What do you recommend that people pick up as a first introductory set of hardware, and what libraries would you point them to?
+
+**Rachel White:** I think that if you don't know anything about hardware at all and you're wanting to get started, the best thing that I would suggest is the Johnny-Five starter kit that comes with a Tessel. You can get it on SparkFun. The benefit of the Tessel versus an Arduino is -- the Arduino you're gonna have to flash with custom firmware, and if it's your first time using that kind of board, you might not necessarily know how to do that. But the Tessel just comes and it's ready to go, essentially. You just plug it into your computer, and you can either run the code from your machine the same way that you do with your Arduino and other boards... Or you can just push the code up to the Tessel, so it runs on the actual board, which is more similar to the boards that have embedded systems on them, which is really great. Plus, it's ready for Node out of the bat.
+
+The projects that I think it gives you to build are -- there's like a little robot one, it comes with DC motors. I honestly just get the kits now, because -- like, whenever you go to conferences and there's people giving stuff away for swag, I just break everything apart into individual components I can use later... But there's a whole bunch of documentation that comes with it that helps you get up and running.
+
+The other libraries that you can use are -- Bryan Hughes has a library that allows you to use JavaScript for the Raspberry Pi... I only recently started using a Raspberry Pi. The new model 3 makes it a lot easier to be able to use it without having to plug it into your router or SSH into it, because you can use something called PiBakery to start your card up... So it already has the Raspbian operating system on it, and then you can configure this thing called "VNC Viewer", which lets you essentially -- it's like a virtual machine on your computer that you're actually logged into the Raspberry Pi with, so you see the whole Linux operating system.
+
+I actually just built this cool gallery out of a 32x32 LED matrix using a Raspberry Pi, and I'm running Node on the Pi, and I'm also running Node on a single-page app that's hosted on Azure. The way that it works is you -- so there's not a lot of good Node libraries for the LED matrix, so all I did was installed the C library that already works for displaying art on the matrix, and instead I have the Node application listening over the IoT hub on Azure, and it just runs the C shell commands whenever it gets the message to display art... Which is kind of hacky and cheating, but there's a lot of ways that you can jump in and use Node with a lot of things.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Those are the best hacks. I love that stuff!
+
+**Rachel White:** \[31:58\] It's like, I kind of inadvertently built the world's hackiest Node library for displaying art on a LED matrix... So you can, too. What else do we have?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So the point of an "Ask us anything" show is people asking questions, but I guess Mikeal and I might have some questions, which we've already shared a few...
+
+**Rachel White:** You can ask us questions not about JavaScript as long as they're safe for work...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true, yeah.
+
+**Rachel White:** We have many, many interests.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm taking a break from bread-making, so no bread-making questions.
+
+**Rachel White:** I was just gonna say "Ask Mikeal about bread."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No... Gotta take a break from that. I can tell you all about ketosis, but I can't tell you about bread right now. \[laughter\]
+
+There's a question about IDEs... So I've never used IDEs, I've always used straightforward editors, but I've always been a little bit jealous of some of the features that nice IDEs have. Eventually, I made my way to Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code is great because it is an editor, but it has a lot of the features that I've always wanted from IDEs... So I use Code now.
+
+**Rachel White:** I also use Code, but I work at Microsoft, so...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Didn't you use it before you worked there?
+
+**Rachel White:** No, I used Sublime Text. But honestly, it doesn't really feel that different. I use Visual Studio Code with a bunch of syntax plugins for JavaScript, and Node debugging stuff... I'm on my Mac right now as I type this, so I can't even open -- well, I don't have it installed on here, because I just use this for the podcast. Wow, that was a weird noise.
+
+It's really good... So Mikeal's looking for a new computer, right? \[laughs\] And he's like asking people "What should I get?" Well, he just wants a laptop. But the reason I bring this up is because he said it on Facebook, and some guy in his comments was like "Ugh, dev work on a Windows machine?", and just wanted to be like "Have you even tried?", because... I don't know, it's just so nice, especially with Git for -- I don't know how to say this word correctly... Ubuntu? The Bash for that on Windows is fantastic. I have it running inside of Hyper, which is great. My terminal and my code editor are beautiful, and they run great and they're fast.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that was a weird comment, especially because -- I mean, we have statistics on this from npm, but there are more Windows users of npm and NodeJS than there are Mac users.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Really?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's very surprising.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that they're a little bit less vocal on Twitter, but yeah, there's a lot of people that do development on Windows, a very huge amount. And one of the secrets to Node's growth, even early on, was having really quality Windows support. I don't think that people appreciate how different it is than, say, Python or Ruby, or a lot of these other languages. It's really first-class.
+
+But before we get off of IDEs, I did wanna just -- I wanna get a list of your extensions, Rachel, because I've just found some new, interesting extensions that I'm really happy about. So you can put @installed into the extensions thing, and that will show you the ones you have installed.
+
+I have the JS Standard Linter installed, I have npm Intellisense, so that will actually do auto-completion for the npm packages that you have. And obviously, the regular kind of Intellisense.
+
+Also Search Node Modules I think is really cool. It searches your Node modules directory for autocompletion as well.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[36:08\] I have this markdown preview one that's super nice, because I write a lot of documentation for the projects that I do, and it lets me preview it right in the Window, which is cool... I don't have to open it up or push it up before I check out what it looks like.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, what a pain to ship to GitHub or something like that just to get a preview of your markdown file... No, that's not how you do it.
+
+**Rachel White:** How do I see what my settings are, Mikeal? \[laughter\] Or how do I see which extensions I have?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So when you click on that Extensions thing in the left side bar, @installed will show you your installed ones, if you put that in the search...
+
+Another one that I just installed recently that I'm loving is called Version Lens. It's so webby and great. Basically, when you pull up your package JSON, it looks at all of the deps that you have, and on top of the dep it says if there's newer versions like within this range, if there's like a newer current version that you're not getting because of your package thing, and each of those are just links, and when you click them, it updates the version in your package JSON. It's super nice.
+
+**Rachel White:** So I have a lot -- well, not a lot. Since I also do a bunch of styling stuff, I have Color Highlight, which whenever you type "hacks colors" in your browser, it shows you what the color is around it, which is kind of nice.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I thought that was default. I thought that was just on by default.
+
+**Rachel White:** I don't think so. I have the Dracula Official Theme installed, because it's my favorite theme... It's so nice!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I didn't know that it's official... \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, it's because people try and use the name -- it's a really popular theme. It's really pretty, it's nice. I have an HTML Snippets one, which is similar to like Emmet, and then I have like Sass in Python, and ESLint, and also Babel ES6, ES7 syntax coloring one... And that's it. I should probably delete all these and start new... But yeah, those are mine.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I actually talked to Zeno Rocha about some back-story on Dracula, which was pretty interesting.
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh, cool.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, on episode 248 of the Changelog we talked to him about sort of like his open source lessons learned. His first introduction to open source was this jQuery boilerplate project - this was back in the day - and the very first pull request was one that deleted all of his code and said "Start again because it was crap", basically. So it was a horrible introduction to open source, basically.
+
+We talked about that, and then finally we got to this scenario where he was talking about just his passion for making an editor look good. He came up with this theme, Dracula, and how it's just blown up since then. He started off with one, and now it's been transferred to everything, basically. Vim... Anything.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, if you go to the Dracula site, it tells you all of the different places you can get it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, DraculaTheme.com is the URL, so if you're tracking that on a listener, if you're in the Slack - boom, there it is. That's a pretty interesting project, and it's funny that you did say "official", because there are many imitators, not often duplicators.
+
+**Rachel White:** I also recently switched my font for programming to Operator Mono... Which is not cheap, but it's beautiful, and it's really easy on the eyes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[40:00\] Back to the somewhat of a surprise for developers on Windows to have an easy time - wasn't there a time though where it was harder for them? I know maybe in the Ruby space at least there was... And this is like late 2008, 2009 timeframe, 2006... It was not easy to get set up.
+
+**Rachel White:** It really depends on the language that you write and what you need it to do. I've always had a Mac and a PC, and I've always programmed on both of them...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Easily, no problems?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, easily, no problem. I mean, maybe this stuff on my PC wasn't as attractive-looking and it was a little bit harder to keep dotfiles equal across operating systems, but in the past few years I haven't felt that way at all.
+
+Also, I have the access to people that work on VS Code, so if I can't figure something out or if I want it to look better, I can message them and be like "Help, please."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you think has changed for Windows, the platform?
+
+**Rachel White:** I think it's 100% Microsoft being more involved with open source. VS Code is completely open source; it's written in TypeScript, so it's really easy for people to make custom stuff for it. That's my opinion, but Mikeal might have a better one.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that there's a larger transformation at Microsoft where they're moving from a platform company to a product company again. Early, Microsoft made products. They made languages for other people's computers, they made spreadsheets and Word applications, and then at some point they gained the monopoly over the operating system and they started to just kind of get lazy with product and strong-arm everybody into just being on their platform.
+
+Now that they've lost those monopolies in platform, they've turned everything around - Satya has really turned it all around to be a product company. And to be a product company, you have to make things that people love.
+
+I'm continually surprised by the things that I love from Microsoft. I use Outlook on iOS right now... It's great, actually.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Really?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it's crazy. The fact that I'm using a Visual Studio editor still blows my mind. If you told 1999 Mikeal that that would happen and that they wouldn't be using Vim, he'd punch you in the face. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So violent!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, 1999 Mikeal had no scruples. Anyway... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's funny. I kind of feel the same way, because my transition to Mac came from Windows, obviously - which would make sense - and it was from a place where I just couldn't afford, and even today, I still can't afford the Mac machines; they're still crazy expensive. So it come from 1) an economic standpoint...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Surface Pros are not cheap. I mean...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I haven't compared the prices.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** They're really nice hardware though, too. That's really surprising, I haven't seen Microsoft make hardware that good, ever. It's funny, because I have heard complains about the Surface Pros, but all of the complaints have been in software, or operating system things that people don't like about Windows. I haven't heard anyone, not a single person complain about hardware.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, that's the thing though -- I think Microsoft has sort of like kept this bad name or this bruise... They got punched in the face, as the 1999 Mikeal would have done - punched Microsoft in the face because it just wasn't adding up, and they were walking around with a fake black eye, or something like that, because it's not really there anymore; it's sort of done. I bumped my leg now, just by the way. That was a loud rumble. It's just not there anymore... So they've changed, but everyone keeps the previous opinion about them, even though it may not be warranted, like the person in the Facebook comment you mentioned.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[44:03\] Well, I know that one of the things that people harp on Microsoft a lot of for is everyone's like "Blue Screen of Death! It's so horrible!" and people love to take pictures of stuff out in the wild that have the Blue Screen of Death on, and they can just be like "Ha-ha... Look at Microsoft!", except I don't think that people realize that the reason there's a Blue Screen of Death there is more often than not the reason because since they've made it so accessible for people to build their own custom stuff for Windows, the Blue Screen of Death is Windows as an operating system telling you that there is a problem, and it's usually because of software that you're using that wasn't built by Microsoft. So it's like doing you a favor...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I mean, also, if there is a blue screen, I think that they stopped doing that like ten years ago in their operating system. So these dumb kiosks have 10-year-old operating system, of course they're awful, of course they wrote awful software on top of it...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I've also gotten the kernel panic on a Mac before; it happened maybe a small handful of times my whole entire use of a Mac ever but I've seen that, too.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Also, kernel panics on Linux are just part of using Linux. It's not like this is like a solved problem there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. So what I hear you saying is that if you haven't in a while, revisit your opinion on Microsoft or Windows or any of their new devices out there, as a platform for developers.
+
+**Rachel White:** I mean, obviously I'm gonna say yes, but...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, say it from the true heart of Rachel, versus the "I work for Microsoft" Rachel.
+
+**Rachel White:** I mean, I don't bulls\*\*t, so if it wasn't good, I wouldn't say try it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, there you go.
+
+**Rachel White:** And I know the people that are working on this stuff (the tools for the developers) are legitimately super into feedback and wanting to know what the community wants, and since there's repositories on GitHub for all this stuff, if there's something you don't like, make an issue; let it be known to the people that are working on it. They would much rather hear from you in official channels that read about somebody being like "Oh, I hate VS Code!" on Twitter or something, because that's not gonna help.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We actually linked out to something on the News Stack over the weekend in our Weekly email about Microsoft's transition over these years, and we've kind of covered that to quite a degree. I can remember talking to Arunesh and a couple others at Node Interactive recently... And these are like ten-year veterans at Microsoft, they've been there for a while, enough to see the two different sides that others may assume might be there. The side (as you said before, Mikeal, and I think you said it too, Rachel) where their focus is on developers, their focus is on open source, their focus is on products versus a platform, and you can see that transition happening not only on the outside as a what we get from them, but also the transition on the inside from employees.
+
+I remember Gaurav Seth saying "I've been there 11 years, and the last few years have been the best years ever." I don't wanna put words in his mouth, but he seemed to be coming from a place where "I may not have been here much longer if it didn't change." That seemed to be the sentiment, but he didn't say that though. But it was like "Microsoft has changed so much for me as a developer to make me enjoy my job, allowing me to do cool stuff as Chakra Core, and fun stuff with Node, and do stuff in the community, whereas before it was never like that."
+
+**Rachel White:** \[47:54\] Yeah, I've heard that from a bunch of people. More questions!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** System76 Lemur right now, talking more about hardware... That's from Peter Benjamin.
+
+**Rachel White:** What is a System76 Lemur?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's Linux laptops.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, interesting. That Intel Core i7 is the chips that they use in the Surface Pro as well.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, "If you go to any conference where MS has a presence, you definitely get that vibe." Oh, that's a comment, not a question. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, there's not a question mark at the end.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where's the question marks?
+
+**Rachel White:** Alright everybody, you've gotta ask us more questions. I've gotta go in four minutes, so...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, four minutes... Let's do random picks.
+
+**Rachel White:** I'm going to a party in a 70-room gothic mansion.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Must be there on time. Must eat in advance...
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh, I do need to eat in advance...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Makeup's gotta be perfect, on point.
+
+**Rachel White:** Obviously. I hate the phrase "on point" so much.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, not on point? What's your version of "on point"? Spectacular? Fantastic?
+
+**Rachel White:** Rad, I don't know.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, rad. Makeup's gotta be rad. I forgot we're back in the '80s again.
+
+**Rachel White:** I'm always in the '80s.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, I grew up in the '80s, so I wanna go back so bad. If I hear '80s music, call it a day.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah... You know what, there was a question about server-side rendering earlier that Mikeal can answer, and then I'll leave... \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I don't do any server-side rendering, so I'm actually really bad at this. I think that's really an Alex question. We need to get Alex on to talk about that kind of stuff.
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh, they wanted to know about -- where is Alex? Is he home yet? Probably not...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** He's probably listening. On his drive...
+
+**Rachel White:** Neither of us know anything about -- well, Mikeal probably knows something about server-side rendering. I don't...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How about we do two minutes of random picks? And Rachel, you can begin. What do you think?
+
+**Rachel White:** My random pick is actually going to be a CFP that's open that people should apply to, because it seems neat, and it's in Tokyo! It's NodeFest Tokyo. Yeah... Apply, I don't know. What else?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I've been there, it's great. Everybody should go.
+
+**Rachel White:** I've also been -- well, you've been to NodeFest Tokyo or you've been to Tokyo?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I've been to NodeFest Tokyo. I went to the first two or three, something like that.
+
+**Rachel White:** Nice.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's one of the oldest Node conferences, actually.
+
+**Rachel White:** I did not know that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it started the same year that I started NodeConf.
+
+**Rachel White:** Wow...! Cool. I think the other thing -- I actually was looking at this cool procedural generation Subreddit where they just talk about procedural generation... Hold on, I'm gonna burp. I muted myself for the benefit of you all. So there's this library that I just linked in the channel called TwoLoud, that lets you do noise functions. There's like Perlin noise, Simplex noise and a bunch of other stuff, and it's really good for generating tile sets or any other kind of random procedural stuff that you need, and it makes canvas tiles... It's pretty cool.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Really cool.
+
+**Rachel White:** And now I'm leaving.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Bye, Rachel.
+
+**Rachel White:** Have a good weekend! Bye!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Bye.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What about you, Mikeal?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Let me think... Okay, there is a project called LeafletJS. It's a pretty amazing JavaScript library for doing everything you ever wanted to do with maps - embedding maps that work on mobile, and desktop, all the interactions, putting points in... All that cool stuff. There's this great company MapZen that's a sort of cheaper and slightly easier to use alternative to MapBox for embedding maps and interacting with them, and they use this library as their base, and then they provide a bunch of tiles and services for doing smart routing, and stuff.
+
+\[52:15\] I've been building a little app in my spare time for fun with that library, and I was really impressed with how far along this LeafletJS thing is... It does literally everything. And for a task this huge you kind of have to be a big framework, but as far as big frameworks and big piles of code go, it's actually easy to use and not very obtuse.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, my pick will be something to tease up some future content for us. There was a blog post on the Heroku blog talking about the Rise of Kotlin. We just recorded an episode this week which will go out in about three weeks because we have a small backlog... And I'm pretty excited about this. It was a fun conversation -- my son's crying in the background, because it's time... \[laughter\] But the fun thing about Kotlin is it's very interesting in terms of how it's come about from a third-party product company, so to speak - it comes from JetBrains. We talked about IDEs earlier - they're like the experts of creating IDEs.
+
+So rather than Kotlin being like Swift is to Apple, Kotlin is to Google - it's not that way; it's actually JetBrains, a third-party. So it's really interesting how this language came about, really interesting about how it's solving some interesting things on the JVM, and the power it's giving to Android developers to have an alternative to Java. It's a fun show, so... That is a good article. I'll link it up in the show notes to go and check out in prep for our show coming up on Kotlin.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. Alright, good stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And with that, that is the Ask Me Anything Random Live Show of JS Party. This was probably the most random show we've done so far, so thanks for tuning in. For those in Slack, thanks for hanging out!

Async control flow and threats to the open web_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,319 @@
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript! I'm Mikeal Rogers...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm Alex Sexton...
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** And I'm Kyle Simpson.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Kyle is guesting this week, filling in for Rachel. We're gonna ask him all kinds of questions about IoT and Robots, just to make sure that he's properly filling in... No, no...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Put him through his paces a little...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, exactly. \[laughs\] No, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna talk about some very interesting topics that I think we can all get into... The first one is not a contentious topic at all; nobody has differing opinions about this. This is Async Flow Control, so...
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** Yeah, it's very uncontroversial.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I mean, there's generators, there's callbacks, there's promises... Pretty much nobody has an opinion about which one of those to use; everybody does what they want. I just wanna get into some of the pros and cons, and also because we have Kyle here, who spent a lot of time writing educational materials, talk a bit about which ones of these are the easiest to teach.
+
+Alex has a lot more experience in like a bigger company dealing with this stuff, so there may be some opposing perspectives there. Kyle why don't you tell us a little bit about this? I know that you have some libraries around this as well...
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** Yeah, I do. I've been at this Async stuff for quite a while. I was just recounting the other day that some of the earliest exposure that I had was the very early spec discussions when Mark on the TC39 committee was bringing up the idea of putting promises into JavaScript. He had this e-programming language that he has Futures in and he wanted to put promises in JavaScript, and that's when I started following the topic and building libraries around it. That was probably early to mid-2009, so it's making me feel really old how long that stuff's been around.
+
+Async has been a cornerstone of the language for a really long time, since practically the beginning, but it's a kind of a modern invention that we thought that we should have some higher order patterns for organizing asynchronous code beyond just the callback. When I teach about it, when I write about it, I have to go back to the beginning, because I think a lot of people take the callback for granted; if you ask most developers, they don't even know why it's called a callback, what does that even mean? So we kind of have to go back to the beginning and say "Well, this is how it was waaay back in the day..." But there is, as you mentioned, a ton of really cool patterns that have come out over the last few years, and from my perspective I think the good part about all of that is more choice allows developers to more appropriately express their intent in their code, and make their code more readable.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[04:07\] When you say "way back", are you talking about DOM addEventListener() and then jQuery kind of normalized that and made it a little bit more reasonable... Is that what you mean by "way far back" for the async programming?
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** Well, some of us were writing async programming before we even understood what closures were... I remember back in 2002 - JavaScript was comparatively pretty young and immature at that point, but I remember writing an internal application that ran only on IE4, and 5 is when they introduced the XMLHttpRequest object, so you could do "asynchronous" stuff, but we didn't even know what that fully entailed. We literally asked for XML from the server, but we didn't even understand that you could close over a variable and know which request paired with which response, so we were investing crazy stuff like generating IDEs to match them up, and so on.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I remember when jQuery came out, a lot of new people just kind of jumped into jQuery and did a ton of stuff, and they were doing all this async programming without really realizing it. Alex, could you give us some perspective on that, since you were definitely heavily involved in the jQuery community during that time? There were like a million new web developers that came to the web and just started doing async programming without doing a bunch of research on monads or anything.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it was definitely the case that, being in the jQuery IRC channel at the time - whenever it kind of exploded - you'd get the paste bin of a lot of various people's different sites. And generally, people weren't doing the same type of massive, large, single-page application, but it was more like "I need to add functionality to a server-side rendered page." But that grew and grew and grew, so you'd end up with these files, and it would just be one big, long set of calls into jQuery, and then massive indentation of "Well, if they click on this and then this handler gets called...", you know just copy and paste... A clear misunderstanding of control flow, because it just sneaks up on you.
+
+It's like, "Well, first I can do this, and then I iterate all the elements and then I change them and it's good", but as you start handling more complex actions, async control flow, and even like a callback, it's really easy, real fast, but then when you need to wait for like two callbacks to both finish, you end up writing the silly counter-logic where you count up the number of things that have completed until it matches whatever... You know, everyone had their own implementations for that, and it became like a well-known spaghetti case where people had app.js and it was just one big, long set of callbacks inside callbacks inside callbacks inside callbacks. Now I think is when people started looking towards things like Backbone.
+
+I think Backbone was a direct answer -- not that it solves a lot of that stuff, but just the structure of those files. So it wasn't even like an async solution, but it was just code organization, being able to split up files and actions, and some asynchronous control when it comes to models and stuff like that... But I think that's why everyone globbed onto Backbone so directly; it was because it immediately solved some of the problems with async control flow, even though it wasn't an async control flow thing. It just split stuff up enough for people to feel okay again.
+
+Then naturally, their apps got bigger and they were like "Oh my god, we still need async control flow", and I think we're just getting to the point where people have solid -- you know, kind of the promises revolution and all that kind of stuff; it's the first time people kind of had solid understandings of all of this stuff, back when it was the promises A and Dominic Tarr... Or was it Tarr?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[08:11\] No, it was Denicola.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, Denicola.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And Kris Kowal.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, Kris Kowal, that's the wizard. Yeah, so all the Promises A, plus all that kind of stuff... It was right when people were like "Okay, we definitely want this set of bags of tools and we should standardize it."
+
+I think that's when the front-end world finally -- a lot of the front-end stuff actually... They got around it in different ways. Rather than putting handlers whenever you get data, a lot of the stuff is just like automatically updating. We didn't actually solve any control flow async stuff, it was just like the way that we render stuff on the page no longer needs a callback whatsoever. A lot of that kind of got hidden. I don't know... At Stripe it's something that we definitely have very firm tooling around doing asynchronous actions, and we're constantly rewriting it in order to make it more firm and more solid. It's the most constant source of confusion and bugs.
+
+There are so many cases in asynchronicity that you have to handle, like loading error states, completion states with errors versus completion states that are successful... There's just so many things that by default you just think "Oh, I wrote this code and it'll be perfect every time." It just adds so much unknown, and you don't know you need to handle that... There needs to be a lot of tooling around that. I don't know, I have strong opinions, but... Yeah.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** I have a throwback reference that I think at least some listeners would maybe appreciate. This is a metaphor I use to describe the state of managing state over time. I remember way, way back in 1986 when the original Nintendo came out, and I still think the best game ever made, Legend of Zelda on the original Nintendo... But one of my favorite parts of that game is if you remember the 2D map that you walk around (or pseudo-2D map). When you went into a cave, the whole screen went black except for this tiny little illuminated circle around Link, where he was holding a torch **Alex Sexton:** Yeah like a spotlight.
+**Kyle Simpson:** Exactly.
+
+So you could move around the whole map, but you couldn't see the whole map at once. That is to me what modern JavaScript applications and asynchronous programming are. We can understand this one little part; I can understand these two or three steps of the flow control, but then it forks over to this other part, and as soon as we make that non-local jump, our brains kind of shut off. And as soon as there's any kind of non-linear, if it splits and forks and then comes back together, our brains just don't handle that well.
+
+I think that's a big contributor to why people keep trying to reinvent the wheel with frameworks; it's because we didn't really solve one of the core problems, that we can't with the language - or we couldn't for a long time - express sophisticated flow control in a way that people are gonna be able to read. So we just kept burying those details deeper and deeper inside of frameworks and libraries.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I agree with that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So there's been a lot of work that's happened on this over the past few decades. We had a discussion a few episodes back about if you're learning JavaScript today, is there any reason to even learn the function keyword, or should you just go straight to arrow functions and just be done with it? When you're teaching JavaScript today to somebody new, do you really go back over everything that's possible, or do you just go "Look, here's a way to do this with either async/await, or with Node's standard callback interface..."? Do you just pick one and go "This is what we're gonna learn for now, because it's the easiest to get your head around"?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[12:15\] I don't think it's necessarily an equivalent thing to arrow functions, to all functions... Because there are times when you still need the old thing, whereas theoretically you could completely replace the async control flow stuff -- or, sorry, I'm not talking any sense. I guess what I mean is that I think you're gonna still need to know what a callback is. You may not need to know all the different ways to handle callback hell more directly, and I think that's fine, but it's not like you can just like get away with not knowing what callbacks are. It just seems too fundamental, even if you're using promises everywhere.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** People are gonna have different answers on that one for sure, they will have a lot of different opinions among those that are listening, and I'm sure many of my peers in the teaching world have strong opinions on it. Speaking for myself only, I do teach the fundamentals. I teach a course called "Rethinking Async", and we start at the callback, and then we talk about why callbacks, and there are several major reasons why they're limited, and problems of callback hell. It's not really nesting an annotation, there's really deeper problems there.
+
+Then we talk about thunks. The reason for thunks is because they are a really good conceptual base for promises, and the reason promises are useful is because generators can let you do the sync/async thing. I build from the ground up, not that I expect that people will write lots and lots of callbacks still, or will ever even necessarily write a thunk, but I think those are still really deeply important conceptual understandings for people, so I still teach them.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You kind of glossed over some of the other fundamental problems with callbacks... What are some of those issues? In Node core right now there's actually an argument about "How do we make promises as good as callbacks are for a lot of the debugging stuff and a lot of the error tracking stuff that we have in Node?" There's like a huge amount of instrumentation inside of Node that really depends on some of these structures that aren't there yet for promises, so I'm curious what you feel are the limitations of callbacks. Is it just a composability argument?
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** I would say to me there are three main drawbacks that callbacks alone don't solve. The first one is that callbacks, unless you introduce a pattern like a thunk or something with closure, the callbacks don't have any memory, they don't have any way to pair state with them, and managing state over time is the whole thing, that's the whole problem that we're trying to solve. Time is the most complex state in the entire application, and callbacks alone don't have a particularly good solution for that, so people create a lot of ad-hoc stuff; they just happen to close over some variable, or some people just still use global collections of variables to store stuff across callbacks.
+
+The callback -- you just pass in a callback to a function and latently close over some state object is not good enough for the kinds of complexity that we're typically modeling. The second major drawdown...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So hold on, I wanna dig into that just a little bit more. I wanna explain a little bit deeper, so that some of the newer listeners can follow as well... So when you create a callback, you create this sort of inline function, and if you reference any variables on the top, those get closed over; that's what the closure is. The VM actually does a very good job of optimizing, only keeping around references to the things that you're referencing inside of your function. But what we are saying is essentially like the state of the function that it's going to be manipulating is just these variables that are up in the closure, and there's really no way to inspect them, right? There's no visibility into them, other than just looking at the code, right?
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** \[15:56\] There is that aspect, you're absolutely right, but I think I'm going at something even deeper, and some of this is that I've over the last few years become a lot more interested in applying functional programming concepts. When you just willy-nilly close over variables out of any scope, and those variables are pointing to state objects that just change because any one of a dozen different callbacks can change them, you're violating some of those fundamental principles like pure functions, and things.
+
+Now, closure itself is not anti-functional programming, it's actually right at the heart of functional programming. But when you use closure in functional programming, you have to close over something that isn't gonna change. If you close over something that is going to change, you're asking for all of the problems that -- when you look at a function, you don't know how it's gonna behave unless you mentally execute the entire program up to that point. But if you do use a pattern where you close over something that isn't gonna change - which is what I was referring to with the thunks pattern - if you close over some state and keep that with the function so that that state is preserved and now the function is the value that you're passing around and reasoning about, and that value that it's closed over isn't changing, then it's really not that much different than a promise. That's why I said thunks are kind of like promises but without a nicer API.
+
+That makes composing, as you said earlier, those different pieces, those functions with each of their different states closed over - composition of those is a lot easier when that state doesn't change. So that's what I mean by a callback by itself is not a great pattern for that. But when you apply some extra formality around it, it gets a lot better.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I definitely agree that, even in the promises case, we're almost always generally adding more state and more process around any async action, to the point where there are still fundamental pieces, but we need things like -- the actual async action might not be cancelable if it's a promise, but we need to be able to cancel some async actions. So adding that state, whether something's canceled, and then preventing things from happening while things are in flight, and extra state around that...
+
+So I guess, to some extent, if I'm often wrapping promises in a certain way, then I guess I could wrap callbacks in that same way and manage all that state with the thunk, and that kind of stuff, and I suppose that's fine. But it seems to me I always need at least as much state as promises give me, in any complex application. For sure, I write 500-line or less programs all the time, a script to do X or Y or Z, and I'm rarely using promises or anything like that just I know I need a callback to do a readFile, and I just throw in a callback and that's fine with me.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And the states that promises have are just success & error, right? But you know, it also says if it's done doing the action or not.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** Yeah, the done is implicit in whether or not there has been a resolution to success or error, but as of yet, promises don't have a canceled state, so as Alex is saying, people create ad-hoc wrappers on top of promises to represent that particular... And I think there's at least some that believe - and I guess I would probably me more in this audience - that observables for example are a better thing than a cancelable promise. An observable already has some really nice abstraction built into it that you can model that idea of "it's been canceled" or "it's no longer subscribed", whereas a promise is kind of a lower level thing and maybe it doesn't need that extra state.
+
+Alex, I think your point is taken - that state is necessary, and that's the whole reason why I tell people, look at the pain of all of the ad-hoc stuff you have to do when all you have is a callback. Then when you put a promise on, see how much of that you don't have to do anymore. Then when you put an observable on top of that, see how much less you have to do now. It develops a deeper appreciation for those shortcomings than if you just said, "Well, all I've ever done is write an observable." You're not really sure exactly why, and you're never sure if a promise in any given particular scenario might be enough.
+
+\[20:24\] The second problem that I believe plagues callbacks is inversion of control. And by the way, inversion of control as a general concept is actually generally a good thing. Martin Fowler says that's the difference between libraries and frameworks, it's inversion of control. I think that's a good thing. But specifically related to callbacks, when you wrap up a portion of your code, a portion of your logic in a callback, and hand it off to some other piece, whether that's another part of your own app or some other part of the system that you're not in control of, you have given up all control to ensure exactly how, when and how often that callback might be called. When you erode that trust, you lose understandabillity.
+
+One of my getaphise laws, if you will, is "Code that you don't trust is code that you don't understand, and vice-versa." So I think that inversion of control problem is a big deal, and promises are actually really well designed to fix that, because promises un-invert that; instead of me passing a callback to you and you getting to decide when and how often, you pass me a promise and I get to decide if I'm gonna subscribe to it, and I know the promise is only going to resolve once, so a lot of those concerns that I might have had about your usage of it, I don't have to worry about anymore. So inversion of control is the second one.
+
+The third one is a little softer to describe, but it's essentially that callbacks - the syntax promotes a very non-local, non-sequential reasoning, but the way our brains work... Neuroscientists tell us that our brains are very synchronous at the highest level of cognition; the way we plan things out is very sequential. And callbacks promote a style of programming that is very much the opposite of that. I think we struggle to communicate well all the complexity of our flow control because we're limited by the syntactic choices that only callbacks give us.
+You hear people talk about observables and things like functional programming being more declarative - it's because we can list out a flow control in a program in a much more linear way. My preference is the synchronous style that you get out of async/await style functions. That works a lot closer to the way our brains work, and if you can understand the code, you can read the code a little bit better.
+
+So those I think would be the three things that I consider to be callback hell.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, I think that's pretty good. I can definitely say this has been really enlightening. I think we got a lot of the good arguments out. I personally will continue to use callbacks because my brain is broken, I guess.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yes.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's just better... \[laughs\] We're gonna take a break now, and when we come back we're gonna talk a little bit about the future of the web and who's trying to kill it.
+
+**Break:** \[23:24\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Let's talk a bit about the web. There was an interesting thread recently from Joe Hewitt on Twitter... For those of you that are newer to programming, did not use Firebug back in the day, a long precursor to the Chrome DevTools was this Firefox plugin called Firebug. It introduced really the first web developer tools. That was written by Joe Hewitt. Joe went on to create a small company that got acquired by Facebook really early in Facebook's time, and then Joe would almost by himself write the first mobile app for Facebook, which was actually in a web container. It says in this thread that apparently he was in multiple screaming matches with Steve Jobs over email to get that accepted into the App Store.
+
+Generally, I don't think that Joe has to work anymore, I think that he's pretty set... But he's a really ardent defender of the web; he really tries to make sure that the web is going to win, and really sees it as being attacked on all sides right now, and probably not going to move into the future, and that we're gonna move towards more proprietary alternatives, because that's what everybody's trying to do. So who is he talking about in terms of attacking the web... Kyle? \[laughter\]
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** Well, where do we start...? First off, I didn't follow that thread. Some people that follow me know that a while back I kind of stepped away from Twitter, so I did not follow that particular thread and it sounds like, just doing a quick Google search, that I'm probably glad I didn't, because I might have gotten myself into trouble with some things I might have said there. But if we take a step back and we just ask what does even the open web mean, because probably a lot of listeners would have different opinions on that? I think the open web means a web where the developers and the users of the web are at least as important in making the decisions for the future as the people who are really making the big bucks, like the Apples and the Googles of the world.
+
+To me, that's what an open web means - a web that we are a part of the future of that; it's not just being dictated to us. If you compare that to - and I'm old enough and have been around long enough to remember vividly and have participated in a web where we were just handed the web by what Adobe shipped to us in Flash, and what Microsoft shipped to us in Silverlight. That for a long time was like, you know, there's the web that's like the plain HTML pages, but if you really wanna built compelling games or experiences or graphics or video or any of that stuff, you've gotta go play in this special sandbox that you don't control, that isn't discussed publicly in terms of how it works, and at any given whim they can just decide "We're gonna change it, mess around with it or whatever." I think that's the best way to describe what that open web is - to think about what it was before, when we weren't in control and we didn't have any say, and it was just being dictated to us.
+
+\[27:45\] We now are in control in the sense that anyone of us can participate in the specification bodies, for example. We can go participate in W3C, or WHATWG, or whatever specification bodies for web platform features; you can participate in discussions around TC39, maybe even get invited to one of their meetings or something like that, and have some say in the future of JavaScript, because there isn't one company that's controlling any one of those features. That's a hallmark of a good, healthy open web, but that doesn't mean that there aren't people that wanna challenge that, for sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I wanna challenge just even the presumptions that you've already laid out. First of all, Firefox has lost a lot of market share, and a lot of people don't really see Mozilla pushing at the forefront of a lot of new standards, because they're so resource-constrained. A lot of new standards now are being pushed by Chrome and by Edge. I don't have numbers from Microsoft and how many people work on Edge, but just Chromium, just the web fundamentals - there's over 500 people at Google that work on it. So they're investing a huge amount of money, but also that means that it's relatively inaccessible to just dig in and write some code on Chrome and get that out there. So we are sort of reliant on the fact that -- many Google open web evangelists really go out into the developer community and pull in feedback, and we're really somewhat dependent on that goodwill effort.
+
+On the standards front--
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** Well, wait a minute... We've gotta give credit to Microsoft Edge, because they're a whole lot more present in that discussion than they ever were before, and they deserve credit there.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, I apologize... Yes.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** And I don't know that we should be so quick to throw Firefox under the bus either, because...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, I mean, they're losing market share, and that has a real impact on how much that they can really do. Things aren't looking very great. I still have a lot of love in my heart for Mozilla having worked there and really believing in that institution, but to say that they are not hurting right now would be a lie.
+
+Yes, I apologize - Edge is doing an awesome job. In particular, they're pushing a lot of offline use cases and stuff like that right now too, so they're doing great work. But I really wanna challenge these standards part. The W3C in particular has a structure in which members buy seats, and part of buying a seat at a certain level is that you get to veto certain work going in, and Apple has used that pretty aggressively, and it's one of the reasons why we don't have touch standards, it's one of the reasons why we don't have a lot of standards around things that Apple asserts IP in. So we are some what limited but like in terms of how much we can innovate on the web, we're a little bit limited there.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think to be fair, Apple would be able to scare the W3C away from implementing touch standards, regardless of whether they're a member or not. I don't think it was their member status that made that hard, I think it was the fact that they have a bunch of lawyers.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I actually don't agree. We step on open patents all the time in web standards, and one of the things that standards bodies try to do is get all of those companies to agree to -- yes, they get them to agree to not assert those patents, but there are also outside patents.
+
+One of the things you're really trying to do is just basically berate each of these companies into just like giving up on that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, but I don't think Apple would do that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So Apple has the opportunity to disagree with a standard going out, or disagreeing with their patents going into a standard before the standard gets published. But instead, what they're doing is vetoing the work ever beginning, and that's really problematic, because then we don't get to see that implementation in other browsers or see any kind of competitive pressure on Apple to adopt the standard, so that, you know, five years after everybody else does, Apple will put it in Safari, or whatever.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** \[31:53\] Well, I think we'd be better off if more of the web platform could work a little bit more, like TC39, and there's some huge caveats there, of course. I think what's good about parts of the open web is that we can see things like somebody saying "Here's an idea for a feature that should go into JavaScript" and any one or any mixture of the browsers can make an early implementation of it to test out, and we've already seen a couple of times that two browsers implementing a feature and saying "We really like this, we think it's compelling" and users liking it, has been enough to sway the opinion so that one of the browsers that might have trailed behind or said "We're not necessarily liking that feature" went ahead and implemented it anyway.
+
+I think that there are still ways that we participate, and I wanna just go back to -- yes, it's true that there are some mechanisms in place where people's paid memberships do give them some veto power, but having a group of four or five players that have a bit of an adversarial setup between them is still far better that one vendor getting to completely decide a dictatorial style.
+
+So when I say that the web means that we get to participate in it, I'm saying that at least it's not controlled behind some one closed door in a boardroom; there is a group that controls it, and we don't get all that we want, but we get a lot more now that we would have were flashed to be the web that we were building.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Also, I think one of the keys though is that you really do wanna get rid of that veto power. TC39 tries to reach a consensus, but at the end of the day if they have to, they'll come down to a vote and each member just gets a vote. If you have more members, it decreases the power that any one particular participant has.
+
+And I do wanna give a shoutout to TC39 who runs the -- they own the JavaScript standard. They've done a tremendous job at just improving their process over the last few years... One, in making sure that things don't get certified before we know if they can remain compatible, a lot more participation from outside people and outside groups and developers... They've done a tremendous job at this, and I think that we should probably take some of the cues and some of the processes that they've pioneered and try to port them to other standards groups for the web.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** So now that we are all completely in 100% agreement on what the open web is and should be, let's talk about some of the things that are I think existential threats to the open web. I don't know if I agree with some of the claims that Joe Hewitt would be making, but I'm serving as a coach here this year of the Fluent Web Conference, which is happening in about a week and a half in San Francisco. The theme of Fluent this year is building a better web. For me, I had to internalize "What does that even mean to have a better web?" We have to then think about what the web would be -- if it wasn't going in the direction of better, what direction would it be going in? And there are several movements or flows towards things that can rip apart the open web. I think one of those that is almost universally decried by developers is this idea of digital rights protection (DRM stuff) being put directly into the web platform, so that vendors get control over the video content being played in a browser, or things like that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It goes beyond just for videos. It goes way beyond just that.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** Sure, but they want control because they wanna be able to sell stuff and not have piracy, and that makes sense, they need to make money, but they are biting into one of the fundamental principles of an open web, which is that a developer is completely in control of that experience, and they're saying "No, no, no. There's going to be this outside (like you said earlier) veto power that you won't be in control of."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[36:08\] Not just developers, but users as well. The users of the open web are no longer in control of their browser.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** That's true. That's why Tim Berners-Lee is so vehemently against it and why he's campaigning so vehemently against it. He created this thing and he's saying "Wait a minute, we need to be worried about the direction that that's going in." But there's no clear right answer here, because keeping it out means that content producers have to go back to the drawing board and figure out a different monetization model than just straight up content access cost; they have to figure out how they're gonna account for piracy and other bad actors and things like that. So that's an existential threat to the open web; to me, that's not just a single step, that is A step in a direction that goes much further, where lots of different people, governments and other people say "Well, if Hollywood can step in and control that experience, then the United States government now wants to step in and control that experience, and we want a hook, too." There's a lot that that road can go down, and I don't think we should even open the door.
+
+The other big one is ads. That's the big elephant in the room, because again, there's a monetization model that we need to support for the web; people wanna build businesses on the web and not just have hobby websites. We need to support business on the web, and part of that is people giving away content "for free" but then showing you ads to get it back. There are some very interesting plays going on right now with what they're doing with the Brave browser and trying to upend this world, but the way that content publishers see it right now, they should be in total and complete control to track your experience, and they'll sort of nod with "You know, we'll personalize your experience so the ads that you get, you'll like", but that, as a user, is yet another control that's being taken away from me; my privacy control is being taken away from me. These are things that I think really harm the future of the web.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think even just beyond privacy, these ad networks have actually also become vectors for people to do different phishing attacks, and things like that... And not just phishing, but also getting you to download something and then taking over your entire computer and having that kind of extortionware model where you have to pay them Bitcoin in order to get your computer back. A lot of that stuff is actually delivered over these ad networks.
+
+Most people, when they put an ad on their site, they don't do the content deals to get that ad placed; they rely on some kind of ad network to do that placement, and those ad networks are being constantly scammed by incredibly sophisticated attacks to get these ads in. So literally, these are not verifiable; it's not possible to get them out without just saying "No, we're not gonna have ads anymore." Just like it's not possible to protect privacy without saying "You know what, we're just not going to allow certain features in the browser that allow this kind of tracking as well."
+Brave has been incredibly aggressive about ad-blocking and tracker-blocking, and as a result a couple sites won't work, because they're reliant on those features. But if you look at some of the announcements that came out from Safari, and I know that even some of the Chrome people are looking at it - some of these features that we have on the web that certain sites depend on may actually get turned off because of these concerns.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** And maybe they should be, right? Maybe we did put features into the web that sounded great, and then we kind of came back afterwards and we're like "Ugh, I don't know about that."
+
+I remember -- I think one of the classic cases was when you have a link that gets changed to a different color when it's been visited, and then some enterprising hacker has figured out "Oh, I can track somebody's browsing history by making links in the background and checking the colors to see if they visited it."
+
+\[40:06\] Well, rightly so, we had to rein back in some of that functionality to say "Whow, whow, whow... Your ability to check on the color of a link is not more important than a users' need to have privacy." That goes back to -- the web platform is guided (or should be guided) by this thing called "the principle of constituencies." Go look it up if you haven't read this before; it says "Wherever possible, where there's a conflict between priorities, the users come first, and then developers, and then implementers", and way, way down the list is gonna be somebody who wants to track and make an ad more personalized to somebody. So it's right that we sometimes have to rein those things back in.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think one of the things that we really need to point out too is that the reason why this is an existential threat to the web is that there are constantly competitors to the web, and they are predominantly proprietary competitors. But the reason that the web has always won, and why the web won when everybody was writing Windows software and all of a sudden the web exploded was that 1) it was more secure, and 2) it was usually more performant if you were using multiple applications. Anybody who ran a Windows computer in the late '90s knows that the more that you install software, the slower your computer gets.
+If you go to a bunch of different websites, your computer doesn't get slower the more websites that you visit in a single tab. And the security model is really important. You're literally running arbitrary code that random developers wrote, on this computer, and somehow these browsers aren't constantly being taken over. And that is just not the case with desktop software or with a lot of the software in these app stores and things that we're running.
+
+So the reason why an app store like iOS has might beat the web isn't because people just love their iPhones and there's some kind of experience thing, it's the performance and the security, and we need to be better, we need to be leading the way in terms of performance and security. If we're not, we're gonna lose out.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** There's obviously a huge push in the last year or two, and Google spearheaded the effort largely towards progressive web apps, to try to bring web apps to parity with native apps. Some people say "Well, maybe there shouldn't even be parity. Maybe they really should stay distinct", but there's a big push to blur or erase as many lines between the web platform and the app platform as we can. I think some of the discussion about that - and about the word "performance" even - misses the fact that users... End users, not developer users, but real end users, like your relatives and random people on campus or whatever - there's only a few currencies that those end users really care about.
+
+I would argue that end users understand stuff like "This zaps my battery really quick and it makes me have to recharge my device a lot." I'd argue that they understand stuff like "Wow, that cost me a lot of bandwidth." That's for people in parts of the world that don't get unlimited bandwidth, like we might get here in the U.S. If they're on metered bandwidth, "Wow, this is really data-heavy. Every time I use this app, my data bandwidth costs go through the roof."
+
+Those are currencies that users really care about, and if we want to get to the point where end users care so much about the web versus app platforms, that they vote with their dollars that they buy the web rather than buying apps. We're gonna have to speak to those currencies and not just to the "Oh, I feel really good because I can write better code than a service worker."
+
+\[43:54\] I totally get why service workers are awesome, but an end user is never gonna care whatsoever about that. They will maybe care about offline, but they're several steps removed from what we focus on as developers and what a real end user is gonna vote with.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure. It's a weird discussion to me, because we had a time when the web was the leading thing, and it was not a good time. I don't think the web is set up to be a good leader, because things are so difficult to change in a good way. The process for adding or removing or changing something in the web is a lot harder and different than the process for so-and-so's proprietary application/operating system to do so.
+
+I actually find them to be this really good, symbiotic relationship; it's the gut bacteria inside of a human, or whatever. The explosion of good, fast mobile applications was an absolute 100% driver in quality, good improvements in the web. It is the single most important event that occurred that caused the web to get better in the last ten years, in my opinion. And I think the web will always be a little bit behind, because they wanna do it right and they wanna do it in a backwards-compatible way. They have a lot more constraints... And that isn't to say the web doesn't ever innovate; there's plenty of innovative parts of the web, but I think as far as the edge of what users want, the fact that some proprietary thing can iterate so much more quickly means that the web will always be a little bit behind, and the web shouldn't always just do everything that they do... But it's like a consideration, it's kind of like a testing ground. I think the web will outlast all of those things. There will be new types of applications, augmented reality space, blah-blah-blah-blah are the things that are pushing the web forward in 15 years from now. So I think it's a symbiotic relationship, I don't think it's a killer. The web just lags a bit.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Are you telling me that I shouldn't build my brand new artificial intelligence virtual reality startup on the web?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm telling you you shouldn't build that at all, because it sounds dumb.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** \[laughs\] Alex, I think you have a fantastic point. It does really kind of ask the question for all of us (developers) to ponder - is the fact that the web (and especially JavaScript) values backwards-compatibility so deeply in its DNA (something written 22 years ago is supposed to still keep working today)... That's always been touted as one of our strengths, but is it a strength, or maybe it's a weakness? Because I think one of the reasons why we're slow to change is because every time we make a decision we feel like we're stuck with that decision forever.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I think it just causes us to need to create different solutions. Rather than making a backwards-compatible change, we make a sister standard that can work alongside the old one. There are plenty of ways to store data in a browser that aren't cookies now, and we didn't have to kill cookies in order to make those work. We were able to make them faster or more secure or asynchronous - all the different ways that those things are different, we were able to add those things. The difference I think is that when Apple puts out a new device, you've gotta get it. You can only be one device back, two devices back max before you have a bad time, and I think you can still be on -- you know, XP is pretty dead now, but even for a long time, you could be on XP with a Chrome install, and it'd be fine for the most part... Especially since mobile devices were so far behind CPU wise and if people were talking about that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think the only wrench in your argument is that the Apple watch is the number one device that's sitting in somebody's cupboard somewhere. \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sorry, I'm confused about what that has to do...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You were saying that you can only be one device back, or you constantly have to be getting the new device, and I think that there's actually like a fair amount of fails that happen as well. I'm still not convinced with all the VR stuff at all.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's riskier on their end, especially when they have to make hardware. That's a business I don't wanna be in. But I guess the openness of the web and the hopeful inclusion of the most amount of people via the web -- like, the non-prioritization of companies, or Americans, or whatever, hopefully... Of course, those things happen; the democratization, or whatever words you wanna use to say that everyone's welcome means that the web works longer for Americans, but it just works for people who are in situations where they can't have the latest devices and run the latest iOS, and upgrade their $700 phones once a year.
+
+I think it's pretty fundamental to the inclusion, the neutrality, whatever. Even though we fall flat in that way and in so many other ways, we should always be getting better. I think that's why it's a fundamental part of that, and I don't think we should get rid of the backwards-compatibility stuff. Rarely is that the cause of problems. It's the cause of frustration. Rarely is that like the blocker, I guess; it's always just a concern that we have to work around. It reminds me of the .mjs stuff in Node... That's stupid \[mumbles\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Don't get me onto this... You're gonna make me go off on a random tangent now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it's stupid and sucks and like there those people who use the bad thing are the ones who should change. But at the end of the day, add a freakin' letter to your thing and it'll keep working. It's an uglier platform because of that history, but it doesn't fundamentally break anything, in my opinion. While the web may be dirtier and uglier and have really long names for grabbing selectors even though it doesn't need to, it's just like... That's the web that we have. The backwards-compatibility is worth the extra characters to type.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We're gonna take a short break, and when we come back we're gonna get into our project of the week, which is the first WebAssembly based project that we've done on the show. Stick around.
+
+**Break:** \[50:59\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, so the project of the week is Blake2b-WASM. I'm not gonna spell this out, I think that you're just gonna need to check the show notes if you want a link. This is Mathias Buus, one of my favorite programmers in the Node and JavaScript community. BLAKE2 is a fast secure hashing algorithm, and this is used in Sodium encryption and a bunch of other encryption libraries.
+
+When they first started talking about WebAssembly, one of the things that they kept talking about was "We'll be able to do these incredibly fast and efficient algorithms." This is actually a pretty discrete algorithm that we need for a bunch of different crypto. Mathias has actually written this in C++'s native module in Node.js. He's written it in pure JavaScript, so that it will work in the browser today, and now he's actually implemented it in WebAssembly. He's got benchmarks comparing the three of them, and also if you dig into how this library is being used, you can see how to poll in a WebAssembly library if your browser supports it today, and still have plenty of fallbacks, and stuff like that. So what do y'all think of this?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That seems like the whole idea behind WASM, like being able to still write in regular web languages - you build your interface in JavaScript and React, whatever you wanna do, and then you have a worker that hits WASM stuff for really complex things, like the BLAKE algorithm, or any kind of hashing algorithm would be a really easy choice to do this with. So it seems like a perfect use case; it's THE use case.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** Do we have any idea -- I was just taking a quick look at the repo... Do we have any idea what the source language of this is? When I look at that repo for Blake2b-WASM, it just says "implemented in WASM." Did he literally write the s-expressions, or was that transpiled from some other source language? I think that's the bigger narrative about WASM - what shift will there be from writing stuff in JavaScript, to what other languages and what will that mean for JavaScript?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I imagine he took the standard implementation of BLAKE. I'm trying to find the thing... I think it's C++.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, based on the comments, it's compiled.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, actually... There's a Go implementation as well; it could be Go. I think it does matter, but in this case it seems like he \[mumbles\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think he may have compiled, but I think he may have also tweaked it by hand. The wat file is only 25,000 lines.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** Only 25k? Wow... \[laughter\] What I'm getting at is that I'm excited about what WebAssembly is gonna do for performance. I'm waiting around until we start to see, because I don't think it will be too long - maybe a year at most - before we start to see frameworks saying "You know what? We went ahead and re-implemented our Virtual DOM diffing (or whatever) in Rust and compiled it to WASM", or whatever language they choose... So it makes a lot of sense to push the most performance-heavy kinds of things into WebAssembly. The question will become, once you've done that, once you've opened the door as a library, as a framework or as just a company that wrote an application, can you just start making the performance argument for virtually every line of code, to where we get to a future where 80%, 90%, 95% of a web application is actually in something entirely not of the web, if you will; it was written and deployed on the web, but it was written in a more traditional sense, so there isn't as much of that open "View source" DNA to the web as we used to have. That's the part that I'm curious about. But like you said, Mikeal, Blake2b just seems like a perfect use case for WASM, I'm glad to see it.
+
+\[56:15\] It's very cool that we now have all the major browsers on board, so there's almost no reason to not start exploring this space, because they all have it, so we might as well start seeing what we can do with it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah I heard it's written in C; the official implementation is C, not C++. Yeah, I think we're already past the point of "View source" being super useful.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Yeah... I think that I do want line numbers; I like having line numbers, and pulling those up in an inspector and looking at the source, but yeah... Literally clicking "View source" and sorting through the million lines of code in an average application today is slightly less useful.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Of minified code, right?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I forgot... \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think we're already doing so much compilation that the compilation "View source" argument is already mute. We just need better WASM decompilers. In the same way we can pretty-print the minified code of a Webpack-compiled React application that was also transpiled with Babel and somewhat backwards figure it out, decompilers exist for most languages; we could reverse-engineer the C in this and get a similar thing, you just have to read C.
+
+I think the fact that we do this more is only because we used to do it a lot, and I don't think it's a bad thing that we do decompilation to figure out how things work. There's still no fundamental thing that makes that illegal on the web, even with WASM; it's just that we need new tooling. There's no reason DevTools couldn't implement a WASM decompilation view for minified or precompiled WASM.
+
+So I'm not sold on the idea that we're gonna break the web by having compilation targets, but I'm also not necessarily sold that at any given time more than a small chunk of people will be wanting to write in C.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** Well, maybe not C, but I think there's probably a pretty significant chunk of people in the Node ecosystem that have at least considered writing parts of their Node applications in Go, for example; that seems kind of a natural bridge, and many high-profile companies have moved there.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** They have that option.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** They have that option of course now, but I'm saying they could have the option of not even moving outside of the Node ecosystem. If V8 supports WASM and Node supports that, you might potentially see people writing Node applications with very little JavaScript.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I don't think I've ever seen it with Node. I've seen it with Rust a bunch, though.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, but why wouldn't -- I guess on the server people already have the option to do whatever they want. They can just write their whole application in Go, with a Go server. We already see this choice being made by people, and people still choose to write in modern JavaScript. I'm not saying there won't be websites that are completely written in other languages, but I don't feel like people choose JavaScript because they're forced to only. I think people like it, and as it improves, it will have the things they need to not want to switch... And if it doesn't, then good. There's no reason to hold on to JavaScript just because we all have fun memories of Ajaxy in 2009, or whatever. \[laughter\] If it gets beat as the best thing and it's compatible in a way that makes the web principles not break, then cool; I'll be the first to switch over to it, but I don't think that's the case.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** \[01:00:14.04\] Speaking of JavaScript the language progressing, I did find it interesting that just apparently at the most recent TC39 meeting we saw another -- and I say "another" because I keep track of where proposals are, and this is at least the second or third one that made it all the way to stage three, which ostensibly seems like "Hey, this thing's gonna land in the browser, or in JavaScript", and then they pulled it out. The latest victim, if you will, is SIMD extensions. It seems like the story is "Hey, we don't need SIMD in the language because now we have WebAssembly."
+
+In some respects, that's a shame, because I was kind of looking forward to that and I was excited about it, but in other respects I think what's good - Brendan Eich described this a couple years back when he first talked about WebAssembly, that it could sort of be a pressure release valve on the tension of wanting to put so much stuff into JavaScript the language. Maybe what we'll start to see is that JavaScript the language can improve in readability and not necessarily have to improve in adding all these new hyper-performance optimized APIs.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... I think it's silly to think that JavaScript was going to be the best way to do things whenever SIMD was -- like, simultaneous operations on a CPU is like not the level that I think most people wanna be building websites in. If your website needs that, then it's likely that there's a better choice for tooling, and all that kind of stuff then exists in JavaScript. So I think that pressure release valve is good. I kind of wish it still existed, because -- for the most part, as long as it doesn't affect me, I'm glad it exists... But I don't know; I like that pressure release. It's definitely a good way of thinking about it.
+
+The Brian LaRues of the world who are very against adding anything I think will also appreciate it... Because there definitely is pressure. "We can't do X and Y and Z that everybody can. How come we can't hit the right frames per second, and all the other things can?" Well, those are built to do those types of operations. Clobbing that on to a language that wasn't built for that is maybe a bad idea. I'm okay if you're doing things that need simultaneous CPU operations. Use the languages that were made for that, and that's fine.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** One interesting little thing I find in here is that if you look at the benchmarks, the WASM implementation is doing really well, but the native module in Node.js is actually still quite a bit faster.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Of course.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Then what's going on at WASM? That's kind of interesting. There may still be a really good place for some of these primitives to make their way all the way up in to JavaScript so that we can do some pure JavaScript stuff; you get some more performance without crossing that barrier between...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** WASM is still pretty early though.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that's true.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** One of the things that surprised me, didn't get a lot of fanfare and hasn't even been talked about much, but reading the release notes for ES2017, they just sort of slipped in that final bullet point that they added Atomics and Shared Memory, which is essentially threaded programming - a very light version of it, but for 22 years the main selling point of JavaScript is it's single-threaded; you don't need to worry about mutexes and semaphores and all that other kind of stuff, and now the pressure point with web workers and sharing memory between web workers was enough that that feature has now landed. I'll be curious to see whether that one pulls back because we moved in the WASM direction for threaded programming, for example.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[01:04:24.20\] I would not compare this to threaded programming the way that most people understand threaded programming. It's much closer to the message passing structures that you might find in Go and things like that, to be honest.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** Well, they literally do have mutexes. The Atomics thing is "block on a read until it's alright" Now, I know that's CSPish, like Go, but it literally is "Hey, I don't know whether or not I'm the first one to read, so block on it." And I don't know whether the intention is that's the only API, they just put that very bare bones thing in and there won't be any more, or if that's just the gateway to lots more sophisticated threaded stuff coming to the language.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... I don't know. I think it's actually pretty important even in the JavaScript world to be able to share memory between workers though. You could be completely in JavaScript and still want that, and still have that be a very good performance increase, that isn't super CE, other than the fact that -- it's just that memory is tough to manage when you can't manage memory. Workers are a natural place to offload things, but if you have to duplicate memory every time you have a worker, it kind of ruins the whole thing.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And on that note, let's get into our picks. Alex, what's your pick this week?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** My pick this week is Blake2b-WASM.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, no... \[laughs\] We totally mess this up, man.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Was that your pick, too?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] If you need to think of one, we can go to Kyle.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I'd like to hear what Kyle has to say.
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** Well, I have to pick this week the Fluent Web Conference, coming up on 19th-21th June, out in San Jose. I am, as I said earlier in the episode, co-chairing this conference, and it is not too late to get in. We have plenty of seats open at the conference, we also have seats open in our training workshops... I personally am somehow also doing a class there, in addition to trying to co-chair the conference. We'd love to have you out at Fluent, to continue this discussion of what it means to build a better web.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[01:06:52.18\] Alright. For my pick, you know, I've done a lot of bread-based picks on here for my bread-making; as a result of doing that for several years, I'm a bit overweight, my cholesterol is terrible, so I made some pretty huge dietary changes. I'm on a keto diet, and the one product that's just been like really saving me and helping me kind of stay in ketosis is this MCT powder by Quest. You can get that on Amazon, Quest MCT powder. If you're doing a keto diet, it's the best.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That was an interesting pick. My pick is not a dietary supplement this week... It's Preact.js. We've talked a lot about React, and I reach for Preact occasionally, especially for a third-party type thing. If you're used to React and you really don't need very much of it -- it's definitely not API-compatible or anything like that, but if you remember, in the old world there was jQuery and then some people had some jQuery-like versions (I can't even remember what they are called). Preact is just like a 3 kb implementation of some of the most familiar parts of React. So if you need like a little widget and you don't want to start off with 40k and pull in Redux and all that kind of stuff, Preact is a pretty good choice, and we haven't really talked a lot about it.
+
+There are a few other 3k-5k implementations of React and you can kind of probably find some comparison charts and things that people like about the different ones, but Preact is a good choice; the other ones are fine, too.
+
+I find that a lot of people pull for React and the only thing they want is a render function and the change event to work the way that other things work, and then the other 39k is just relatively unused... So Preact.js.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Nice.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** There's a good talk from JSConf EU, "Into the void 0", by Jason Miller.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Sweet! Alright, on that note, that will take us out. Thanks everybody for listening, and goodbye.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Bye, everyone. Thanks, Kyle!
+
+**Kyle Simpson:** Yeah, thanks a lot for having me, guys. I appreciate it.

ES Modules and ESM Loader_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,447 @@
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Hey, everybody! Welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript. We've got a special guest today - say hello to John-David Dalton, also known as JDD.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Hi! That's me, I'm JDD! \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm Mikeal Rogers...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And I'm Alex Sexton.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Today we're gonna dive into ES modules. To kick us off, I wanna get into the history of ES modules, because I listened to this terrible podcast in the JS Party feed where yayQuery took over and Paul Irish made some interesting statements about how the Node modules did it wrong, and why do ES modules have to be .mjs, if they are the ones that suck?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That was my line.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, okay, that was your line... So that kind of argument works if history doesn't matter. \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No, I mean... If you listen, I think we understand the situation; it was just kind of a fun time to use the "He's the one who sucks" line from Office Space.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. But when I listened to that in my headphones, I was screaming, because I was like "We couldn't have done anything at the time because these modules didn't exist!" \[laughs\]
+
+We were joking earlier that we're highly qualified to do this, because Alex wrote two sentences of the AMD spec, and I wrote one sentence -- I wrote one sentence of a revision to the CommonJS spec, so we're well-qualified. \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I mean, I can't think of people who would have written more than that...
+
+**John-David Dalton:** I write code that supports both.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So to really go as far back as we can, JavaScript is like a thing you script include in your page, it's been that way for a long time. The first people to do everything are usually Dojo - they do it in this way that everybody ends up hating, but Dojo really did do modules first; they had an independent loader where you could really isolate your code and write your own stuff. This was way, way before sourcemaps, so in order to get line numbers while you were debugging, you really did have to do the async loading stuff. So they had this whole async loading system for debugging, they had a giant Java toolchain for actually bundling everything together before people really bundled their code like that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** At first it was all synchronous, right? It literally used synchronous Ajax and eval().
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh yeah, that's right, it was synchronous XHR.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. It would take like three minutes for your app to boot, and then that's where -- what's his name? He's one of my favorite people in the entire world; James... Wrote AMD... Oh, my goodness, this is not good.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** James, uh, Oh, man...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[04:11\] RequireJS...
+
+**John-David Dalton:** GitHub... \[laughter\] I'm doing the same thing.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** James Burke, that's what it is.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** There we go.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** James Burke was on the Dojo team, so AMD actually kind of came out of Dojo a little bit, and then was the official loader once the RequireJS kind of started to exist. But there was like the first synchronous loader, and then there was the asynchronous version of that, and then that kind of turned into the AMD spec. So even stuff we still kind of at least deal with today - I don't know too many people still using AMD, but it all comes from that original Dojo stuff very directly.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So before we get into AMD though I think that we do need to rewind a little bit... I don't think that they really looked at Dojo at all when they did this, but there was this early ServerJS community where people were building a JavaScript platform for the back-end. The primary one at the time was one called Narwhal, which was on the JVM. These were really dominant before Node came around, and there were a lot of people thinking about different ways to build out this backend. One interesting thing about Narwhal though was that it did have a lot of synchronous IO patterns inside of it.
+
+Their module system was synchronous, and \[unintelligible 00:05:31.29\] and all that kind of stuff. So they didn't do any sync load at all, because it didn't really matter to them, so they wrote this really simple module pattern...
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Did it use load?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No... I'd have to ask Chris Cowell to make sure, but I don't think so.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Okay.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This was like the first more formalized spec for how you could write JavaScript modules. Traditional NodeJS module users have seen this pattern, it's very similar. The big difference that I would note that is very important is that the module .exports equals a function, that whole pattern where a module can just be one function - that didn't exist in the CommonJS spec.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Correct.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That was something the guy added later. So a lot of people started using the spec in the Narwhal space, and when NodeJS started, it grabbed that spec. Also, CouchDB I think still to this day has CommonJS module support, so you can add them into properties on a view, and then in your view you can actually use CommonJS modules.
+
+So the spec kind of got around and people started using it for modules and stuff like that, but eventually Node just became so popular that the ServerJS effort kind of died off. Node started to make some very Node-specific adjustments to the module system, so it's really not compliant in any way with any spec that CommonJS wrote. It's not just that module that exports equals a function thing, there's a lot of other stuff in there about how the resolution works inside of Node\_modules, and all these other little tricky things that really matter when you start to say "Oh, let's add another module." \[laughs\]
+
+But a lot of people didn't like this module system, including James Burke. They felt like it was not quite fit for the web, because it didn't have this async loader, because it wasn't built around that stuff...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** They were objectively right, right?
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Yeah, I mean, it's synchronous versus asynchronous. Synchronous on the web is not great.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, synchronous in Node is also not a thing. With Node, what we figured out was that even though everything in Node is async, it actually makes sense to have a sync module system because you need to load up your entire application before you can actually handle things.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** But that only makes sense on the server.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[07:49\] Yes, okay. That is fair. But what people were doing already with Browserify was they were taking a bunch of these modules and bundling them up and using them in their web applications. And everybody in production, even if you're using AMD, ends up doing this bundle step. It's really only in debugging where you wanna truly asynchronously load these things, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, and potentially in the HTTP/2 push future, but...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I've seen some interesting benchmarks around that that show that it's still not --
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think we're far away from that, but yeah, it's some theoretical future where it's just as fast to not bundle.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. So the AMD spec comes along... It had a lot of good fans, people that really actually...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It was actually part of CommonJS as well. It was a CommonJS spec.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, so they went back to CommonJS. When we talk about ServerJS and the CommonJS community, this was a mailing list; it wasn't an official standards body, it was really like a mailing list of people that argued about specs they were running on a wiki. There's wasn't much of a process, and I think AMD passed without too much turmoil, but when they started to try and define promises, they got into a lot of trouble, because people just could not agree, and so they ended up with five specs, or something.
+
+Anyway... Yeah, so that kind of brings us to ES modules. I think ES4 had a modules spec in it, which, you know, ES4 kind of died off. Then there was still though like a spec kind of floating around; it was very much based on Python, very pythonic. That had some anti-patterns in it that we really advocated against in Node. For instance, the import\* from something, if you've ever seen this... You can do this in Python and in a few other modules systems where you basically say "every property in this module, just dump it into the current namespace with that name." It seems really convenient, but it makes it impossible to figure out where things in the scope came from... So it's just a terrible feature that nobody should be using.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You can do it in current ES modules, but it doesn't dump it into the namespace. You can import\* as foo, and then use the bucket of things off of foo, which is cool.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, so that dumps it into one property that is named at the top... That's totally reasonable! \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's totally different, but it's still -- I know in some systems, (like Java) whenever you import\* versus import something specific, your runtime gets a lot bigger, because you have to actually pull in all those things separately; there's separate files, all that kind of stuff. With JavaScript it really matters; this is usually like a single file, it's rarely like someone re-exporting a bunch of stuff, so it ends up not changing anything.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** The main problem with it is that you have three import statements, and they all say "import\* from somewhere." One of them gets the bar property from foo, and then later in the code it's just calling bar, and you're like "Well, where the hell did bar come from? I need to know what this does, I need to look up its docs." \[laughs\] There's just no way to figure this out.
+
+So anyway, they revised the spec; it's still pretty pythonic, but it definitely started to use some of the new syntax coming down the pipe that was also in ES6, stuff like that. Were either of you involved in the spec process at that point, where it kind of came back on the table, and then Yehuda got involved to try and make it a bit more compatible with Node?
+
+**John-David Dalton:** No, I wasn't. I popped in a little bit later.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I followed the tweets about it... \[laughter\]
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Usually, when it comes to syntax, I'm not a chromogen, I'm pretty open to new syntax... So I'm like "Let's have the new syntax, let's start hearing on it and using it to see what shakes out." I'm all for -- at the time, I was all for the import, the export, all that stuff.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[11:58\] Right. I think the spec sat in a weird state for quite a while. This was before a lot of new processes were put into place at TC39. The spec kind of lingered with people poking at it, nobody had really implemented it yet, nobody was using it in the wild, because this was kind of pre-Babel, so we didn't have people really experimenting with syntax on a bleeding edge like that... And I think most importantly now there's a staging process where you kind of go through stage zero, stage one, and at each stage there are some bars around how many implementations there need to be and how much input have they gotten... But there's a couple specs in what we call ES6 (which is really ES2015) that predate that process, and one of those specs is the ES modules spec. So it got finalized before there were really many implementations out there. There were some big question marks around the loader, for instance. The module loader is another spec in the W3C that is even less worked on.
+
+Anyway, at the time that it got kind of ratified in ES2015, there was a lot of people saying "Oh, well this is gonna be compatible with Node", because Yehuda had done a bunch of work looking at how Node modules look and work to spec, and how ES modules work, and "Let's make sure that they have feature parity."
+
+When Bradley started to really dig into this though (Bradley Meck) and figured out how we might actually implement this support, he started to run into a lot of crazy edge cases and gotchas in how Node's module system not only works today and loads modules, but also how it can be kind of dynamically shifted, and stuff like that. And we call them edge cases because you don't find them until you go way down this rabbit hole, but they affect something like 20%-30% of the Node ecosystem, so it's important that these actually get fixed... And that's I think where you really got involved, JDD. You started to work on another spec, and looking at changes... I think you can really dig into this here.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** I got involved last year around May, June. I had seen a lot of the discussion about .mjs pop up, and I didn't really like the idea of a new file extension, so...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Let's unwind that a little bit - why do you need a .mjs extension? In the browser, you have this new script include basically that signals "Hey, this is a new style module, not an old style JavaScript thing", but we don't have that in Node.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** You have type=module in the browser; in Node... Node loads things based off of file extension. A .js file, a .json file, a .node are handled based on their extension, and then it defaults to .js; it falls back if it doesn't recognize the extension.
+
+For Node, because the existing module system is CommonJS, there needs to be a way to distinguish quickly between your parse goals - if it's going to be CommonJS or if it's going to be an ESM or ESN module, because they behave differently and there's different rules in place for them.
+
+One of the things is like your EcmaScript module is going to have implicit strict mode, and there's certain syntaxes that are allowed at one and not in the other, so that's why the extension is there.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, and you didn't like the idea that there would be this new extension .mjs?
+
+**John-David Dalton:** \[15:37\] Yeah, I mean... The problem is that all new-facing proper EcmaScript modules would require this new extension, and it introduced some other things too where it was like "Node is not a vacuum, even versions of Node." Projects don't tend to just support one version of Node; there's usually three versions that you end up supporting, so if this is introduced, you're still going to have to have a transpile step if you're gonna wanna support Node 9 or Node 8, so then that leads to things like doubling your package size because you're gonna want to have your .mjs and your .js. But then that also leads to things like transpilation is not 100% accurate, so you get these weird edge cases that a bug will appear in your Node 9 code but not your Node 10 code in the same package. I didn't like the gap there for that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I think there's an additional gotcha in the transpilations, too. As we've been working with TC39 to figure out what parts of the spec maybe need to shift or adjust in order to make our support work, we're finding things in the Babel transpilation today that make the module system behave slightly differently than the spec says. So we're moving towards the spec, but we're actually kind of departing from the way that Babel works. If you're just using transpilation, you may actually end up with a completely different behavior than what you actually wanted.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** But my main nitpick was just on the parse detection, or the detection of the goal. I didn't wanna introduce a new file extension, because that also carries over into the browser. I mean, you say the browser doesn't care what extension it is, but there's already blog posts that say "Hey, just write all your code in .mjs, even for the browser", and I think that seems unnecessary and it seems like there should be a way around that, so I've been kicking around alternatives.
+
+Last year I introduced with Bradley a proposal called "Unambiguous JavaScript Grammar", which is a way that says "If your module has at least an import or an export, then you know that it is an ESM file, instead of a CommonJS file or a script target", because it has import or export.
+
+At the time, Node really wanted that to be mandated by the language, so they took it to the TC39 and said "Hey, TC39, would you be interested in changing the language to mandate this?", basically saying that an ES module must have an import or export to make it unambiguous. The reason is that if you don't have an import or export, there's no way to determine if this is a script file or a CommonJS file or an ESM, because it could look like any of them. That happened to fall through though; they decided that no, they would not mandate that, and so because they couldn't get a language change, they went back to saying "Well, since we can't know based on grammar, we're gonna have to go back based on file extension", so they went, at least for right now, with that proposal.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Can you dig a bit more into the logic there? Why did they not go with this unambiguous grammar? Why didn't they say that?
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Because they want assurances -- one of the things is when you're refactoring your code, you might remove an import or you might remove an export, and be in a state where you're a side-effect-only module, which means no import or export, and then if you do that, you've unintentionally changed your parse goal; you'll go from implicit strict mode to not strict mode. Certain keywords will be available to you or not available to you, so it's a stumbling block. There needs to be intent there.
+
+In the browser you say that something is a type=module; it's very explicit. But with unambiguous, it requires it at a syntax level, and just having import or export, it's easy to slip out of that and accidentally go to a different parse goal, which is why there's other proposals now a year later that say "Hey, you can have a new directive that's like use module, because that's an explicit opt-in to ESM, and something that won't likely disappear when you're refactoring your code."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[20:19\] So that brings us through up to that spec... So what does the landscape look like now? Who has implemented ES modules, how have they implemented them? Node is currently pursuing this both in standards and in implementation, trying to make this work with .mjs. What's the current status of the spec in the overall implementations in browsers and stuff like that?
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Edge has experimental, I think Firefox and Chrome are both experimental as well, and then I believe it has shipped in Safari. So basically all the major ones have it, either experimental or shipped.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That means you have to turn on a flag about some thing or another.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Yes, right... Or have a preview build of the browser. So it's coming, it's right around the corner; it's super close. It's not something that's like a year out, it's something that is months out.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** There's also the loader spec, which is its own kind of thing. Have they also implemented the loader spec, and are they considering that more experimental somehow?
+
+**John-David Dalton:** I honestly don't know anything about the loader spec; it is super fuzzy to me. I don't know who's following that. I'm over here on the syntax side.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Have you guys seen SystemJS, or checked that out at all?
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Yes.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** SystemJS does a lot of stuff with the loader. It's built with the ES module loader project, it's ES module loader polyfill...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So it's a polyfill of the loader...?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, it uses that in order to do more, but it uses the minimal polyfill for the loader API, and then on top of that, it does other stuff... It's pretty cool; I was actually expecting it to catch on a little more, because it kind of does a lot of what JDD is doing now, with crazy support for all different types of things. But I think it went a little too hard into trying to create its own whole ecosystem, and I betcha that's probably what kind of got it..
+
+But it has a lot of loader override-type things that kind of get towards that. That's Guy Bedford's project, SystemJS. It's worth checking out. It has 8,000 stars on GitHub, so it's not exactly hurting, but I've never used it, so I can't really talk too much about it, but I think it's roughly in this space.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** I believe I've seen a couple projects use it. I know he's really into that loader space; I like to find devs that are super passionate about a certain topic and kind of defer to them for it. He's in it and probably is into all of the spec and follows all that stuff, so I would say if you have a question or something, feel free to ping him on it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it's a cool project. People should check it out. I had a blog post a long time ago (as we all did) about AMD versus CommonJS that I thought I'd find a spot to put in there... And it's not super important, but there was --
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I remember that post, yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think it was a good post, still... It was like a response, I think, to some terrible Tom Dale post where it's like "Give up, AMD. You've lost. Everyone else is dumb", which is interesting, because I'm pretty sure a lot of Ember uses AMD under the covers.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** I was just gonna say that, Ember does use AMD.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[23:53\] Yeah... So I think maybe he read my blog post, which was just that, like, I don't care what you author in. If you're gonna compile, that's fine, but if we're defining a module spec that just has to work everywhere for everyone in all cases, then AMD is the superset. If you write synchronous require statements and you wanna use Browserify to compile it down, compile it down to AMD and then everything will be interoperable, whether you use AMD or you use the thing that needs to compile to AMD. The whole point of it was like -- the standard that we all choose needs to be usable on the web without Node.js, right? You shouldn't need a server step in order to use the default module specification... But everyone's gonna compile, it's just right now everyone compiles -- like, even to this day, Browserify compiles down to a function that's wrapped in functions with keys, and then Webpack uses these IDEs that throw everything onto an object... I feel like we could have kind of like interoperable bytecode modules, or at least for a long time -- now we have ES6 and it'll be fixed.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** There was even a build step for AMD, and that was RJS, the build optimizer.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. If you don't mind authoring an AMD - which I didn't - then you might as well write it, and you're gonna build it, but... AMD worked without a builder. It was an optimization step, or whatever.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** I never understood those kinds of fights. If you like CommonJS, use CommonJS. If you like AMD, use AMD. If you're a library author, support both and you'll get more users.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I understand you \[unintelligible 00:25:35.14\] JS were a AMD, or a UMD creator. We didn't talk about that either, but I would have been more of a fan of just like instead of UMD needing to exist, why doesn't CommonJS just compile down to AMD? Use whatever you want, and then everyone compiles down to AMD, including people who use AMD, and that would solve everyone's problem.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But at what point do you compile it down? If you write a reasonable module, do you compile it down before you publish that module, or do you just publish that module in the regular Node module system and expect that somebody when they use it in the browser they're gonna compile --
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think everyone -- much like now, you can't really ship ES6... Or a lot of times you can, you have to kind of transpile that way. Everyone, no matter their build stack, can use it. So the idea is like your Dist folder would have your AMD compile. You write in CommonJS and then you compile everything down to AMD in your Dist folder, along with your CoffeeScript, or whatever we were doing back then.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm remembering my position during this weird fight with AMD, and the reality was we had way too many modules in the Node ecosystem that were being used by browser tools and being compiled in another browser to say "Okay, we're just gonna not use this spec anymore for publishing reusable components." And on the "What does it get compiled to side when you use it on the browser?", yeah, AMD made more sense for people to use, but also there was already a spec for ES modules; we knew that there was gonna be a modules spec in the browser at some point in time.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No... It was extremely early and in no way was that a thing that anyone thought would happen anytime soon, and it didn't. It didn't happen for five more years... And it still hasn't happened. \[laughs\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. I think the thing that nobody really saw coming was Babel taking off, and then frameworks being built as Babel toolchains, like React... At that point, you can use these new standards and just have them compile down to whatever. It's not even worth having an argument over what that's compiled down to, if it's AMD or CommonJS or whatever, as long as there's a good sourcemap.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[28:01\] I actually think it's still a little bit sad that -- like, it will eventually not be true anymore. Eventually, modules will work in the browser without Node, but I think it is a bad thing, and was bad for the web, or whatever - and there are tons of bad things for the web and it's fine, everything's gonna be fine... But I think it's a bad thing for the web that we let that happen, to the point where like if you want to use JavaScript on the web, you also have to use Node. That became a rule. And that's great for Node, but bad for the web, I think. We locked people into "You must use this server-side JavaScript thing in order to use this open platform that's a completely different ecosystem."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So this is what I'd argue with though - one, referring to it as a server-side thing is a little bit disingenuous, because when you use it this way, you're actually using it as like a front-end compile step, and you're using it as like the way you would use Python, or...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** On a server.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well no, but you don't call Python a server language when you use it to just like run a script on your local system. It's a system language.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure, but I don't care. What I mean is that people already had Ruby-built pipelines, right?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But they sucked... Compared to what we know now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** They all could have got better in the same amount of time, if we--
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, they couldn't, because the people that innovated-- people that have been innovating in these toolchains get to work in JavaScript, and that's the language that they know and love, and they're part of that same community. And the reason why we have much better toolchain-- Node is not a particularly great language for this, actually... Doing everything from I/O in the callbacks is not particularly good at this case.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Your bias is showing, in my opinion. I think we can parse JavaScript modules in any language that we want...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But we were...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I mean, we were in Java, for one thing...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And in Ruby.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** ...and two, there were plenty of really fundamental, huge leaps in tooling that happened in Rails and in a lot of these things prior to any of this taking off, and to think that those tools would have just stagnated because Node never existed to come save the day because everyone could type everything in JavaScript--
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, no, no, that's not what I'm saying...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's exactly what you're saying! So silly...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, what I'm saying is that it's definitely revisionist history to say that it would have been better if we didn't have to use Node for these things, because what we get from having a toolchain that can take all of these different Node pieces and put them together, regardless of what language it's in, is more valuable than not having it. So we were gonna move to this system anyway, and the reason that we moved to Node was because these people were able to innovate quicker in JavaScript.
+
+You were at it, I remember that you were here -- so in 2011 at the first NodeConf in Portland we had a panel, and one of the questions to the panel was "What should you not use Node for?" and everyone on the panel agreed - Ryan Dahl, Isaac... Everybody. I think Brendan Eich was even on it. You probably don't wanna use this for systems stuff, for what you use make scripts for and things like that. It's nice to have asynchronous flow when you do that stuff... Literally the thing that is maybe the major use case right now, and we were saying "No, it's probably not good for this." And at the time, \[unintelligible 00:31:22.15\] was able to wrap half of all the modules in Node, so that tells you the size of the ecosystem at the time that npm had grown to.
+
+After that, there were so many things written in Node and so many things written in JavaScript that could be compiled down to the browser that it was like "Oh wow, we get to tap into this great ecosystem when we write this tooling. This is a much better language to do this in", and a bunch of people stopped doing this stuff in Ruby and started doing it in Node. They found it better, even though it's not particularly a better language.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No, they found it required...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Required?! Who made them do this?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[31:59\] My problem isn't that Node existed and offered these tools, my problem is that the default thing that we all chose required you to use this single language. We got away from being able to do anything in any other language because we standardized a specific tool. I'm not mad that Node existed, but I think Node should have compiled down to a common format that worked on the web, versus having everyone need o switch their entire systems over rather than choose their tool based on their needs, or whatever.
+
+Revisionist history is to say like "Oh, well the Rails tools aren't good now." That's because everyone had to switch over, of course!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This has to do with those, because every tool that takes a Node module in the Node format and puts it into something compiled for the browser has to have its own interpretation of the module system. It doesn't get to leverage Node's module system... That being Node's module system is really no different than it being an AMD as far as Ruby is concerned, if you're parsing that in Ruby and creating a Ruby toolchain around it. You don't get any particular benefit actually out of using Node; you still have to implement the entire module system... Or at least enough of it to compile things down. Browserify doesn't use Node's module system, it has to actually reimplement it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think that is a very simple way of thinking about that, sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that these workflows won because they're better, honestly.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm not saying that they aren't better.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** I thought they won because just -- I wanna write in JavaScript, so when the opportunity came to be able to do that and have system-level access be able to write files and load modules and reuse code, I jumped at it. That was a no-brainer for me to switch.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, so I think maybe both of you are misunderstanding me. I would have immediately used all of the Node's stuff... I think it is the best tool for the job etc. etc., but I think that it is explicitly anti-web to essentially say "This is the new standard", even if it's not a real standard; everyone said "This is how everyone has to do it from now on", which required people running Node. I think the fact that Node was the standard for modules and it did not work on the web without using Node was a step backwards before we took steps forward. That's all I'm saying. I still would have used it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** How do you load AMD modules without any code to load the AMD module?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** AMD by default just works. It injects the script tag...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** There's a still a little loader there.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You have the AMD runtime - there's even like a miniature one; it's 2k, or something... I think it's called Almond. It sets up the names \[unintelligible 00:34:59.24\] for things to be able to require and define, and then it loads your script, and then whenever you require a new script, it is asynchronous, so it doesn't run the function until it loads the three scripts that you say are required to run this, and then those are then available inside of the function that eventually gets run.
+
+It works completely without any build, and I think that's a good default, because it doesn't require people who just wanna build a website to learn Node whatsoever, or learn any server-side anything.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So you can also do this with any module in npm. There's a thing called Browserify CDN, where you can just in a web browser say "Oh yeah, just require this module." You don't have to have a Node build pipeline -- you don't need a pipeline, you can just use it. And it's not super popular because guess what, everybody has a build toolchain anyway.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[35:54\] No, it's not super popular because the only thing I can think of that's worse than requiring Node is requiring BrowserifyCDN.com as the required thing to build web pages. That's not a solution to this problem generally, it is someone else doing the Node build pipeline for you, that still requires Node.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** As a sidetrack though, there is an AMD loader for Node too, so... That was kind of cool. You could use AMD syntax and have it work in Node as well, if you required the loader.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** AMD actually even worked in most simple synchronous cases, with a small build step that didn't need any context of -- like, you could do it with Dash... So you just need to add a line at the top and a line at the bottom, essentially wrapping it in a require function. Then as long as you had essentially statically analyzable with RegEx require statements, it could then do a function.2 string and then figure out what you're gonna require and then not call your function until it asynchronously loaded those things. That was an alternate thing that most people didn't know about.
+
+So you could actually author synchronously and then still ship async AMD with like a Bash build step that just concatted a line up top and at bottom.
+
+All I'm saying is that everything's fine and I used the tools that were the best, but I still think it was anti-web and we could have done better, and we should have done better. We should do that next time.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I don't agree that it's anti-web, but I will say that the recurring theme here is that this thing that is standardized and adopted is just more important than this thing with feature X. That's a recurring theme that we'll see in technology forever. The thing that everybody happens to be using, the thing that gets the most adoption at a certain point in time is what we end up standardizing to, even if it lacks feature X, Y or Z.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think that is the direct reason why websites are really slow on mobile devices today. Node is the reason. The fact that synchronous, giant builds \[laughter\] -- no, seriously... The fact that synchronous, giant builds became the quick standard of just like "Take everything in your Node modules and build it into this giant object that you ship as a 4 gb file at the beginning of your website synchronously." That's the Node pattern for this, right?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I thought Alex Sexton was my co-host, not Alex Russell. \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's the problem. So if we would have started with something that could do asynchronous loading, then I think we'd be in a much better place, where people would only be loading things that they needed for any given page... By default, because that's how it works.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I actually think it's very valuable to not have to write a lot of your own code, and whoever is the best at creating reusable code and dependency networks that allow you to do a lot more while writing a lot less are gonna win. And eventually, that's gonna turn into a bigger bundle, and it doesn't really matter -- like, whoever won was going to be the best at creating this future problem...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No, I mean... By default, if you asynchronously loaded packages, you could just say -- like, nothing has to change, it's just when you hit this page, the new package loads. It's a built-in kind of feature to the asynchronicity of the thing. Right now there's some cool stuff with like async/await on top of imports that people are starting to clob onto for asynchronous imports... And those are cool. Finally, we're back into a world where this is possible, and I think once that catches on, to do like "Hey, this is a different view on a different route and it has a bunch of different dependencies because it's my settings", then once people move into this idea of "Sometimes I can asynchronously load dependencies", then bundle sizes will immediately -- like, if you cut your bundle size in half, that's huge; that's insanely huge.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** It's already making its way into build tools, too. Webpack now supports dynamic import syntax, and it should do that - deliver part of the bundle upfront and then part as needed.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[40:06\] I don't know, I'm so much skeptical of our ability to cut up the application code this much to make a big difference for secondary and third loads, when if you have a service worker, it gets loaded after the first load anyway, and if you have a mechanism by which you can update it before they requested the new code, like when you publish something it gets downloaded by the user in the background before it's actually needed - that's always gonna be much, much faster.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** There are definitely parts of the solution to this problem, but you can never get around the fact that the first time that you go to a web page, it takes 10 seconds on a not brand new iPhone to parse the JavaScript. It's a real problem and it's not going away. I think out current build system is a direct child -- the cause of it is because we adopted a synchronous server-side tool for doing web building, and it worked for a long time.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I don't agree with that at all, but okay. \[laughs\] At some point we have to move on though. Alright... So Alex Russell is gonna take a break, and then we're gonna get Alex Sexton back for a minute. \[laughs\] When we come back, we can get into the project of the week.
+
+**Break:** \[41:29\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Let's now dig into the project of the week. JD, you wrote a loader to -- I believe this is too to the universal spec, that you do your working on?
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Yes, so it's part of Lodash 5... So the Lodash 5 is the thing I'm working on. It's going to be ES6+ only, and I did not want to have to transpile it back for Node 4 or 5 or whatever, so I wanted there to be a loader for that, and so I had to create one. I've created a work in progress - this has not been published yet. If you go to the repo, which is github.com/standard-things/esm, you'll see the EcmaScript module loader there.
+
+It is for Node 4+, it supports .js, .mjs, it supports dynamic imports, it supports the file protocol, it supports live bindings, it's going to be spec-compliant by default, which means that things like unambiguous grammar are off by default, but you can opt into them... Things like carrying over some of the CommonJS goodies like dirname and filename that require named exports of CommonJS modules - all of that can be opted into, but by default it will follow the Node behavior of what .mjs and ESM is in Node 10, except it will be available for Node 4+.
+
+\[44:30\] What's nice about that is that you can just ship one version of your code and it just works. The consumers of your package don't have to care about it either. They don't have to worry about if they're loading ESM or CommonJS. For them, things will just work. So it removes the compile step, it removes having to have dual packages, it allows you to support a range of Node versions, and you can use import/exports, so it's a win.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I've really gotta ask you, so the usage here is -- basically you do require @std/esm, and then the import syntax in the language starts to work properly... How the hell did you do that? I'm looking at this going "How would this ever work?!"
+
+**John-David Dalton:** So I need to add an example for common usage - what you would normally do is inside your package you have an index.js. Your index.js can be basically two lines long. The first line is to require the standard ESM loader, the second line is to then require your ESM code; usually module.exports=require your whatever.mjs and then .default, so that's it' After that, all of your ESM code should just work.
+What we do is we tie into Node module compiling and loading mechanism, and we can then parse the code, transpile it on the fly, cache it and then load it. But the thing is because we're dealing with such a small subset of the language, we can do this in microseconds, so not even milliseconds - superfast. It's cached, so it's only done once for the lifetime of the unchanged file, which means that most of the time it will be comparable to CommonJS loads... And that's how we do it. It's a quick, speedy transpile. Then I selectively wrap the loader.
+
+What we've been able to do is most of the time whenever you have a loader that you're overriding, it's a global change, but that would be not good, because you would have modules that all of a sudden start working that did not opt into it... So I've done a lot of work to ensure that only packages that are using the standard ESM loader get the behavior.
+I've also done it in a way to where you can support versions of the ESM loader. So one package could be using version 1, one package could be using version 2, and they're not gonna conflict or stomp on each other.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's impressive. That's really hard to do properly.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Yeah, so we've got that going... The idea is that, again, the consumer should not have to worry about it; it's just a way for you as a package author to have your import/export with a very little ceremony. You basically require it as a dependency, and then you have that small hook inside your index.js file to load in your ESM code... Which is great, because later on if you decide to drop the loader and you only wanna do Node 10+, then you just change the index.js file, and that's it. I wanted it to be super lightweight.
+
+\[47:57\] Again, I like unambiguous module grammar; I don't necessarily want all my code to be .mjs. I like a lot of the Node carryover stuff, so for me, I'll be configuring it with those options. But for everyone else, it will be standards, and as spec-compliant as possible by default... Which is great, because if it's spec-compliant by default, then you can take that same code that you're writing and loading in Node, and then you can take Babel and transform it back, if you want to, for like a website... Or you can browserify it or webpack and bundle it, and it should just work. So having it be spec-compliant by default is a pretty nice default.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And to make Alex here very happy, it means that you can just use this in the browser without any tooling and without Node, right? Eventually, when we have \[unintelligible 00:48:48.24\]
+
+**John-David Dalton:** So ESM and Node will still have Node's module resolution - lookup, I believe...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, right, right.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** So that doesn't transfer over to the browser. I wish it did, because that's super handy, but --
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It could with a loader override, I assume...
+
+**John-David Dalton:** That is correct, you are right. But the good thing is that existing tools should continue to work. So this is something that you can opt into, it gives you enhanced support...
+
+Another thing I like is that with Node v7+ it's like 99.9% ES6-compliant, right? It's just essentially missing tail call and import/export. So this import loader, this ESM loader just adds that import/export bit to the language, so it's not having to support a ton of crazy stuff, and that's why it can also be super fast inside of its transformations.
+
+One of the first things I did was reach out to one of the Acorn devs to see if they could come up with a way to do a fast top-level parse, and sure enough they were able to cook one up in like a day and a half. I then took that to a project called Reify, which is done by Ben Newman, and Reify is what my loader is based on. Then I started contributing to Reify, improving its load time, improving its parse time, adding support for gzipped modules and some other things, and then from there I'm now able to fork and create the ESM loader. It's been like a four-month plus process on this.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's it?
+
+**John-David Dalton:** For me? Yes. \[laughter\] It was four months for me, but Ben has been working on this project for over a year, so I'm leveraging the work and the experience -- a project that has not only been worked on for a year, but it's being used by MeteorJS right now in production... So it gives me confidence that this thing has some substance to it, it's just all theory; this is something that is actually being used at a company, people depend on it, so I felt more confident basing it as my approach to the problem, as well.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** To me, it's super simple - it's one function call, then after that you get it. What's nice is, as you see based on the readme, it works in the Node REPL too, which is where you just require it and then all of a sudden the syntax just works, import/export after that, which is super handy. I dig that, too.
+
+One of the things I'm excited about that's non-standard is the support of gzipped modules. You know the browser supports gzipped compression for your resources - JavaScript, CSS, HTML... It seamlessly handles that; Node doesn't seamlessly handle loading those kinds of resources. Node has gzip support built in, but there's just not a loader mechanism for it. Because Lodash is depended on by a good chunk of the ecosystem, I get to see report after report about filesize, and the current build tools - going back to build tools having some issues - don't show the minified gzipped size of something, they show the on-disk size of your Node modules package, and Lodash happens to ship its dev build in the Node package. That means it's got all of it's documentation and source code in-lined, so it's a 4 mb on disk.
+
+\[52:33\] Lodash 5 will be gzipped and will be less than 90 kb on disk, so I've optimized it heavily there. One of the secret sauces to that is loading gzipped files seamlessly. To the end user, their code will just work, but instead of it loading a .js file, it's loading a .js.jz or .mjs.jz file.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Word of caution, though - not everybody should do that, because if you have a lot of tiny gzip files, they end up being really large, actually... Like, there's not a huge amount of benefit to that. And I imagine uncompressing it in real time can be kind of slow, as well.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Actually, if you gzipped -- so I didn't experiment where I just gzipped my Node modules folder, Babel... You know. After a while, your build tools and your build change - you'll have over a gb inside your Node modules folder... So I gzipped it and I saved 500 mb out of the gate. And it turns out that reading from disk is actually more expensive in many cases than inflating gzip through your CPU... So in many cases, small gzip files will actually load faster.
+
+Isaac of npm (formally Node) has also written a 3x faster gzip loader, which is what I'm also using. It's super fast. I'll be using it, like I said, for Lodash. I like that, because with Lodash, if you wanna load the kitchen sink, it's 600+ modules; I'm using that as my benchmark for the ESM loader as well, seeing how fast I can load 600+ modules in Node, with or without gzip there.
+
+I will say it's not a silver bullet, but for me, since most people have multiple versions of Lodash, 4 mb x 4 mb + 4 mb starts to add up, and eat into people's quotas for things like Azure functions or AWS Lambdas, or Electron apps and things like that. Your Node modules folder tends to inflate and can have consequences, so it's nice to be able to have a way to zip that up.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's a really good point.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** \[unintelligible 00:54:50.08\] the actual ESM loader. What this doesn't show is that the ESM loader will be a zero dependency package, and will be under 30 or under 40 kb. So the ESM loader is not only small, but zero dependency as well. I wanted people to be able to feel like they can add this to their project without having it bloat it up, so I'm using Webpack to actually build-optimize the loader, I'm using Zopfli to compress it, and then using the built-in gzip support to load it up and execute it, and it actually runs on par with a non-gzipped version, but it goes from being over 240 kb to just being under 40 kb. Again, it will be fast, it will be small, a zero dependency package that you can just include.
+
+Lodash will be taking a dependency on it - I'm incorporating feedback from people like Sindre Sorhus because he's massive in the ecosystem, so I want him on board with the ESM loader as well, the naming...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Is that based on his tweet that said "I will never move to .mjs in the history of \[unintelligible 00:55:58.03\]"
+
+**John-David Dalton:** I had been discussing this with him before that even. If you noticed in his tweet, he says he might use the loader that I'm working on, so he's been in the loop for a while.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, nice.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** \[56:11\] Even the name... One of the first things I did was look up a standard, official-looking name, and get the namespace for that and the package for that. It's because I wanted to feel official, I wanted to be spec-compliant, I want to be easy to reach for and use, and that would be a user land solution to this whole .mjs/ESM compatibility issue that we'll crop up.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Corban in the chat is asking (just general) "What's the SSD and CPU on what you're doing these benchmarks on?"
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Good question. I have the MacBook Pro (Touch Bar) laptop plugged in. Even unplugged, I get similar speeds unless I'm on low battery, and that's when the CPU starts to kick in. I will say that it varies from project to project, but the cost to me isn't egregious and in some cases it's a benefit. So for me the file size savings is the biggest win for the compressed file.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** What are people's concern there? They're just on like a resource-constrained device, like a Raspberry Pi, or something?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I also think when you're comparing -- the trade-off of \[unintelligible 00:57:30.16\] is that it's a lower file size, but then you have to take some CPU cycles to decompress it. It matters if you have a fast CPU versus a slow disk, or a slow disk versus a fast CPU, or if you just have a fast both, right?
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Right.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** On a MacBook you do have an SSD, but you're also on top of the worst file system ever created by human beings, so...
+
+**John-David Dalton:** But this is also a single-time load for the lifetime of the application, because Node caches the loaded modules as well... So what you'll be concerned with is your startup cost, and that's something that you can weigh.
+
+For me, the benefit is really clear because most -- so I should also mention this... Lodash 5 will not have an index file, will not have a main monolithic include; everything is cherry-picked, which means that -- a common usage is for people to reach for about five or six of the 300+ methods, and just use five or six. For me, five or six small loads are nothing, so I get to save over 3 mb in package download and have almost negligible impact on the load. It's a win for me in that case.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right now I actually ended up pulling down the Lodash.whatever method that I need from npm, so that I get a smaller version - how is that gonna change in Lodash 5 with this?
+
+**John-David Dalton:** So that actually ends up being a larger version. I'm stopping the individually packaged methods - like the Lodash.chunk package - because it turns out code can't be shared very well across those packages. Something that's nice about a single package that has a lot of submodules within it is that you can use build optimizations inside Webpack or Babel to alias and reduce functionality, and that's something that doesn't travel well across packages... So I would end up actually duplicating a lot of code in those individual packages.
+
+Something I'm doing with the Lodash 5 is before, it gave you all the functionality upfront, and then you have to opt out of functionality, which means it created a bigger build by default. Lodash 5 is going in the opposite direction and giving you minimal functionality upfront, and then there'll be mechanisms for you to opt into more functionality, so you'll get smaller builds by default.
+
+With that, I think the need for individual packages will be reduced, and I can standardize folks on just using the single Lodash package and the build tools around that, like Webpack and Babel or whatever you need to optimize and enhance your package and bundle.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[01:00:19.13\] In order to do this, are Rollup and Webpack gonna have to become aware of your module system?
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Actually, for the gzip files, they will; they will have to become aware. I have already contributed the loader to Webpack, and it's part of their Webpack-contrib. So it's already in Webpack, it's already been published for them. For the other ones, yeah, they'll have to. What's great is that it's about two lines of JavaScript to get it to work. It's really not complex, because Node already has gzip support, has a Zlib module, so... It's like, you read the file in, as a buffer, you pass it to the gzip decompressor and then you spit out the output (it's super tiny), but yeah, they'll have to add that, and I think that with Lodash it will get added, so I'm not super worried about that. There will be a time where Webpack will have it, and others won't. But I use Webpack, it's the thing with momentum, so I went and targeted that first.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's great. Alex, do you have any remaining questions before we move on to picks?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No, let's do some picks.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, this is all super compelling. Alright, Alex, why don't you kick us off.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I am going to pick somewhat of an ecosystem of ideas, kind of... It's the Fantasy Land specification. At Stripe we use some types, and then there's some people who are really into types, and they make me use them a little more than I like, but some things end up being really pretty and good... And there's kind of this specification for interoperability of common algebraic structures in JavaScript called Fantasy Land. I think they're referring to the fact that if everyone used this, everything would be so much better, which is like, maybe...
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Actually, I believe they were naming it that because someone had been poking fun at them in a Reddit thread, and they said "You must be living in a fantasy land!" and that's how the spec name came.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So I like it a lot, but I agree that it's a fantasy land. We use some subset of these at Stripe as part of our stuff, but it's just like whenever you need either algebraic structure to handle errors, and leftMap, rigthMap, whatever type stuff... But then there's kind of a community that wraps popular things...
+
+For instance, there's a Lodash Fantasy Land implementation that--
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Oh, now way!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, so you can get that, or you can get Ramda Fantasy Land as well. Any of that different stuff... Not only is it typed, because there are type defs for both TypeScrypt and FlowType, but also it adds in these algebraic structures for how things come back and how you use them, and things... And it's cool.
+
+I think if you kind of start with it or use it for some base core of your fetching code, or something like that... Any sub-ecosystem could completely use this and be pretty successful, even if you can use it across everything, because other libraries don't necessarily \[unintelligible 01:03:33.06\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I tend to think for functional programming a little goes a long way; I'm into the "a little bit in moderation is a good thing." I'm on the fence about this whole FP thing. I offer functional forms of Lodash modules called Lodash/fp - it's built into the existing 4.0 - and that has everything auto-curried, data-last, immutable, all of that stuff. And I kind of see it in the same vein as like -- I supported AMD, and the fans of AMD were so gung-ho and so supportive that they gave Lodash a boost in terms of usage, and they were super loyal...
+
+\[01:04:26.02\] I see FP as kind of that same thing where it may not be as big of an audience, but they are very enthusiastic. The users of functional programming styles are very enthusiastic, they're super eager to help, so I'm trying to decide how to continue that with Lodash 5, too. Totally cool, yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, you should look into Fantasy Land.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Yeah. It's actually the most requested feature on Lodash right now - a Fantasy Land compliant version.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, cool.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** I bet you didn't know that! Totally close!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I did see that issue, but yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright. JDD, do you have a pick for us?
+
+**John-David Dalton:** I do have a pick, and it is for projects like Babel. I would say they're always looking for contributors to help. Projects that I see requesting for contributions and pull requests would be things like Mocha, MomentJS, Babel... If you're looking to get into open source and you're looking to get your feet wet, they have open issues that are tagged for things like "Good time first contribution", "Documentation tweaks" - things like that are a good way to get into open source and you're really gonna be helping out the projects.
+
+I would say look to those, especially if you use them in your day job. If you use Babel, go contribute back to it; if you use MomentJS, which is awesome for dates, contribute back a little bit. It means the world to the maintainers; they're just like everyone else, they're trying to find the time to work on the project, so having a helping hand, or even contributing feedback to an issue or documentation is a big help. Check out Babel, MomentJS and Mocha.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** The time may have passed, but for a long time the best place to contribute - anything that TJ wrote and abandoned was in dire need of people to do easy fixes. I think Mocha still falls there.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Yeah. That means the world to people. Help out. Lodash itself is in a pretty good, stable state. I'm taking my time with version five, so I'm coasting on that front, but on these other ones, these other projects could really use some help managing issues and pull requests and features.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Cool. My pick is Mapzen. If you've ever had to integrate a map with a website or app that you're using, you probably poked around with a few things that are terrible and then settled on Mapbox. Mapbox's definitely set like a great standard - they were better than everything else - but they get really pricey really fast if you go past the free tier.
+
+\[01:07:12.08\] Also, I have a bunch of code sitting around that I have to copy and paste in in order to figure out how to do things. So the Mapzen JavaScript API is just a little bit more evolved, a little bit easier to use. They have a lot of the same support and cool tools and everything, but it's just a bit easier, the ergonomics are a bit nicer, and much more incremental pricing, so... I'm loving Mapzen. That's it.
+
+Alright, thanks everybody for joining us, thanks JDD for coming on for this episode.
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Thanks for having me.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, anytime. With that, we're all done for today. Thanks, everybody!
+
+**John-David Dalton:** Bye!

Good Documentation, Non-blocking UI Rendering, Node Community Updates_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,265 @@
+**Rachel White:** Hello! Welcome to JS Party. I'm Rachel White, and we have a special guest for you this week with us. I'll let her introduce herself.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Hey, I'm Tracy... I'm here with y'all today. Thank you for having me.
+
+**Rachel White:** And then obviously, Mikeal's not here, and we also have Alex.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Alex Sexton, Virgo... Um, this is probably not true; I have no idea what my sign is.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool! We have a lot of cool, fun things -- I don't know cool, we have exciting... Semi-exciting, semi-cool, semi-fun things to talk to you about today. We're gonna talk about documentation, what makes for good documentation, non-blocking UI rendering, and then we're gonna talk to Tracy about the current state of Node.js and what is being a community/education person like, and what's going on this year with Node.
+
+Cool, let's jump right into the documentation. We're gonna talk about what makes good documentation to you; how do you prefer to go about adding documentation to your projects, what are some best practices, what are projects that you like...? Who wants to start?
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** I'll jump into it a little bit, because this is something that's just been this wonderful, sort of serendipitous week of hearing a lot about documentation. I was doing research for learning Node and kind of looking at the survey stuff that we had gotten from last winter's survey... As I was reading through all of this data that we had it was really odd, because I kept reading about what docs people were using to help learn Node. Some people were saying like, "Oh yeah, these docs are great!" and then I'm seeing other people saying, "Docs are terrible, they're substandard. What's going on?" and I was just like "What docs -- they're being really vague about it."
+
+What I found out when I dug into it was that they weren't referring to the Node API doc. They were referring to docs from authors with npm packages.
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh...
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, so it was just this really interesting -- like, I knew that the documentation has been a struggle for us in Node, and so when they said that, I was like "Oh my god, that makes so much sense", because a number of prolific authors in the community early on were contributing to Node itself, so they were doing a really good job with documenting their own projects and packages, and that ended up educating a lot of people on best practices for what you should be doing, because they had to watch these projects evolve.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** But part of that was -- it kind of brought into the question for me, because when I started writing Node, I remember like "Wow, these API docs don't make any sense to me. They make all of these assumptions", because a lot of the people who had written them had written other programming languages prior, so they kind of assumed that you knew these constructs... So yeah, I was like "Oh, so I have to dig into this", because it's really hard for me to believe that people thought that they weren't naming the Node API docs as the thing, and they are much better now... But they still need work, because they're not entry-level.
+
+**Rachel White:** So basically the community poll gave you results that a ton of people weren't actually using the documentation that you wanted them to?
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** \[laughs\] Yeah.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[04:00\] I feel like whenever I'm writing or working with a new language or project and I'm jumping in, if there's good documentation (which we'll talk about later) then it's super helpful, but I think that something else that people don't take into consideration is people have different learning styles too, so if there's other ways that people give you examples, you're gonna go and check those other sites.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah.
+
+**Rachel White:** Or if there's sites that have -- this is kind of dumb and a little ridiculous, but I know that often when I was doing more frontend stuff and I needed to know CSS or HTML questions, you always get... I feel like the worst results come up first on Google. You're gonna get those W3Schools and the Stack Overflow questions that are giving you the information that you don't want... I don't know. How do you think that a good way to remedy this problem could be?
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, that was my first -- I think Mikeal and I talked about this a while back, and our data definitely backed it up. It's sort of this -- like, if you don't write good documentation, then you don't get to choose where people are going to get the information to understand your project. So I don't know about other projects in JavaScript, but I know in Node what ended up happening is the majority of people who were learning Node then are learning it from going to Stack Overflow, and combined with documentation.
+
+What's really interesting about that is a lot of our collaborators aren't the ones answering questions on Stack Overflow.
+
+**Rachel White:** That's true.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** So then it's even more so -- like, if you're seeing a bunch of people who are sort of talking about good practices in writing Node, they are not necessarily... Like, we're not leading that effort in Stack Overflow; it's whoever has the energy to be answering questions in Stack Overflow, which is super awesome, but yeah...
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, Stack Overflow also has that difficult to attain barrier of entry where you're not able to contribute until you've participated a certain amount of time, and vice versa. It's like one of those weird situations where you can't be a part of a thing until you're a part of a thing, but how do you get to be a part of a thing?
+
+Now I'm actually wondering... Do you think that there's a responsibility of maintainers to not only write good documentation but to also maybe -- if you see somebody in the community that is stepping up and taking part, to be able to build upon the good work that you've already done - do you think that there's a responsibility to maintainers to be able to take that and kind of like bring it into the process...? Where if you're not finding what you're looking for here, here are other recommended resources that you should take a look at...?
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Well, Myles Borins and I were talking about this yesterday, and we were talking about like -- something that I struggle with for resources and education is there are so many ways to learn, even just online, not even in person... It's going to people who write blog posts, they're googling for it, Stack Overflow... And even Stack Overflow now has this really cool thing where it isn't just the questions section, they actually have example sections now... I think it's called documentation, and it's starting to be just plain examples. It's not just docs; what we think of docs often times are more like a definition, a How To, or a Getting Started... But I consider those documentation, I think it's really great.
+
+\[07:52\] For me, it's like I want there to be one source of truth. Also, having started in Python, I find that it's really easy for new learners, if they don't -- they're not inundated with so many places that they have to look at... But in Node, at this point, I don't think we get to choose that. So instead of trying to control it, it's like maybe we encourage people - maintainers, contributors, that if there's a place that they like to hang out, then they should voice their knowledge. "We have this place that you can go in the Node GitHub repo that you can go to ask for help. It's /help."
+
+That's great, but as I've said, Stack Overflow is the number one place people are asking questions for Node, and it's kind of built for that. So that's great, but then maybe we should be encouraging people - what we consider subject matter experts - to be contributing there.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah. So aside from just finding the good documentation and the places that people can go, now I'm starting to think about the actual process of writing the documentation, and what are good practices that people can use while writing their code in order to make it easier on them in the long run.
+
+I know personally previously I've used DocBlock type stuff while I'm writing to describe the actual things that are in the code, but I think Alex writes a lot more code than you and I do nowadays, so maybe he can give us some better insight into this...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm not sure I can. \[laughter\] Specifically what are you looking for more insight in?
+
+**Rachel White:** So do you do anything while you're in the regular dev process of working on a feature or a codebase, in order to make it easier for documentation at the end?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** To be written?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay, sorry, I was misunderstanding... So documentation has levels, you know? The minimum documentation I feel are publicly documenting the function signatures of the public API of any software, right? So it's like "Here are all the functions and their names, and here are the arguments that they take, and here's what it returns." Does that make sense?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's the minimum viable documentation, I think. Anything below that is useless; you have to just read the code, it's not longer documentation. So one thing that's become more popular in the past six months to a year is typing JavaScript. So for JavaScript-specific stuff, if you use Flow or if you use Typescript, you can generate that documentation automatically.
+
+Stripe uses types as like a build step and builds them out. We don't gain a lot of built time error checking, because a lot of it is too nebulous -- there's not a ton of third-party library support for this stuff... But the thing to gain from it is just automatic documentation for every API signature across all of our code.
+
+So I think that something like that can be really useful for getting -- automatically updating documentation when code changes is a pretty important thing, I've found, because documentation becoming outdated is actually maybe worse than something not being documented at all. So when you have types built directly into the code, those things get updated automatically on every build; the docs just get built with the code.
+
+But then on top of that, you kind of have to have -- then it becomes a cultural thing. It's like, "Are you allowed to ship something without writing words about why it works the way it works and how you might use it, or examples of how you might use it together?" At Stripe we actually have (I think we call it) a frontend explorer. So we have a bunch of components, and some are really generic... It's a button, or a date picker, or something like that... But some are like "This is the thing that you use in the selector for the settings where you change your avatar to..." -- like, it's very specific, but you still want to document that, so this is a place where you can throw example code of the different settings that you can put on it, and it will then automatically render that stuff, and then pull in all the types and render all the function calls.
+
+\[12:30\] A new developer at Stripe can go to this page and say, "I need a menu over here that I have to do... Let me look at these menus. Do I need to write a new one? Can I look at these?" So that's fully cultural, past the mandatory typing though. I think it's a good culture to build, it's extremely important.
+
+**Rachel White:** I agree. Tracy, or I guess either of you... What are some codebases that you've used that you are increasingly impressed by how they handle their documentation?
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** For me, honestly... In JavaScript I was trying to chat with some people today about what they were inspired by, but I'm still blow away by MDN and the process for that, because they also make it so incredibly easy to contribute back to it, which I think is incredibly important, because a lot of people - and I learned this painfully, early - forget that docs are living and that there's bugs, and they need to be fixed... Right?
+
+You're just like, "I assume, very naively, that oh... It's the documentation, it's correct, so I must be doing something wrong." And then I found out very quickly that that wasn't the case. So that's tough, and that's in JavaScript, right?
+
+Django, you know... [James Socol](https://jamessocol.com/) was giving a great talk earlier this week - and he and I were both in Python before... You know, it's tough to beat that when it comes to that level of project - you've got versioning, I believe you have it in multiple languages, which I think we'll talk about a little bit later... You know, spoken languages...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** There's also a book... There's the Django book too, right?
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah..
+
+**Alex Sexton:** ...that gets updated along with the code, I think. Python has ReadTheDocs.io, right? Isn't that a thing?
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Oh, yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Kind of like a central repository for different projects docs. I think npm kind of becomes that for a lot of JavaScript projects, because you write the readme with the docs in it, and then npm hosts it, and you end up hitting the npm homepage... But the ReadTheDocs thing is nice, because it's versioned, and all that kind of stuff. So you can kind of go back in time and see what the docs were for your version... They may be more uniform, as well...
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, I've used ReadTheDocs at least at one company, and especially it was because the founder, Eric Holscher - we worked together at Urban Airship, so we were using that... We were dogfooding it quite a bit. It was great. I'm not super stoked about writing RST, I much prefer markdown, but in terms of that, it's really useful. The documentation in ReadTheDocs is incredible... They're at least practicing what they preach.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I agree. MDN is a really good example of just something that has persisted over time and continuously gets better. I know Janet Swisher out in Austin is, I believe, full-time on MDN. I believe there are other people that are full-time doc writers for MDN, so... Once your company gets big enough, it definitely makes sense to hire technical writers and spend a lot of time putting effort into making it better and better.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah.
+
+**Rachel White:** And communicating with the technical writers, not just giving them code and being like "Have fun!" \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah.
+
+**Rachel White:** ...as I say with resentment, and Tracy knows why. \[laughter\] I wanna bring up Johnny-Five as an example for a special exception to documentation... Not because I'm biased and I love NodeBots -- well, yeah, I am biased and I do love NodeBots, but I think that the reason that I love NodeBots so much is because of how good the documentation is.
+
+\[16:26\] It touches on the API for using it, it gives you visual diagrams on how to use it, there's code examples for so many different microcontrollers... So you can come into it with so many different ways of your preferred learning style, and there's something there for everybody, and... I don't know. I think that's probably my favorite. It makes me very happy.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm gonna toot Stripe's own horn a little bit, but Stripe is pretty well known for good documentation of their API, which is a little different than what we're talking about... But as a company, if you have something that people have to integrate into their software, you need pretty good documentation on that.
+
+And one thing that Stripe does - that a lot of people still don't do, but people catch on to every once in a while - is if you have a Stripe account and you're logged into it, there's a bunch of data that you have that's specific to you, and you have your test keys and all that stuff to hit the API... So if you then go to the documentation page and you're still logged in, all of the docs are kind of automatically made specific to you. So any of the documentation calls - if it's a curl or a Ruby call or anything; you can look at it in different languages - you can just copy and paste it and run it, and it is correct for your user, and the data that we show you that it returns is the data from your actual account, with some scraping.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Wow.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So it actually makes it to where all of the documentation is kind of living, in the sense that it's actually making calls - to some extent; we don't make charges every time you look at the charge page, but it really brings people into a quick, firm understanding of what they need to send and what they need to come back, because they can copy and paste and verify that the data looks the same, and all that kind of stuff. That's been really successful for us, and I would encourage everyone to steal that idea.
+
+**Rachel White:** I encourage everyone to steal that idea, too. It would make everybody's life easier.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, that sounds amazing.
+
+**Rachel White:** That's what happens when you write good documentation - it encourages people to have a good connection with your product or what you're trying to get people to use, and then they'll tell other people about how great it is to use... So there's really no excuse for having bad documentation, other than... I don't know.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** It's work! \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, other than that it's work.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** It's a lot of work... \[laughter\] It's like whether you're doing the right thing, and you have \[unintelligible 00:19:01.19\] to do it.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, true.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** I mean, I'm saying that that's an excuse sometimes. Sometimes there's just not enough hours in the day, unfortunately. And that seems like it's often the first thing to go.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's also true that in your first iteration of your application (or business or whatever you're documenting), the documentation kind of flows out because you have such a small service area, and you don't have any -- I mean, it's kind of like greenfield in code, you just write whatever you want. But as soon as you update something, now you have to manage both the old and the new, and then you update more, and the service area grows, and by the time you're 3.0, the docs are massive, all the examples are out of date... It's kind of a snowball of work. You would assume that since... You kind of touched on this before, Tracy, that docs are living and you have to keep updating them, because the code -- even if the code wasn't changing, you'd probably still need to continuously make them better. But the code is changing, so you have to keep updating them based on the changes in the code and making them better, all while not breaking anyone's workflow, or anything like that.
+
+\[20:13\] So the work actually increases over time. It feel like, "Oh, I wrote all the docs. Now I only have to do little updates in the future", but I feel like it kind of is this early big spike, and then it drops off, and then over time it far surpasses... Eventually you're a massive -- if you're successful and you have 12 people full-time, documentation writers and programmers and all that kind of stuff.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, the living dark situation is definitely -- I found it to be a problem that people don't make that-- or if there's a mixed, like a conflict in manage expectations, because I think there was for a time... James Snell spent an exorbitant amount of time updating a lot of the docs (I believe it was at the beginning of this year) for Node. Part of that was that there had been a ton of updates and releases... And people aren't pulling open source code for Node now; they're looking at the docs, which you would expect from a mature project, but the docs weren't keeping up quick enough, so then you had people arguing, saying "No, this is what the docs say", and I'd be like "The docs are out of date." We're working on it, but that's really tough, you know?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, for sure. One way to try to fight against that that accidentally occurs somewhat in that thing I was talking about at Stripe where we run actual calls to code to try to generate the example output of our API endpoints is that we have to build the docs and run tests against all of the different calls. Essentially, if we have docs that make a call that is no longer compatible with our API, the tests will fail. So we may not have new information in there, but we can - and 'guarantee' is a very poor word to use here - somewhat try to check with tests that all of our documentation continues to currently run.
+
+All documentation should have an example and it should have a known output, and you should run all of those examples as tests, and if that output no longer matches, then you need to update the docs and the tests should fail. So that can be not insanely difficult. As long as you can extract out the examples from the documentation and run them separately, then that feels like a pretty simple few lines of running all of the examples files in the example folder, or something. Give it a shot.
+
+**Rachel White:** Alright, I think it's time for a break. When we come back, we'll be talking about non-blocking UI rendering.
+
+**Break:** \[22:57\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And we're back. During this next section, we're going to be talking a little bit about maybe a segment light about concurrency in the UI thread, or non-blocking rendering techniques to make the browser not lag whenever you try to do things or render things (render other things) or scroll.
+
+\[24:00\] We've talked a lot in the past about maybe network performance, and we talked somewhat last week about _Isomorphic JavaScript_. As a refresher, _Isomorphic JavaScript_ is a name that was given to code that renders on the server and the client by [Spike Brehm](https://www.linkedin.com/in/spikebrehm) at Airbnb back in the Backbone days when we used to do it the hard way. So _Isomorphic JavaScript_ refers to JavaScript that you can render on the server, and then whenever the page renders, the frontend code "rehydrates" (this is the word we use) all of the nodes that are already in the DOM, and then things start working, magically.
+
+So you have a server side render, you get SEO, you get fast rendering. You might not get fast thing to work, so if your JavaScript still takes a really long time to parse and execute then none of your buttons work yet, but maybe your links do, or something like that; it'd be cool.
+
+The last section of that is more along the lines of in-app... Like, during the execution of the application and the use of the application, we still do a lot of rendering and re-rendering. And React was pretty big -- so in the Backbone days you would say "There was a change in my view. Let me kill off the HTML" -- or like, either you did it by hand, like with jQuery, you updated something, or you said "Let me kill everything in this entire view", and then inject all new HTML into there. That as sad for many reasons, especially performance and layout and all sorts of things.
+
+In the React world, the whole magic was the virtual DOM. You did a DOM diff on the virtual DOM - the previous state, the new state, and then you'd only re-render the parts that changed, and that was a pretty big deal.
+
+But we still are in a world where a lot of times you're switching pages, right? You click on the menu button and the URL changes, and you render a totally different page with almost -- like, only the menus match. DOM diffing doesn't do much for you there, because the whole DOM is a diff. Actually, in early React, in early Ember versions of this DOM diffing stuff for large refresh page changes like this were a big problem, because so many things would mismatch the diff that it actually became faster to just replace the HTML instead of actually going into each individual place and updating... Like, "Let's change this span to a div" and then update every single attribute on it to be something else, and then update all the content inside of it, rather than just pulling it all away and throwing in new code.
+
+So where I think we're headed in this interesting space that is coming out of the need for faster, lighter-weight, cooler animations and all sorts of stuff is concurrency and non-blocking, and piecemeal rendering. So we have the native little API in the browser called requestAnimationFrame. requestAnimationFrame is a tick, right? It says "Every 12 milliseconds I'm gonna call you." Pretty regularly, but much better than setTimeout, or setInterval, or whatever is gonna do. Those can vary wildly in timing. But if you do a requestAnimationFrame, you get every 12 milliseconds. That way you can get 60 fps. If you do an animation that works inside the requestAnimationFrame, then you can get a 60 fps animation.
+
+When we're talking about rendering, much like you want to fit any animation you're doing inside of the requestAnimationFrame 12-millisecond block, you wanna fit any rendering that you're doing in your page inside that block as well, otherwise you're going to stop that requestAnimationFrame from being able to be called. You're going to stop the browser from being able to scroll smoothly; you're gonna stop anything that is in the UI thread - the rendering, the layout, all that stuff - from being able to happen, until you're done running your code.
+
+\[28:13\] In React, a lot of times we have DOM diffs and things like that and re-renders that take a lot more than 12 milliseconds. So even though we have this fast, cool virtual DOM diffing thing, we're in a situation where we're lagging the browser and we're causing jank and all that kind of stuff because of the rendering style... And it will take 30 milliseconds to render everything, or 300 milliseconds if it's crazy.
+
+So the future here, I think, is in concurrent or non-blocking rendering engines. React has been working for a long time on this - it's called React Fiber. Other engines are also working on this... There's Ember Concurrency, which is not only for rendering; it can be doing other things. You're doing less than the UI thread, but it's not necessarily a piecemeal rendering of the DOM. But there's a good gist that I'll put in the show notes about what React Fiber is, when you can expect it... There's a talk at React Next 2016. There's a team at Facebook that works on React, and they've been researching how to make this good for like two years, and it's finally pretty close.
+
+The first version will be completely backwards-compatible, and then in the future they'll kind of like start adding more primitives for deferred updates. You can also imagine, you wanna update something that takes longer than a frame of time to do, and then you wanna update it again before it's even done, so you actually end up with this big, long stack of things that has to pop off each time, and it blocks... So if you're gonna change something and you haven't got to it yet, and then you give it another event to change it, it will just throw away the middle thing and be able to just go straight to the ending. All sorts of advanced architecture for rendering like that, which really brings JavaScript rendering much closer to the way that it happens on native devices, which I think should make performance a lot better. I just talked for a lot of minutes...
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I enjoy the "Is Fiber Ready Yet?" (isfiberreadyyet.com) This is like the most helpful site for a technology that's going to be available soon but isn't, because it shows you all of the things that have been done already for passing tests, and then the ones that are close.
+
+Oh god, there's children crying. Sorry...
+
+Then there's also the failing ones, so if people were involved in it and wanted to fix it, they probably could. That's pretty neat.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. And kind of harkening back to the documentation thing, the site IsSomethingReadyYet - it goes back all the way to AreWeFastYet (probably the first one), and it was Firefox trying to catch up their rendering engine to V8 and Safari and stuff like that, I think... Or any of the SpiderMonkey versus V8, and stuff like that.
+
+But then there was one for docs too, right? Do you remember? In order to get MDN listed above the W3Schools sites, it's like AreWeFirstYet -- that was it... AreWeFastYet and then AreWeFirstYet, and then there was kind of an explosion of AreWeSomethingYet. IsFiberReadyYet is a good one, too. Anyway, that was a tangent.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, while you were talking, I was trying to figure out -- I am always curious to see when something like this is coming along if there's like a not-framework version of it, because I came from the tiny percentage of people who were trying to write JavaScript without using a major framework, which turns into the no-framework framework... But I'm not seeing any incremental rendering packages that would be worth... I'd love to hear about it if somebody knows about it \[laughs\].
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[32:09\] The idea of incremental rendering assumes you're doing -- maybe the reason why is because it assumes you're already using a library to do batch rendering, right? So it's kind of like a thing to undo a thing you added.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Right, and also there might just be too much going on.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Honestly, if you're from the world of web components and "let the web APIs do everything" and all that stuff, where you're rendering HTML and CSS inside web components and they work before the JavaScript executes, the browsers already do rendering in this way. That would probably be your answer - don't use any framework... Use web components I think would be the standard's small, no-library version of this... Or very similar, I think.
+
+**Rachel White:** Right. We're gonna go to another break.
+
+**Break:** \[33:07\]
+
+**Rachel White:** So we're back! Next, we're gonna talk to Tracy about what it is like to work for the Node Foundation, what's going on with Node, what does she do - she's just gonna tell us all these good things about her job and the community. So tell us what it is that you do exactly for the Node Foundation.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Oh my goodness, okay. So I am the education community manager... I get to wear a bunch of different hats. It's sort of along the lines of what people -- a lot of people don't realize what the Node Foundation does or what it's like to work full-time in open source.
+
+A couple things I'd like to say first is that there is not as much coding as you would imagine, and sometimes that's sad... But a lot of the focus is around people, and sort of working on helping people collaborate together, especially when it's really tough for them to do so. The other part of that - the Node Foundation itself is this mass of different groups that work together.
+
+There's the Node Project itself, which is comprised of the TSC, which is the Technical Steering Committee. Under that (I believe that's the way it's structured) is the CTC - Core Technical Committee. Those are people who are working on the codebases in different working groups for the code that makes Node run, as well as documentation, evangelism and things like translation.
+
+Then there's the Community Committee, which is very newly chartered. That is a place that was created that I helped get chartered at the beginning of this year, after we'd worked on it for quite some time, to give voice to community. So that's really interesting, because a lot of programming foundations don't have that level of voice.
+
+\[36:01\] Community is a very weird, ambiguous, handwavy word because it's communities - it's a whole ecosystem of groups around the world, and it can be people who are writing npm packages, or it could be projects like Express, or... The TSC is part of the community, as well. Then you have all of these events, like Node School and NodeBots, who have helped keep Node a thing.
+
+When their code isn't changing a lot or we're not really hearing a lot from the core project itself, there are people who are still around the world, using this in production, and using this for fun, and they still need to learn this code, so those communities are really helping keep that there.
+
+That's nice, because advocation also fits in there. As we're growing the foundation -- there's also the board. The board is this group of corporate members and representatives from individual members of Node, who come together on a monthly basis and work together in between those meetings, to sort of figure out and support the project the way it needs to. Their responsibility is more towards legal, making sure that the foundation is protected - because I think a lot of people don't realize that as individual programmers, we put license on things for a reason, and part of that is that you can be sued. Some of that liability is provided by the foundation... That and administrative stuff; helping to encourage companies that they should have people who are writing Node full-time in their offices. And that's really nice, because that means that a lot of us have jobs working in that, because that can be hard to come by in other programming languages, and I think a lot of people take that for granted.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I was gonna say... We work together, IBM Watson, and you were trying to help shape a lot of the community stuff while we were there. And then when you had the opportunity to join the Node Foundation, it just seemed like a perfect fix. I know how much you generally - or not generally, GENUINELY - care about users and community, and fostering growth of people that want to further just get more people interested, and then also help strengthen what's already there.
+
+So I guess touching on that, what kind of things do you do at the Node Foundation to maybe help spread the word about Node to existing developers that may not be familiar with it, and to people that are starting out? Because isn't Node the largest-growing open source community that we have right now, out of any language?
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** By sheer numbers, yes. There's all these different ways to measure it. It can be like interest... Node - a lot of people are really interested in writing it, and there's like a volume of people... Just by that quantity, Node is really popular. Then there's really cool orgs like Rust, that are doing a really great job with community and documentation and teaching, but there's just way less humans in that so far.
+
+For us, it's that we have this great opportunity and a lot of people wanna learn, but we have to make sure that -- as we've grown, we have to be more deliberate about what we're doing, because we're not just growing to grow.
+
+We want the codebase to be good, we want it to be stable, we want more people to wanna contribute, so that it sustains itself, and part of that is making it a better place to hang out and participate, and also making it easier to write that code.
+
+\[40:09\] There are concepts in Node that can get incredibly complicated and the learning curve can get steeper, but you have to know how to write JavaScript to write Node, and I don't think learning JavaScript is that difficult either, but there is definitely a lot of places that we can work and improve, both in JavaScript onboarding, as well as Node onboarding, to make that better.
+
+A lot of this year for me, the roadmap that I wrote out for education, is education and community. We need to work on the Getting Started. There are other programming languages I'm really envious of, because it's a huge investment. You have to spend time on multiple people working on this, on writing curriculum, on writing getting started guides, on working on the website so that it is easily discoverable to find these things and having it in official places.
+
+Again, a conversation I was having this week was around supporting the community in a better way. We notice that our online chat mediums like Slack and IRC, the survey data showed us that most people don't think that it's good quality, but they don't know where else to go to have that kind of interaction to get help. So I had a really enlightening conversation with the Community Committee yesterday about maybe, instead of choosing Slack or IRC as an investment for that, that the problem is not so much -- we need a place to go hang, and talk about LeCroy... It's like, we need a place where we can go ask questions about Node and get an answer that helps us, so it's support. It's actually like what companies are using, right? Some companies use Slack, some use IRC, but if you have questions and you need to learn, who do you go to? Not everyone has an awesome network of developers that they can ask questions to, so we need to figure out a way to provide that.
+
+**Rachel White:** That is a good point. I think that it's interesting to point out too that you can be a contributor to shape the Node ecosystem without contributing code. One thing that I have always appreciated with what the Node community does is they just want everybody to help; they want people that can be technical writers for stuff, they want people that have done community building before or have done evangelism before, to just come in and make things more welcoming. By doing that, I think that the codebase will eventually be able to be more accessible to a lot of entry-level or more junior people, as well.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, this is something that we -- everyone talks about like "We need better docs." Well, there's only so many hours in the day, and a lot of times the people who need to be writing those docs are the people who are also writing that code. The person writing that documentation needs to understand what they're writing about, so it's really tough because we need to find a way, as you've said, to include more people with the talents that they have.
+
+Technical writing is a really special skill, and we need more of that. We could also use project managers, we could also use designers, because design is a better user experience. It's also aesthetically more pleasing to people, and it can attract people to a project, it can also help display information in a different way than just words on a page... And then there's folks who maybe have a skill in technical writing via translation, because that's not just gonna be copying and pasting and changing out the words, it's the nuance of the different languages that you've got there as well. And we need all of that, and so many projects need this.
+
+\[44:28\] You need to start approaching it from the point that of course developers are important to the project, they're writing code, but maybe we've ignored the other roles for a bit. So it's nice to be able to have this making space for everyone there, and saying that "We need all of you."
+
+**Rachel White:** Definitely.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Node can be a little bit difficult to jump right in, even if you wanna write docs and you're a good technical writer, but maybe a good advice is that there's a long tail of projects, and Node's documentation is better than, let's say, 99.5% of them, or something like that. There is a project that you use every day that you know well that needs better documentation, so if you wanna just get your feet wet, go try to submit a pull request that's just docs for someone. I can tell you as someone who maintains a few libraries, I immediately merge every pull request that looks like that... Unless the information is wrong or whatever, but then I just work with the person.
+
+But it's so helpful when other people come and help on your project. So if you have projects - even multi-thousand star GitHub projects have some lacking documentation, and it's pretty rare for someone to just say like "No, I don't want more information on how to use this." So get your feet wet there, and then work your way up the ladder, if you want.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, I mean the first thing that I look for when people are asking to help out with education is - and that's a little secret - I go and look at their repos and see if they've documented anything, and see how they're writing that out. I can just tell so much more about your project if you've documented it, and if there's no documentation, I think that also says something, too... And maybe unintentionally, but if you know enough at least that you've accepted pull requests from people who wanted to help you, you're encouraging people to help maintain projects, and you're doing a better job too, as a maintainer.
+
+**Rachel White:** I was talking on muted, but I said "Definitely." So what is in your future for the rest of the year? Other than all of the things that we've just talked about, are you gonna be going to conferences to try and help out? Because I know you were doing a lot with that last year. What are you gonna be involved with for the rest of the year that we see going forward?
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Well, the big focus right now - my world is very much centered around shipping the Node certification. This sounds a little backwards, but after that it's going to be focusing more on Getting Started in Node, and making sure that these resources for people to get to the point where they feel like they're confident in taking the certification exam - we have to make sure that that's in place. And also looking towards programs that are providing these things.
+
+Informal education is how most people have learned Node up until this point, and there are exceptions to that, such as training, but community colleges, universities - they're not really teaching it. There is a very small subset of code schools who are teaching Node as well. I love JavaScript, I love full-stack JavaScript, I love the luxury of not having to context-switch, so I wanna see more people be able to do that, because I really do think that that helps more people learn. So that's the rest of my year, among many other things.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[48:18\] Cool, alright. Well, I think that's gonna be all that we're gonna talk about for our segments, and now we're gonna move on over to our picks of the week. Alex, do you wanna go first?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'd love to go first. My pick this week is called Prettier. It's by James Long (JLongster). He put out Prettier a little while ago... It is a code formatter. Much to everyone's surprise, there are a lot of code format checkers, ESLint and stuff like that, or there used to be JSCS, and JSHint would do some of it... But there wasn't anything that could take JavaScript and absolutely always perfectly re-render that JavaScript in the exact way that you wanted it to be rendered based on your rules.
+
+There's some prior art with GoFormat and ReFormat - that's from Rust, or something... Anyways, it is a code formatter, and it just went 1.0. It's actually already in use by a bunch of very important -- let's see: React, Jest, immutable-js, Haul, Oculus, Cloudflare, I think Facebook uses it... A ton of people already use this and it's not very old. So it just went 1.0, it just gained the ability to have some options around whether you want semi-colons and a few other different things, which really sparked some 2009 conversations on Twitter... But regardless, I think it will end up being a pretty standard tool that everyone just includes. And you can kind of get rid of the notion that anyone could ever commit any code that didn't follow your style guide. It's cool.
+
+**Rachel White:** Tracy, you can go next.
+
+**Tracy Hinds:** Sure, okay. My pick is Free Code Camp, and I think at this point a lot of people have run into it in some way or another. They're producing so much content which I find really helpful, they have really great blog posts... But in itself, it's sort of an online bootcamp and it has a ridiculous amount of coding challenges. I like the way that they've set it up, because it really allows people who are starting from nothing or next to nothing in terms of programming knowledge, and it builds you up with structured challenges. You can actually build up to getting certifications for frontend and backend and dataviz.
+
+\[50:58\] Once you've met all of those hours - and this is free, as far as I can tell; I've not experienced a paywall of any sort - you get to move on to working on real-world projects, pair-programming with somebody else who's at the same point that you are. And this includes - you get agile user stories, so you have to learn about that, which I think is really valuable for getting a job. And the work that you're doing is on real non-profits who have requested this work happen for websites or their apps. After that you get a certification. The team at FreeCodeCamp is actually helping you with interviewing challenges as well as part of this, and I think at the point where you're done with this, you have over 2,000 hours of work invested in this, so it's not a joke.
+
+I love how it covers the full range of skills and challenges that you would face as a programmer getting started, so I think this is really powerful.
+
+**Rachel White:** Alright, my pick of the week is actually from Stripe, and it's not me sucking up to Alex. They are starting this new digital magazine publication called Increment, and the editor-in-chief is Susan Fowler, who we know left Uber and is now going to be working on this publication that is essentially going to be a quarterly publication that deals with the ins and outs of writing code and dealing with distributed systems, and the interactions between teams and version control and code reviews...
+
+I think that it is going to be really interesting and really insightful to people that may stick to their one siloed team and don't necessarily interact with other teams, to get a really insightful and exciting way to find out how good, effective teams are structured and can work together successfully.
+
+That's it for this week, we're done!

Inside Node 8, Glitch, Building a Community Around Education_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,359 @@
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Hey, welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript. I'm Mikeal Rogers...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm Alex Sexton...
+
+**Jessica Lord:** I'm Jessica Lord
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Jessica is filling in for Rachel this week, because she's at the conference. It's awesome.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** I've already failed! \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We're lucky enough to have her back. And our first topic today is the release of Node.js version 8 - not to be confused with V8 the engine - and to talk about that we've got a guest on, James Snell. Why don't you say hello, James?
+
+**James Snell:** Hey, how's it going, everybody?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No one answered him... \[laughter\]
+
+**James Snell:** It's going well, James... Really well. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Doing well...
+
+**James Snell:** That's good!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, so James is actually now the director of the TSC; he sits on the board of directors for the Node.js Foundation... But why don't you tell us a bit about what is in Node.js version 8?
+
+**James Snell:** Oh, there's lots of stuff in version 8.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We're gonna need more details than that. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Alright, we'll see you next week. It was nice talking to you all. \[laughter\]
+
+**James Snell:** As I said, it's one of the largest major releases we've had in quite a while.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I mean, 8 is at least two bigger than 6, and it's way more than 4.
+
+**James Snell:** Oh yeah, it's twice as big as four. I think there were somewhere around just over 150 semver major commits in this one, so it's actually pretty significant. A number of the high points is we have what should be the final API for async hooks. They're still experimental, but that's there... There is the new util.promisify() function which we can talk about... There is the Node N-API, the evolved version of the native abstractions for Node that actually allows ABI stability across Node versions, which is really cool...
+
+We have some other things like WHATWG URL implementation; it's not officially supported, no longer experimental... And a number of other things, but those are probably the most significant new things.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Dig into that N-API thing a little bit, because it's like behind a flag, and stuff like that. Tell us a bit more about that in detail.
+
+**James Snell:** N-API - the whole purpose of it is to allow native add-on developers to write to an API that is going to remain stable, that is guaranteed to remain stable across Node versions.
+
+\[03:58\] Previously, if you were writing a native add-on, you were writing to the V8 API, so you were writing to the native abstractions for Node, the nan tool. The problem with those is that every time V8 changes its API, you end up having to recompile. Every time you install a new version of Node - a new major version - you end up having to recompile.
+
+The new N-API is really designed to make it so that a native add-on can be written once and used across multiple versions of Node without recompiling on a single system. It's even possible to write a module that works both against the V8 version of Node and the Chakra Core version of Node... So not just different versions of the V8 engine, but a completely different engine altogether.
+
+The idea is to reduce maintenance costs and development costs over time, and make it significantly easier to actually build and deploy and use these native add-ons. It's pretty exciting.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** That's interesting... I have a question - maybe it's unrelated. I wonder if this will help Electron development at all.
+
+**James Snell:** It should. I'm not very familiar with what native modules Electron is using, but it should. Anything that interfaces with the native layer should be helped significantly by this. It should allow those modules to become more stable over time, and it should allow the upgrade experience to be far less irritating. You don't have to do an npm install and rebuild every single time you update your Node version.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think the big thing with Electron too isn't that it is using native modules, it's that when you use native modules in your Electron app, they need to be pointed at the version of Node that goes into the Electron app, not the one that you're using on the command line. So yeah, this will definitely help that, because...
+
+**Jessica Lord:** But it's also that Electron sometimes breaks ABI because it has to patch Node to work with that V8, since V8's moving faster. I think that's also a problem. Maybe if ABI is getting more stable in general, maybe it helps everybody.
+
+**James Snell:** Yeah, that's the goal. The whole reason N-API exists is because a year ago we started taking a look at what we were gonna do with Node Chakra Core and how we were going to enable the module ecosystem to remain stable as we go through this effort of enabling other VMs. So it's just the problems of different versions of the same VM changing ABI. We were really determined that the first step before we really went down that path was we had to provide a stable ABI that would be guaranteed to remain stable even across different versions of these VMs.
+
+I think as we go down this path - it's still very early - it will make things like Electron development easier. We have ways to go.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It says in the release notes here that you did a bunch of good stuff around Promises. Can you tell me a bit about that?
+
+**James Snell:** The key thing with Promises -- there's two things in particular. There's this new util.promisify() which will take generally any callback style async API - so if you think of like fs.readFile, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That error-first thing...
+
+**James Snell:** Yeah, anything that takes the error first and then some set of arguments afterwards - it will take that and automatically wrap it in a function that is Promise-enabled. If you do util.promisify() fs.readFile, then you'll get a Promise back -- a function that returns a Promise back that you can use with async/Await and that kind of thing.
+
+\[08:00\] It works probably for 80%-90% of the functions, the callback-receiving functions in Node. For the ones that don't quite fit the pattern, like fs.exists, for instance, that doesn't have that error-first pattern, there is a way of customizing the source function, so that you can customize the way that that Promise is made, so that it'll still work. We are going through a number of different functions within core and adding this customization. Right now there's a couple that don't quite work, and we're working on fixing those. But it's also something that any other module that wants to use util.promisify(), they should be able to do the exact same thing. It's pretty exciting.
+
+The other thing we did with Promises is we made it so that for a native Promise it is now domain-aware. The domains module has been deprecated for a while, but it's still used; there's still lots of people that use it. Now inside your cache you can actually access the current domain; it's relatively minor, but it is important.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Did that change go in, that everybody was freaking out about, about the throwing on uncaught rejection, that whole thing?
+
+**James Snell:** No, that has not landed yet. The reason for that is we still have not settled on any kind of consensus on what that action should be. The biggest thing that we've identified right now is that when an unhandled rejection occurs, that there should at least be a process warning emitted that has the original stack trace. It is possible to do that right now using the --trace-warning argument, but what we wanna do is change it so that by default it just shows that stack trace when those happen.
+
+The challenge with anything that we do here is that the Promises model really leaves it up to the host environment to figure something out, and any path we go down doesn't quite fit well within the model. We either end up with a high number of false positives and rejections that are handled later, and we don't quite know when they're not gonna be handled, or just things where people intentionally aren't handling them and there shouldn't be any worrying at all because that's what the developer wanted.
+
+So it's really difficult to figure those things out and see what we need to do there. At this point we've settled on "Let's not do anything yet, until we figure it out more."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So pulling us out of the weeds a little bit here... I've seen a lot of people throw around this V8 TurboFan+Ignition thing in the compiler pipeline, and it gets thrown around a lot, and it's like a magic performance sauce that everybody's kind of throwing everything -- can you explain what this actually means and what it does to people's code?
+
+**James Snell:** Okay, so right now what's inside V8 - you have the compiler, and you optimize with the compiler: it takes the JavaScript and compiles it down to bytecode, optimizes it and does a number of tricks to make it faster. The TurboFan+Ignition is just a new compiler and a new optimizer inside V8, and for most people, whether you're using the old Crankshaft stuff or the news stuff, there's just not gonna be any impact, you're not gonna see any difference. But the new compiler and optimizer is really geared towards optimizing the new language features, so things like class, or spread arguments, or any of the new language features. Crankshaft - which was the old optimizer - just wasn't set up to handle these new language features very well at all. The new toolchain will make it so that those things can actually perform decently going forward. For most people, they won't see a difference.
+
+\[11:45\] The code that is going to see a significant difference is code that has been highly, highly optimized to take advantage of quirks in the old Crankshaft optimizer. We have some examples of this in Node core itself, where we actually will unroll for loops in order to make it faster. What that means is instead of just going through the entire loop every time, we'll see "Does this thing only have one item or two items or three items?" and we will special-case handling those, and then loop only if none of the other more optimized cases apply. Under Crankshaft it ends up being significantly faster.
+
+Code that is highly optimized for Crankshaft could actually end up running slower under TurboFan, because a lot of those optimization tricks are not longer there or are being done a completely different way.
+
+We shouldn't see code break, we shouldn't see any existing stuff just stop working, but we could see a very different performance profile under the new tool chain once we enable that. That's where the biggest difference people will see is - just the performance of their applications will change.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Particularly with ES6, right?
+
+**James Snell:** Oh, yeah. Any new JavaScript features should become significantly faster.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and async/await is in here too, right? I think it was also in version 7, but this is the first one that's scheduled to go into LTS; there's a lot more users coming onto it. So async/await is starting to become a feature that you can just kind of depend on.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** ...in Node.
+
+**James Snell:** Yeah, in Node. There's efforts right now even to explore allowing async/await in the repl, so just on the command line, being able to do await, and -- there's quite a few things that are being looked at, figuring out how to make it more useful. Util.promisify() is gonna go a long way towards making that useful.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You said there were like a ton of major changes... A lot of those are breaks, and not these feature ads... So what are the things that were broken?
+
+**James Snell:** I'm kind of going through the list right now... Buffer num now zero fills by default, if you call a new buffer. It's not really so much breaking as in functionality, but breaking in terms of performance; it's significantly slower.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But safer.
+
+**James Snell:** Yeah, significantly safer. I'm kind of looking through some of these others... Most of the breaking changes -- we mark them SemVer major largely for defensive purposes... It could break, it doesn't necessarily definitely break. For example, in child process we're doing more argument validation. Before it was pretty loose in terms of validating the input arguments, and now it'll throw if you pass in the wrong things.
+
+Same thing with some of the crypto arguments... There's a few deprecations in here, a few new things that users really shouldn't have been using in the first place, that we're only using internally, like SyncRight stream I think is one of them -- it's always been there, but it was always intended to be just an internal only thing. We now have runtime deprecation on that.
+
+A lot of these are changes to error messages. We have to treat error message changes as semver major in core because people actually parse error messages to determine what happened. So what we're doing is we're going through and adding new static error codes to all these, so that if you wanna know what error actually occurred, you'll just have to look at the code and you can ignore the message.
+
+Once we make that change, we'll be handling error message changes as semver minors or patches, and only changes to the error code or error type will be semver major. That will be a big change coming up soon. We've started that process of migrating those now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I find that I can't think of a project or a company that I've been at that didn't eventually hit that point where it's like "Maybe we should stop allowing users to rely on regex to know what went wrong in the application, and give them some solid code." It also matters a lot for internationalization whenever you want errors in other languages and stuff, so... Good work.
+
+**James Snell:** \[16:13\] Yeah, like I said, there's over 150 of these here, so...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** If you're more like my end and doing less -- I mean, I do plain Node applications, but if you're more of a web developer and you use it as a build chain, are you gonna notice speed improvements, are you gonna notice nothing? Is there something that sticks out, like a less server-y person might recognize if they just upgrade?
+
+**James Snell:** From that point of view, no. I think it should be pretty straightforward. There are a few things that should improve usability... Right now, if you're using a set of tools and some dependency on those tools uses a deprecated API, it's very common for people to see all these deprecation warnings appear in their console output. Those can be turned off now, or you can actually redirect all of those warnings to a file using an environment variable or a command line argument. So it's actually possible for folks that are using Node as part of their tool chain to make Node be less noisy. That should be a good thing.
+
+Overall, performance should be roughly the same as what we had under 7. There's some things that are faster, there's some things that are slower, but on average it's the same.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Did 7 get a lot faster than 6? I think most of us stick to the even numbers...
+
+**James Snell:** Yeah, there have been some improvements. Some things are faster, some things are slower. What we're seeing is -- some of the slowdown is actually caused by V8 - these changes that are being done in the optimizer underneath. Node - this goes back to the early conversation about TurboFan - uses a lot of code that's highly optimized for Crankshaft; that turns out it actually runs us a little bit slower under the newer version, the VM... And we're actually gonna have to go through and update some of those things to make sure that they run faster as we start to switch over.
+
+So you'll see some variance there. Some things will run significantly faster, some things will run actually quite a bit slower.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** I saw a tweet the other day - which I don't think I'll be able to find - about how many people had already downloaded Node 8. Do you feel like they're -- \[laughter\] I mean, I don't even know... I saw on its own, and I'm like "Is this a good number?" Are a lot of people still on really old Nodes, or are you seeing a lot of movement on people getting on this version?
+
+**James Snell:** I think people will get on this version very quickly. It's still too early to tell for sure, but I think within a single day it was 105,000, or something like that. I'll have to take a look at the latest numbers. What we're finding is that most of the downloads occur on the LTS versions.
+
+If you look at version 6, for instance, as soon as it went LTS, the number of downloads spiked significantly. It's still the most downloaded version out there right now, by an extremely large margin. During the first six months of 6's life, version 4 was the highest. And as soon as 6 became the LTS, people were downloading it, and the downloads for all the other versions dropped off.
+
+If you look at version 7, it's not an LTS version - it's newer than 6, it had async/await - its downloads were significantly lower than 6 still. So I think what you'll find is that as soon as 8 goes LTS...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** When is that?
+
+**James Snell:** That's gonna be in October... Then is when the downloads for 8 will really start to take off and it will become the predominant version.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[19:55\] I was looking at these graphs the other day actually, and one of the really nice things about them is that really old versions of Node are going away quicker. There's a floor that you can't kind of go below because a bunch of CI just tests against older versions, but we can be fairly confident that people aren't really relying on them very much anymore. Downloads really floored out for 0.10 and 0.12, and they've even come down quite a bit for version 4.
+
+We were comparing the numbers earlier, that 100k mark... When we do releases of 6, they peak out at around 800k in a day. So already on day 1 you're at an eighth of the market share for the last LTS line. Then by the time that we hit that six-month mark, it is a big shift.
+
+Alright, I think that that covers Node 8. We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back we're gonna talk a little bit about edumacation. Stick around.
+
+**Break**: \[21:05\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Let's get into this Glit \[laughter\] -- Glitch "raise your hand" feature...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Nailed it. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... Jessica, do you wanna walk us through how this feature works and what's interesting about it?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** \[laughs\] Yes, alright. First of all, if you haven't heard of Glitch director/browser to Glitch.com, Glitch is this really awesome IDE coming out of FogCreek. Jen Schiffer is the community engineer there, and it is all the things - I'll try not to spend too much time just gushing about it... It's an in-browser IDE; you can have multiple people editing the code at the same time, but it's also free hosting, and it's free hosting with a Node server. Everything you build, you get free Node hosting, and then similar to like forking a project on GitHub, you can remix a project on Glitch.
+
+Glitch really wants to lower the barrier for entry, and building things on the web and making it fun. I think last week they released a new feature for getting help called "raise your hand." If you go to Glitch.com, you'll see at the top of the page it says "Help others - get thanks" That will show you if anybody has any questions at the time. What it lets you do is anywhere that you're editing code in a Glitch project, if you highlight some lines of code, you'll get an icon with the emoji handraiser, and you can click it and you can describe your problem and it will go to this section on the homepage.
+
+Then anyone who wants to help people who are learning and working on projects on Glitch can go and see who's asking for help. When you respond to someone in need, it'll ask that person to give you access to their project, and then you can get in and start coding with them.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[24:03\] I would like to request from the community that someone make a Chrome plugin that switches the "raise your hand" to a David S. Pumpkins icon -- I don't know if you guys watch this or not, but... \[laughter\] "Any questionsss...?" \[laughter\] Really solid.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Tom Hanks will send us a cease and desist on that one. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, for sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I really like this feature, because there's this huge, really important part of education that you get for free when you do -- or not for free, but by default when you do something in person, which is like when somebody gets stuck, they go like "Hey, help me", and then somebody gets them unstuck. And when you're doing really early learning - like Alex was just saying last week - you don't know what to search for, and you don't know how to even describe what the particular problem is.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, the help exists, but you don't know how to find the help.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Exactly. So this feature does that. You have to build a support system around stuff, right? One of the things we did in Node School was that there was a lot of online support systems to help people along if they're doing the workshops at home, or even calling back to some of the people that helped them in their local.
+
+I know Jessica built this really cool bot that would intervene in people learning GitHub, for that whole workshopper, as well.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** It's still intervening... \[laughter\] About 30 times per day.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So how does that work, by the way?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah, I have a workshopper -- it started as a Node School workshopper that ran in the terminal, but then I switch it to an Electron app because it's for learning Git and GitHub, which I wanted to make more visual to explain to people... Remote versus local, and things like that. So it's an Electron app right now, but the same robot intervenes as it was doing before. Basically, it does everything, really... It wears many robot hats.
+
+When you're doing Git-it, you get to the point where you add a collaborator to your project, because I felt like it was important to teach people GitHub and working with other people to actually try and simulate a little bit working with other people on GitHub... So when you add the robot - his name is RepoRobot - to your project as a collaborator, it then has access and it writes to your repos. Then you have to learn how to pull in changes, and during the rest of the course of doing Git-it, RepoRobot is verifying challenges, it's checking the people have a GitHub account and have done this or that... It's like using the GitHub API a lot to verify that the person has done what they were supposed to do in that challenge.
+
+Then at the end of it all you make a pull request and RepoRobot is merging all the pull requests. So it's going through and it's like sort of reviewing the pull request, because after a certain amount of time, errors became common - or mistakes people were making became common. So the top three or four most common mistakes RepoRobot's also looking out for, and will leave a comment on your pull request, telling you that "This thing was wrong. Here's what you can do to fix it." Then, if your pull request is great, it merges the pull request and then it rebuilds this page that has a list of everybody's names on it that have done it, which is like 13,000+ now... Which is awesome, but also -- I'm using free services as much as I can on this, and right now I have this problem where GitHub notifies you via email if you've been added to a project, and then you have to accept that invitation. So I'm using this third-party email service, but I'm using their free tier and right now too many people are doing Git-it, and I'm blowing through the email tier... So I have to fix this.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[28:03\] Oh, man... The problems with success... I think this is all really interesting, because it seems like in a programming community - and especially in the web community - we keep coming up with these really interesting modes of education where we actually have like intervention and hand raising and a lot of follow through... And I feel like every other week I see a new e-learning platform that's just like a bunch of videos of lectures from people that you never see \[laughs\] And it's like "I don't think that people can really learn this way."
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah, I really love about Glitch that -- you know, I feel like so much of our lives are spent talking about developer tools every day, and every new, hot developer tool and framework, but Glitch is actually trying to build tools to help people BECOME developers and think of new ways to do that. That's so awesome and refreshing, I think...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I also find that if you're working on the educational side of those frameworks and you're working on the framework, teaching people all the time will keep it simple, and make you kind of understand what are big barriers to entry in learning those frameworks.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** What does Alex think?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think that... I don't know. I don't have strong opinions here. I... \[laughter\] It is the first time I don't have strong opinions, so I'm not talking.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** One of the other cool things that Glitch is solving, that is a huge barrier to getting started, and that maybe some of us take for granted because we've gone through the motions so much of setting up our dev environment, and we can upgrade our Node and we'll be fine, but for beginners, setting up a dev environment and then setting up a dev environment that works on Heroku, and knowing how many dinos you need and whatever... There are tons of hurdles to actually going from zero to putting something online. Glitch provides you an editor, it provides you a server... It completely eliminates all of the dev environment setup.
+
+It's become so complicated, and I feel like it's something that we all take maybe for granted, or we just are used to... But it's just kind of a mess if you're new.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** We have a team at Stripe who's kind of whole job it is -- you know, Stripe hires extremely skilled developers pretty much across the board, and we have a whole team who's dedicated to helping them get their dev environments set up and be successful... The "developer experience and success" type team.
+
+The fact that, as a company who can choose from a large pool of very talented developers who exist, and like it's still necessary at that level to provide environments and tooling and scripts and all these different things in order to help people be successful... If you take out the fact that they've had years of experience on doing this type of thing, and then you put yourself in the shoes of someone who's brand new, especially the -- if you remember my story from last week (I know everyone doesn't listen week-to-week or pay attention to what I say specifically), whenever I was first getting started, I needed a database; I didn't know how to search for a database, but even once I found a thing that wasn't a database but I thought it might be, I ran it locally on my computer because I had no idea how it worked. So I was running Cold Fusion on my dad's Windows XP box and I didn't understand why the website went down whenever I turned it off. \[laughter\]
+
+\[31:59\] I think as much infrastructure as can be automatic is super interesting to me for that reason. And it's really hard once you know things to know what you didn't know in the past, and I think that's why -- like, I want all this stuff to exist, but I think that the absolute most important thing here is that we measure people's ability to use this stuff and how much it helps them, compared to not having it, and just tweak the hell out of it until people can be successful more quickly. I think it's an awesome start.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I find it kind of hilarious that one of the bigger arguments for "frameworks are easier for new people" is that they're not confronted with a bunch of choices, right? Like, they don't have to go out and find every little module to do every little thing. But before you use these frameworks that have this dev environment, there's like a ton of choices they haven't streamlined for you, that you don't know how to make... It's nice that Glitch has taken that out of the way.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah, and one of the reasons I moved also the Git-it workshop from the workshopper in the terminal was that a lot of people were doing Git-it specifically to learn Git. They weren't developers, but they might want to be developers, or they work in an office with developers and just wanna know how to use GitHub, how to comment on something, understand what their co-workers are doing on GitHub. And then the first step for doing Git-it was like "Install Node", and it's like, how do you explain to somebody what Node is, and then try to debug across systems, their Node installation and tell them "It's this invisible thing that's gonna live in your computer, don't worry about it... You just need it." So moving it to Electron meant people could just download an app, which is a really familiar process for most, and then the having Node on your system becomes totally obscured.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think this is a good spot for a break. When we come back, we'll talk a bit about Tad, and we'll get into our projects of the week. Stick around!
+
+**Break:** \[34:15\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** The project of the week this week is Tad. Tad is a little Electron app for dealing with CSV files and tabular data and stuff like that. It's pretty cool! Has anybody had a change to check this out?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I went to the website...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That counts.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** I bookmarked it, because I love tabular data. I was really excited to see this, and also I like Electron apps. Whenever I see that I can download for three platforms, I feel like "This is built on Electron..."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I just love that Electron is letting us build tiny apps, like just apps that do a thing... This isn't like a full spreadsheet app, with macros and all of that. For a long time, if you wanted to do something simple with tabular data, that was basically what you had to use. And so often, I just want something much simpler that can visualize and maybe do small manipulations or analysis... This is just awesome.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[36:17\] Have you guys heard of -- what is it called... Google Docs? \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Also, a little heavyweight, a little heavy...
+
+**Jessica Lord:** And don't you have to be online to use it? I actually tried to do the offline version and I couldn't. I gave up.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It exists on phones, and stuff. It's like offline, something or other.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** For how much Google people berate everyone else about not having offline working, their actual apps at Google are mostly not that functional offline.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... I tried to do a Google search without internet connection - zero results. \[laughter\] Zero. None. Deal with that. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I know. What are they thinking...? Is this not what AMP is for? No... \[laughs\] We're not gonna get into that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I feel like you might have jumped a little too fast into what you liked that was differentiated about Tad, but what is it good for? More generally... It's like a CSV file viewer. Why would I use it?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** If you've ever had to deal with a CSV file, you probably actually are in this weird in-between place. Most of the time when I pull down a CSV file I don't actually wanna put it into Excel or something like that, but I end up having to anyway. So if you wanna do really simple manipulations, like you wanna change the columns, or you wanna see what's in this file without trying to just look through it in a text editor (which is not fun), Tad is a really nice way to do that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** How do you think it gets its name?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I wanna think that it's from Tad the band...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No, that's wrong.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Okay...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm trying to find anything. Tab? It's kind of like Tab separated. Tab? Tabular data?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Adam Stacoviak says "tab delimited."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No... I think he's making that up. He is not a smart man... \[laughter\] You can call it from the command line, which is kind of nifty.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** I've just opened a CSV. Wow... I've just opened a CSV!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] I've never seen somebody so excited to open a CSV file. That's a ringing endorsement of the project.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I feel like we haven't said a ton, but I feel like that's kind of the beauty of this thing... It's that it doesn't do a ton.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Just to check it out...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We said just a tad... It was just a tad.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, actually... Check this out! Go to the web page. Are you guys on the web page?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Mm-hm...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You are? You promise?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I feel like one of you are lying to me. Top right corner is a GitHub thing... Hover over.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** I've already noticed, I've already noticed!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No, I noticed first...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** What?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** The GitHub Octocat shadow person waves at you.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh yeah, I've used that embed before.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, I haven't, so...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think I used that one in Roll Call, actually.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** "I'm Mikeal. I knew about everything beforehand."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] That's the hipster JavaScript going on... I was into it before it was cool.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah... That's why JavaScript bread is over now.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Okay... Before we beat the horse to death, why don't we get into our picks? Does everybody have their personal picks ready?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Oh, gosh... I knew this was coming...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Alex, do you wanna kick us off?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Uhm... Nope. Let's take a small break.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[39:56\] \[laughs\] No, we don't need a break. So I have mine ready... Yeah, I let everybody know on the internets that I'm gonna be leaving the Node.js Foundation; there's a little blog post about it, and stuff like that. But yeah, after a few years of leading the foundation since we've started it, I'm gonna take off and do something else... I haven't decided what else yet, but I definitely need a short break from Node.js directly... It should be fun, whatever I end up doing.
+
+And the project is in very good hands... Everything is very, very good. It's a very positive thing. But yeah, I just want everybody to know that I'm gonna be unemployed, and...
+
+**James Snell:** Come to Austin!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Is that where unemployed people go to retire?
+
+**James Snell:** Well, it's warm... It's overly warm...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Overly warm...
+
+**Jessica Lord:** It's warm here in New York, too...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, but in the next month or so, that's gonna turn into really muggy -- no, not muggy... Just like really humid and gross -- I've been in New York in the summer, it was not super fun. But I actually am gonna be in New York next month, so...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I was talking to someone yesterday and they were talking about how publishing hours often have like a half-day on Friday - like if you work in news at all, or something like that - because everyone who worked in newspapers was rich enough to get the hell out of the city on the weekends, so they'd all peace out on Friday, half-day... Because no one had A/C, so they had to go up to the mountains. So it's still a thing that publisher hours or news hours kind of is a half day on Friday because 80 years ago no one had A/C. I thought that was kind of a nifty little anecdote that I thought I'd share with everyone. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think I'm gonna slip this into my future employment contract... "I do half-days on Fridays, man..."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** "I gotta get into the mountains... I don't have A/C."
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah, in the Bay... Escaping the heat of...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** In the Bay Area, yeah... \[laughter\] Alright, do you all have picks now? Was that enough time for you to think of something?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** I just went to my Instapaper and three of the top last things I saved were Tad, What's New In npm5 and What's New In Node 8, so I've got nothing...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] You exhausted the list of things that you have around...
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So maybe I'll do some shameless self-promotion... My pick this is -- Stripe put out some new products this past week. I think Stripe Connect has a new version, and then also something -- I'm trying to remember the non-internal name... Stripe Sigma. You can go look at what those are, but very specifically I'm talking about the landing pages for those. Those are my picks this week. The designers at Stripe are very good and they work on these, so if you check out Stripe.com/connect and Stripe.com/sigma...
+
+\[43:06\] The Sigma page might as well be like a 3D C JavaScript that -- I don't know, it's really nifty. And then the other one uses some -- my very specific thing that I like about it is that it uses CSS Grid, which is kind of like a slightly useable thing on desktop modern browsers now - it's something we've talked about in a previous episode - even though it might not work everywhere... But I always assumed Grid was like a layout mechanism, like "Here are some columns" type thing, or "Here are the sections of the website for content", so it kind of surprised me to see... We these skewed stripes in the background; they used to be really hard to put together - you had to do images or do these different things, and with Grid it just works perfectly.
+
+So this is like a little section with the class name of Stripe, so open up your console and go to the Stripe.com/Connect and look at the Stripe section for a beautiful designer usage of the CSS Grid. That's my pick for the week. That 10 lines of HTML and CSS. \[laughter\]
+
+It's cool though, right? I'm always so excited when Stripe launches a new product, because "Cool, my company is doing something", but I'm really excited to see what the designers do for the landing page for those various products, because they're amazing. I love them. Shout out to Benjamin De Cock and Philipp Antoni. Follow them on Dribbble or whatever designers do. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. So on that note, I guess that's gonna take us out. Thank you everybody for coming on. Rate us on iTunes, or something like that. We're done a little bit early today, everybody can get some extra food. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or go shopping for a Tushy.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughter\] Exactly. Can we get Tushy to sponsor us?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't see why they wouldn't...
+
+**Break:** \[45:09\]

Inside the Release of npm@5 and Sheetsee_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,471 @@
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript! I'm Mikeal Rogers...
+
+**Rachel White:** I'm Rachel White.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And I'm Alex Sexton.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And on the show today we also have Kat Marchán and Rebecca Turner from npm... Why don't you all say hi?
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Hi!
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** Hi!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So let's just right into it. We really wanna talk about npm@5 today, we're really excited about it, so why don't you tell us a little bit of the back-story behind npm@5 and why this is such a big deal release?
+
+**Kat Marchán:** It's kind of a big deal...
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** It is!
+
+**Kat Marchán:** The story of npm@5 is that last October - or September...? When was it?
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** October.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** npm@4? So last October we released npm@4, and therefore we couldn't use the number four anymore, so we needed a bigger number to release, and we chose five as a valid increment for an integer. The further story is we've had a lot of breaking changes that we've been doing for a while, and that's usually what we do in major releases, but most important was we've had this cache rewrite on schedule in some way or another for five years. We've been putting it off, Yeah! pretty much... It was meant to be this rewrite that we -- we expected it to be mostly an internal improvement. It was going to maybe speed things up slightly, maybe it was going to fix a lot of our issues, but we mostly saw it as this architectural improvement.
+
+Sometime mid early last year we decided that we're just gonna bite the bullet and we're gonna do the cache rewrite. We'd been talking about it for five years, we have closed many issues with going like "This will be fixed by the mythical cache rewrite that we've been talking about for five years..." So we were like, "Alright, when can we next do it? We can probably do it for Q1", so that's the schedule that we set for ourselves last year.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** Yeah, and then Kat started playing around with it in November...
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Yeah, it was November when I started looking at it...
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** ...and we first started to actually see results -- I think you tried it out in late January...
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Late January, early February, that was when I could actually do it.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** ...and we were really surprised to find that it was unbelievably faster. The old cache was -- I still don't know how it was as slow as it was.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** It was slower than just fetching from the network sometimes, if it was faster at all. It was just not very fast. We still don't know why it was that slow... But it was!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's interesting... I'd be interested in that data.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** If you figure out what happened tell us, because I have no idea! \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[03:57\] So it's much faster... I don't think that's the only performance update though, right? There's a couple other things that you did to improve the performance around this time.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** Yeah... I mean, that got us a 5x speed increase over older npms, and then it was like "Wow... That was a lot faster!" and now other improvements start to actually seem meaningful. What before would have been like "Well, that's like a 10% improvement in speed", but it was taking so long anyway that it wasn't a big win, and now it was. So yeah, we did a bunch of other things.
+
+Probably the single biggest aspect of the speed in the new version is the new lockfile shrinkwrap support. Having those allows the install to be much faster. It's part of the reason we made a lockfile by default - it was just speed.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Yeah, but npm@5 it was the speed, and I'd say the second one was usability improvements that we did. We were just like, "Alright, it's a major version. People care about usability - what can we do to make this tool easier to use?" And some insight here - there's a reason that we didn't save by default for so many years. You have to understand that npm was originally designed, intended for and used as a Node library developer's tool. It is almost ideal -- it is practically ideal if you are a Node developer writing libraries to publish on the npm registry. That is what Isaac designed it for - it was designed for a very specific workflow... And npm library authors are not the people who use npm the most these days anymore. The registry is too big.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** Library authors were the majority of Node developers in 2012... Not so much now.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Now we're pretty much \[unintelligible 00:05:42.27\] developers, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** In that vein, one of the things I was excited to see was the symlink stuff... Stripe, where I work, has a monorepo and we definitely have some jiu-jitsu around trying to move libraries that are in our thing into our dependencies, but have dependencies still work among our subdependencies, all in the same repo, and the symlink stuff seems to solve a bunch of that. Can you explain how that works? I guess I did part of that, but I enjoyed that.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** Sure! So we've had this file specifier since npm@2, so you could npm install a local directory. It was added in at the very end of the npm@2 development cycle, and it wasn't super well integrated into the rest of the npm product. What went into the shrinkwrap was never fully specified and has varied over time in various bad ways, because when it was originally put in, the fact that it even worked in shrinkwrap was kind of an accident.
+
+When we were working on designing npm@5, one of the things we wanted to do was to make the shrinkwrap situation, and thus the blockfiles generally made more sense and worked better. So one of the pieces of that was defining "What do file specifiers do?" and we were having a lot of problems figuring out how this should work, until we got the idea that maybe these should just be links. By making file specifiers install to links, it solved all the other problems we were having with that, and it turns out it's super useful. Actually, there's a module on the registry called "link local" which was already doing this. So we essentially just took the behavior of link local and implemented it as core npm behavior.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's interesting.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** The monorepo use case - there's still quite a bit of work to be done there as far as smoothing that out. I expect more on that the next coming six months.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** We have a number of ideas; we think we'll make that better. Incidentally, internally, npm's own website has moved towards a monorepo, so we're getting to dogfood that pretty strongly now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[07:58\] That's encouraging.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I have to say my favorite feature actually probably is the default save stuff. I think the first bug in most of my packages that I've received from other people is "You forgot to actually add this dependency" because I use save for, --save for half of the things that I installed, and then not one of them... This just completely solves that, I'm so excited about it.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Me too... I think we've been pushing to try and do this for a while... It's like, "How do we push this in?" This is a serious change in people's npm workflow, right? This is not a change that we could do lightly, as small as it seems...
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** It basically became non-optional when we decided to do the package locks.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, let's get into that. That's a really, really big change in terms of default behavior, right?
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Yeah, so we're moving to optimize the default path for users as much as possible. We're also trying to cut back on how much configuration you can do and make things like configuration more binary seeming. So instead of saying "Here's your cache min, here's you cache max." Now you have three options --offline to force npm to use offline or crash; --prefer-offline, which is essentially --cache-min 999999, and then --prefer-online, which forces the cache to check that everything is fresh.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** The --cache-min 0.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Yeah, the --cache-max 0...?
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** No, because it's still 304 checks. --cache-max 0 would make it not even 304 check.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Right, right. So we have stuff on the pipeline now, things like... I've talked about --low-mem, which I need to spec out and hopefully get in something like that.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** Yeah, that would be really exciting.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Yeah... Literally, a mode in npm that drops concurrency massively and then makes sure to stream everything, so you have very low memory usage for npm, which is great for people running on constrained VPS's.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** ...and embedded systems, which is a surprisingly common use case.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That is interesting that the install would happen on the embedded system, versus somewhere else and then just load it on...
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** Right, but it's just because that has been people's development mode. They wanna do their development on it. I imagine for deploying it they wouldn't do it that way, I would hope, but while they're working on it, they still have the little Raspberry Pi sitting next to their computer.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** It's easier than having to do all the setup to do deployments on the clients...
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think one of the primary overarching stories behind a lot of this is most people do a thing, and they do that thing and they're like "How come npm doesn't do this?" and I think no one's invoked the "yarn" word yet, but I think a lot of what yarn was was "Hey, there's this use case that if we take away all these other constraints that npm has and all these other things that they have to do, then we can do this other thing very quickly, and add some features." It seems like a primary story of npm is that there are a lot of different use cases and continuing to support all those has very unique challenges in places that people don't even consider.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Yeah, I mean npm is the default, and that means that we have to support all these people; not just new people that are coming in, but what five, six years of people who have old setups and don't wanna have their keys moved too much. Although that's the - \[laughter\] we had a conversation yesterday.  Maybe that's a bit of a weird metaphor at this point, but I think it's okay for npm to make tradeoffs that other things can't. We're not gonna sacrifice the user base that we have in order to primarily serve what developers -- so we can serve both, and that's what we'll do... We'll optimize for like spreading out...
+
+Another aspect of npm@5 is that it is probably our most significant step in a while towards breaking npm down into significant chunks, with the intention of -- like, the dream here is to (the platonic idea, if you will) be able to take all the components that npm uses right now, pick only the ones that you like and need, and then cook up your own package manager for your particular community.
+
+\[12:24\] All the work that you don't have to change, you won't have to rewrite. We have several new packages that are meant to be used by the community more generally.
+
+We're talking about "How the heck will you yank out parts of the installer so that people can make decisions about how they install the tree?" A really good example of things that npm isn't gonna sacrifice is npm has a very -- I guess we're sacrificing it maybe in like some distant future, but right now it is a very core tenet at npm that we do not do dependency hell. npm is the package manager you use when you never, ever want to run into dependency hell. That's why we did the peer dependencies change.
+
+For those unfamiliar, dependency hell is when you have two packages have dependency on two incompatible versions of the same other package. There's two ways to resolve that diamond. Either you install both versions of the package in nested dependencies, which is what npm does, or you have some kind of conflict resolution mechanism where you can tell one package to use the wrong dependency; wrong according to semver. So you will introduce a thing here where you're forced to choose what to break and how, and hope that it works. npm will probably refuse to do that for the foreseeable future.
+
+It's why we never integrated any kind of flat install like Bower would do. We're just not gonna do that. I don't see us doing that.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** No.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Even though flat installs are really important to web developers...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right... You don't want seven versions of jQuery just because you have seven jQuery plugins.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** We want to maximize how flat our tree is, so that people using tools like Webpack or Rollup are able to use tools to reduce the package size of that. But as far as guaranteeing that something is gonna be unique in the tree, unless you use something like peerdeps manually or you have your own mechanism for setting up your global according to your own decisions, npm won't be installing only one version of incompatible packages.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** We would hope that people would be able to build on our tools to make that, if they wanted a package manager that did that.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Yes. And we, fantastically, have basically about that literally just wraps the \[unintelligible 00:14:32.19\] and that's the flat tree.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** I mean, that's very hard... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I feel like it's a common place for a project the age of npm to reach this building pieces part... I think it speaks to the success and the breadth of usage; there's the jQuery UI builder, it's like "build the parts of jQuery you need." Modernizer has a builder, it's too many tests; Babel switched at 5 or whatever in order to do all the "Here's each individual transform versus one" thing. I feel like once you reach some certain level of usage, there's no way you could possibly nicely give everyone everything they want in a single package, so I think the idea of offering the building blocks to doing an npm-like project and then you write the one thing that's different is nice and good. It's a good vision you have.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** What we have today is we have the new cache - it's a content-addressable cache... It's a pain to spell cache... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's a Canadian cache...
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** \[16:01\] But it's super fast and it has a very nice API, and all of the npm@5 cache access is built on that. And then there's pacote which is a... We'll provide links.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** It's a manifest in tarball-fetching library. It does all the resolution of identifiers and stuff like that, identical to what npm does; in fact, it's what npm uses now. So you can say pacote.extract and then you give it like npm@5 and it will extract the contents of the npm@5 tarball according to semver resolution rules into a local directory. So it's a very generic tool for doing that, and it also gives you access to manifest information; you can ask for a manifest to see what dependencies you're gonna have to install.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** And it supports all the sources that npm does.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Yes!
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** So yeah, the registry, but also Git sources, including the new Git semver support, which is one of the other exciting new features...
+
+**Kat Marchán:** And building. You can build Git deps now. If you have a prepare script and you npm a Git dependency, we will install as step dependencies and run the install script to pretend that you're -- you know, basically simulate publishing to a registry.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I see. You're cannibalizing npm Enterprise.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Sure, why not!? \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I guess you'd have to have GitHub Enterprise to fully cannibalize, but...
+
+**Kat Marchán:** It is not that, by the way... we \[unintelligible 00:17:29.21\] for every single Git dep. That is not something you want to do a lot.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, yeah. So how does it differ from tagging something in -- oh, I guess the resolution of the tag can increase in version as a different... Before, you used to be able to do a Git dep and do hash some tag version number; now you're saying that you can kind of do like a carrot version number and it will grab the correct semver?
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Yeah. It will do that I think to references.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Awesome. That is nifty.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I wanna go at a little bit higher level... We talked earlier on this podcast about yarn a little bit... For people that don't know, yarn is an npm alternative client that pulls from the npm registry, but it sort of touts two main features: one was performance and one was defaulting this lockfile. Given that you've done a bunch of performance and lockfile work, I wonder if you can kind of compare npm@5 to yarn in terms of those two features.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** npm always had a lockfile, of course, in the form of a shrinkwrap, so we didn't feel like we should reinvent the wheel there... We just reused that for the new npm@5 package lock. The main difference between yarn's lockfile and the package lock is -- yarn's lockfile, what it stores in it is the relationships between all the modules, but it doesn't say anything about how these are installed onto disk.
+
+The npm lockfile stores exactly how your Node modules should look when it's done. The npm lockfile guarantees that you will have exactly the same shape of Node modules, as well as the same content, regardless of what you're using to install it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I've seen Kat talk about that a little bit. You mentioned that became obvious to you all that it was important to maintain that directory structure... What have you seen people do? What is the reason that is important?
+
+**Kat Marchán:** I think every single person who's ever run CI that runs on Node 4, Node 6 and Node 7 at the same time has run into something at some point where they forget to set up a dependency or something happens with the tree, and suddenly only Node 4 breaks, because Node 4 still defaults to npm 2, which is before our flattening change. People do the darndest things that rely--
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[20:07\] So they're grabbing into the Node modules folder directly, you mean... With the fs.read...
+
+**Kat Marchán:** They do that. Sometimes they just mess up their tree in some way, but they've been testing on one platform... So being able to recreate that exactly is really important.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** Yeah, I mean... In a perfect world this wouldn't be the case, and certainly when we introduced npm@3 we thought we were going into that perfect world. We learned very quickly that that was not the case; people are doing all kinds of scary things to their modules. People are doing things like having their install scrips install more modules. That's a thing that people do.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[whispering\] Oh my god...
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** It's not a thing I recommend... \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, it's really not recommended...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Nested installation... npm install that kicks of in npm install...
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** Or "Download this tarball and extract it here", and some of that includes Node modules.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I see.
+
+**Rachel White:** Notably, \[unintelligible 00:21:04.27\] does that in various ways.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** Yeah... Those, of course, don't affect the modules.
+
+**Rachel White:** That's true.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** One of the reasons I think Sam - who helped with yarn a little bit - was interested in doing yarn was because of the ability... It was like a vulnerability -- I'm very fuzzy on this, but you could kind of do a lot of things with the post-install script stuff; has that changed at all in npm@5?
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** No, and it didn't change in yarn, either. We heard that too, and it was very interesting because by the time yarn was released, it was running all the scripts again. You've always been able to run npm with ignore scripts, which makes it so it doesn't run any of those - that's been a feature since npm@1. If that's a concern of yours, you can set that up. It means you can't compile anything.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Would things break?
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Oh, yeah. That's probably why yarn put it back in, because they realized the ecosystem very intimately relies on those build scripts... Everything, not just JEP. But people do all sorts of things in their install scripts just to set up their modules, and we have the ecosystem we have.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Is there like a plot for some sort of way to make that safe in the future?
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** I mean, you're running someone else's code on your computer; you're doing that when you put the module in there, right? Your program's gonna require that module and it could do anything, so there is no way to make that safe. There's no such thing as a code library that makes that safe, unless you're explicitly manually vetting every module that comes through, and even then there are always bugs.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** There are services that provide this kind of security; that's why we have NSP, that's why we have LibSecurity, that's why we have Snyk. If you're really paranoid about this stuff, aside from reviewing them you can also run them in jail VMs to make sure that nothing escapes... That is kind of what you have to do.
+
+This is something that affects pretty much every package manager in existence pretty much.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** I mean, everyone that doesn't essentially have an editorial board accepting packages. So OS package managers tend to have that. If you wanna get something into Debian, people are going to look at it before you put it in. But if you wanna publish something to PyPy or RubyGems, or the CPad. No one's gonna look at that; that code is not vetted. There is no approval process, so it can have anything.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** We do have some stuff on the pipeline which I actually don't know if I can talk about, because that's registry stuff and that's not my circus, not my monkeys, but we do have stuff to prevent the infamous worms that people are worried about. So at least automated self-publishing worms will be mitigated. They might rimraf your read directory, but it will only be your read directory, and that's great.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[24:05\] I think that might be the thing that I was thinking of specifically. There's something to be said if you're only using it as a frontend tool; maybe you're not actually executing any code, in which case there could be a world where there's no scripts that run and you could still -- I don't know; not super important. But it is an interesting part of this that I think people don't think about a ton... I didn't know any good solutions other than throw everything in a container. That seems to be...
+
+**Kat Marchán:** We semi-regularly re-visit to see if there's anything new that we could do, but it's something that we've known about and tried to deal with since the early days. There's issues about this going back a long time, and it's just like "Well, what do you do?" You can break the ecosystem, but we don't wanna break the ecosystem. We don't wanna get rid of scripts altogether, because people find them useful.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** And they keep asking for more...
+
+**Kat Marchán:** I know, it's like, "Can you stop?" \[laughs\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We're coming up on the end of the segment here, but we've talked a ton about all the reasons why you should be installing npm@5 right now, today... Because it's awesome. Is there anybody that needs to worry about installing npm@5? Any kind of breaks that people might be reliant on out there that you would say "You know what? Hold off for a second...", or is it just everybody should go get it today?
+
+**Kat Marchán:** It's still on at next, so everybody should not get it today because it's a pre-release. There are known issues; we are tracking those and fixing those as fast as we can. As we said, we have a lot of users, we have a lot of very creative users, who really do their own artisanal, bespoke module setups and installations, so we're finding all that out now as people start using it. We'll have npm in at latest on Tuesday, that's the plan.
+
+As with any major release of a tool this core, I would say that you try it, you see how it works for your setup. It might work very work very well for your setup, or there might be things that still need updating. If there are things that still need updating, let us know, we'll get to that. But this is just something that applies to pretty much any software that goes through a major release.
+
+**Rebecca Turner:** As far as things that we intentionally broke - the breaking changes of npm@5, most of those are things like the save by default and the lockfile, and the fact that output is no longer five miles long. I like that one... That one's nice. We have a little summary now.
+
+**Kat Marchán:** Yeah... Apart from people relying on things that they really shouldn't have been relying on, like very specific parts of the ouput, there's not a lot that will change, especially not for consumers of packages. A lot of this is mostly on the developer end.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** If you currently have a shrinkwrap, do you need to generate a new shrinkwrap with 5?
+
+**Kat Marchán:** No. We will probably -- in the case of most shrinkwraps; I don't know if all shrinkwraps in existence... But we will update that on run. One thing to note is that npm-shrinkwrap and package-lock.json are the same format. The main difference is that npm-shrinkwrap is publishable and package-lock is not. Shrinkwrap is meant for things that you really absolutely need to guarantee an exact read for people who install your package. So we automatically read that we'll use it, and then we'll write it back out in the new format.
+
+The thing to note is if you keep it called npm-shrinkwrap, older versions of npm down to like npm@2 will be able to install it; not npm@1, because of scope packages, but all the way down to 2 you should be able to get identical trees pretty much.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's cool, yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, thanks for coming on, this has been fantastic. When we come back, we are gonna get into Sheetsee with Jessica Lord.
+
+**Break:** \[28:10\]
+
+**Rachel White:** We're back with Jessica Lord and we're gonna talk about Sheetsee. Sheetsee is a really cool library that lets you use Google Spreadsheets for visualizing info, and it's really awesome. Jessica, you should tell us about it better than I can.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** \[laughs\] Well, I think you've done a really great job, because that's basically it. It's a really small library to build quick sites with data from Google Spreadsheets. Basically, you're using a Google Spreadsheet as your backend database. That's awesome because people can share it; there's no dev environment. People who aren't developers know how to use spreadsheets, so it's a really easy interface. You can have a lot of people working together on the data, and then you connect it to a website. Once it's connected, all you have to do is edit the spreadsheet. There's no deploying, and things like that.
+
+Every time someone is visiting your site, it's hitting the spreadsheet and getting the latest from the spreadsheet. All you have to do is edit the spreadsheet. It lets you do tables and maps.
+
+**Rachel White:** That's awesome. What made you wanna make this?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** This came out of my Code for America project that I did. Code for America is a non-profit based in San Francisco that pairs designers, developers and civic people with city governments to build open source software for them. I did that fellowship; I had come from the city of Boston previously, and I was really keen on not creating new bottlenecks for city IT departments which have to do everything. I felt like there are so many tools we take for granted on the web that would enable departments to manage and update their own websites without needing to go through IT for everything. That was what was kind of my guiding principle and what lead me to pick spreadsheets in general.
+
+I started building it out that year, and it started off as a bunch of JavaScript built into a Wordpress theme. Then when the fellowship year was over, I got a grant from Mozilla OpenNews, which is a branch of the Mozilla Foundation that focuses on open source tools for journalism. I got a CodeSprint grant from them to spend two months pulling out all the JavaScript and making it a standalone library. That's when it really became Sheetsee. Then I just recently rewrote it, a couple months ago.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[31:57\] Yay! That's awesome. I like that I'm saying "Yay!" What are some cool uses that you've seen people use Sheetsee for?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** People have done it for meetups and schedules... Not everyone tells me what they do. Really, I have no idea what people are doing with it unless they specifically go out of their way to show me. But what is also cool about it is you can use it with GitHub Pages, which is GitHub's free hosting service. Then people can just fork your site and just make a few changes and quickly then have their own site going.
+
+Earlier this year in January I tried to make a site myself where I thought that I was gonna keep up with all the things that Trump was doing, and I was gonna make a database of articles and label them by offence, and...
+
+**Rachel White:** But there's too many and you found a limit for Google Docs... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah, it snowballed really fast and it was just too much work for a person who's not a journalist or a report full-time to be doing. But somebody forked that site and then made a site for like important buildings in Baltimore. \[laughs\]
+
+**Rachel White:** That's cool. That's helpful if you're in Baltimore.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Totally. I've actually used Sheetsee a bunch of times. The use case that I always use it for is like okay, I have just a static website that displays some data, and then I have people that need to add data to it that are not gonna use GitHub. I don't wanna set up a CMS or a database or manage access controls or do all that crazy stuff, so with just a Google Spreadsheet that everybody knows how to use and you can add people to, and people know how to manage, you can then pull that data in and have it dynamically show up on the website. It's just so brilliant and so easy.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It sounds like a good way to internationalize a website... Just swap out the sheet.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Oh, yeah...! That's a really good idea.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Or swap out the column, I guess, so you have the English on the left, and then every column is the translation for a different language. I do a lot of that... I've actually seen that in practice. Not with Sheetsee, but I've seen people use spreadsheets... It'd be nifty to kind of just connect it directly.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah, that's a really good idea. I haven't done this, but you could even just use your spreadsheet as a settings page to just generate a site. Your spreadsheet could have columns and rows to say what color the page should be, what the header should be, and that kind of thing. If you connect the site to that spreadsheet, then it will generate a whole new website based on what's in the spreadsheet.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** A whole new website... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I stole some of your code that you wrote once to do a map with this, and it made me also discover this feature that I had no idea about in Google Sheets where you can give it a column that has like an address in it, and then it'll stick the GPS coordinates in another column. I had no idea that that was a thing, but you can use that to create pretty awesome maps.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Wait... Is that a thing?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It works somehow... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jessica Lord:** I had done that but only using a plugin; MapBox had a plugin for doing that. Maybe there is now more native support in Spreadsheets...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It was some kind of macro, or something... I ended up stealing it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I have two technical questions about Sheetsee, since I haven't got the chance to use it. Can you use data from a computed cell?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** What is a computed cell?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's like I've added up every number in this row, and it's the "=SUM(A1:A15)"
+
+**Jessica Lord:** \[36:07\] Right, yes. Anything that lives in a cell in your spreadsheet gets pulled out.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** The data though, not the formula...?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Right, right.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay, cool.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Sheetsee pairs with this library called Tabletop.js which gets all that data from Google Spreadsheets. It basically deals with the Google API for you, which if you've interacted with the API on your own, you get a ton of metadata and huge JSON back. Tabletop.js cleans it all up and gives you back the pure and simple JSON that you would expect from your spreadsheet, but that actually also means that Sheetsee really just needs some JSON. So you actually don't even have to use a spreadsheet... Which I also do sometimes. I have some projects where I keep stuff in the spreadsheet, and then I just have a NodeScript that uses Tabletop and Node to get the spreadsheet data, and then I do a bunch of stuff with the data, and then I give the data to Sheetsee.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That was my second question: relying on Google Docs to be fast and/or up for your website seems scary once you hit some -- if it's a simple, personal thing, then whatever... My site goes down far more than Google Docs. But if let's say your Trump thing become popular and you want it to stay up; it seems like you could then later on build that intermediary thing where it doesn't directly connect to the Doc, but you can generate the JSON from the doc at any point and push an update... Which seems cool.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah. Originally, I wanted Sheetsee to be this really low-barrier to entry thing. It doesn't take long to think, "Oh, what happens when Google goes down?", because I have seen that happen. I remember specifically actually after the Boston Marathon bombing... People were putting addresses in a spreadsheet and it totally went down; it was too much traffic. But of course, once you add servers into the equation, it's no longer this beginner-friendly thing.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, but it's kind of beautiful in the sense that you can start with the completely easy thing, and then once you hit the scale problem, it's the same amount of work as doing it upfront. So it's kind of like this nice side effect of accidentally using Tabletop to -- I don't know... I think it's set up nicely.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah. But now that there's Glitch.com, the greatest new website, I have a Sheetsee.glitch.me, and that is a Sheetsee template that includes server backup... Because you get a free Node server with every Glitch project you do. Glitch actually for me was the way that took "Oh my gosh, how do I get people a server easily?" problem and actually made it easy.
+
+If you remix this Glitch site, you get a blank Sheetsee setup and it just writes the data to the server if it can go to Google. If it can't give you a spreadsheet, then it will just use what was last saved.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** What's the likelihood of it being able to sync with like Pouch on the client to where you can kind of sync data locally, go offline... Is there anybody who's hooked any of that up?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** I don't know of anybody who has, but it should be totally possible.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it seems like all in line with that.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah. I also have another Glitch that -- because one thing that was annoying is if you just wanted JSON from your spreadsheet, it wasn't super easy to get, and basically you would have to just set up a little Node thing with Tabletop and fetch your spreadsheet, but that was... I don't know; I love spreadsheets, so it was an annoying thing that I kept having to do... So I made another Glitch that is Sheetsee.glitch.me, that you can just pass your spreadsheet key into and it creates a single API endpoint and it returns your JSON to you.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[40:25\] That's really nice
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That is cool.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I don't think that you would need Pouch to cache this, because you could just use a service worker to cache these simple requests, right? That would be even easier.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, it would need to cache -- I don't know, syncing data versus caching requests are kind of two separate things.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I see what you're saying.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Cool!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm playing with demos right now, I'm sorry... \[laughter\] I'm playing with Sheetsee demos in the background.
+
+**Rachel White:** Is there anything else that you would like to add to Sheetsee that it doesn't have right now?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Let's see... One thing -- actually, it's not specifically with Sheetsee, but with Tabletop. Tabletop doesn't handle any errors that you get back from Google Spreadsheets.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** When would you ever get an error? That seem unlikely...
+
+**Jessica Lord:** \[laughs\] If you pass in the wrong spreadsheet key, for instance...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It just gives you someone else's spreadsheet, no problem. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jessica Lord:** No, it just fails, and it fails in a weird way... So you kind of have to deal with it yourself.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I mean, as long as no one makes any errors it seems fine...
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah, definitely. \[laughs\] Don't mess up.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Just be perfect the first time and you shouldn't have any problems whatsoever.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** One of the things that I love about this is I feel like all JavaScript tooling that I've used in the last 2-3 years has been a giant compile chain and it integrates into a giant compile chain, and this was like "Oh, back in the days..." where you could just insert a "script include" and then do stuff in the body. It's like, "Oh yeah, there's actually cases where this is just so much simpler..."
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Actually, that somewhat reminded me of -- the first web development I ever did was members.aol.com; I built a dirt bike website. I literally still have never ridden a dirt bike to this day, but my first website was all about dirt bikes because my friend who taught me how to use members.aol.com had a dirt bike website and I just copied the crap out of it.
+
+The next website I built was for my little sister's soccer team. My dad paid me $5/month to -- it was a trick, I think... I was like, "I'm gonna get money from my dad" and he was like "I'm gonna trick my son into learning web development and statistics..." So I had to go to all of my sister's soccer games and keep stats on all the goals and assists and all those types of things... And I kept it in a spreadsheet on my computer.
+
+Then I would have to go calculate everybody's stats, and then I would update a website with all their different stats on it. I remember very specifically not knowing what a database was, and I was like "There's gotta be away for me to not have to just write HTML tables by hand, and generate this based on my spreadsheets."
+
+I remember very specifically searching in Altavista and saying "Way to get information from a computer spreadsheet and put into..." -- and I never found... I ended up running - I swear this is true - Macromedia Cold Fusion on my local computer, thinking that would solve the issue somehow, and then it didn't work once I deployed the site... It was a nightmare, and if someone would have just had this when I was 10, it would have been really useful... So thanks a lot.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** \[44:09\] \[laughs\] Sorry... I don't know if Google Docs existed when you were 10, so...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Google didn't exist when you were 10... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's why I was altavista-ing things... \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It would be really messed up if you were using AOL pages when Google existed... \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It is a really interesting problem, that once you know terms for things, it's impossible for you to solve the problem. You almost have to just like talk to someone who still doesn't know... But how do you search for what a database is before you know what a database is? If you know the term database, you'd be like "good beginner database" and that's fine, bu if you're literally saying "I want to retrieve information from a central repository..." - it's just such a difficult thing to describe... You would never come across database... Maybe in today's day and age, and Google being good at search... I don't know. It's just an interesting on worlds that we live in.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** On that note, I think we're about time for the picks today.
+
+**Rachel White:** I wanna go first!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, Rachel's gonna go first... \[laughs\]
+
+**Rachel White:** I just don't want anybody else to pick my pick. My pick of the week is a really interesting repository that someone emailed me about and I ignored at first, but then other people did not ignore it and now it's got a bunch of stars on GitHub. It's called [Chaosbot](https://github.com/Chaosthebot/Chaos), and it's a social coding experiment that updates its own code democratically based on what the people that are involved with the project do. You can vote on things in order to get PRs merged.
+
+I guess IIT reminds me of TwitchPlaysPokemon or like TwitchBuildsAComputer or TwitchInstallsLinux, because the fate of the project is at the whim of the people controlling it. I think it will be really interesting to see what they end up making with it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This is a very interesting experiment. I'm reading this now and I'm actually like fascinated by it. \[laughs\]
+
+**Jessica Lord:** I think when I looked at it, it did not even have a ton of this stuff, and now there's like containerization, it's got Vagrant up, and... If you can look at all the open issues and pull requests... It's interesting how -- I feel like it was originally JavaScript maybe... Maybe not. Like I said, I ignored it at first, because I'm a jerk. Now it's just a ton of Python. It's pretty cool.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think my favorite thing here is that they have a death counter... People hack it to merge things that actually break it with the voting mechanism, and they're really upfront about how many times the trunk has died because of this...
+
+\[unintelligible 00:50:27.28\]**Rachel White:** Yeah... My favorite change that got made was this guy got a PR in so that there was no voting weight on the voting, and he was the sole person that could make decisions, which was pretty cool. \[laughter\]
+
+Yeah, I don't know... If you look at the issues, or -- I think it's in the main part... If you scroll down and...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** The Rulers section, yeah...
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, the Rulers section says "It has been ruled democratically. It has been ruled by plasma power..."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** ...and anarchy, a couple times. \[laughs\] It's really good.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, it's neat.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's awesome. Alex, do you wanna go next?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Wait, I just wanted to mention that I searched for Chaosbot and the first result is on the Sonic News Network - as in Sonic the Hedgehog - Wikipedia... They have their own wiki on sonic.wikia.com, and apparently there's a Chaosbot in Sonic X \#28, which is a comic... So that's the true Chaosbot.
+
+\[48:16\] My pick for this week is [Babili](https://www.npmjs.com/package/babili). I believe that's that how it's pronounced... If you type its name into the say command, it will pronounce it correctly, apparently. It is Babel-Minify. Stripe, for instance, likes on its website only to ship ES6 code that works in all the browsers that everyone visits our site it, and it's kind of like a fun thing where you can push just real ES6 out without compiling it down with Babel, or anything like that, and it's cool. But the bad thing about shipping ES6 code is none of the current minifiers support ES6, so if you throw ES6 code, it will fail. So you have to compile down to ES5 and then you can minify.
+
+So I think Babili is the first attempt at an ES6 minifier. It will minify down to the same syntax, just smaller, and whatever. It's still in beta 0.0.1, which is pretty beta... But for small things, I think it's probably pretty safe. They have some tests against some common open source things that appear to work still as well. So if you are interested in shipping ES 2015 to the browser, it's a good thing to start looking into. I imagine this type of thing will get much more popular.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I'm using it in I think like five projects, and only one of them, some module somewhere is doing something that it actually breaks on. It ends up outputting something that is not valid. But that was like six months ago; that may be a bug that was fixed. I tried to track it down, but tracking down bugs in minifiers is incredibly difficult, it turns out, so I kind of gave up on trying to debug it at that point... But I'm really happy with it in the other projects that I'm using it in.
+
+If you're doing WebRTC experiments, it's easy to just ship ES6 to the browser, because the Venn diagram of browsers that support WebRTC and don't support ES6 features is not a thing. They're basically the same.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's decently true of the animations in CSS that's written for a lot of the Stripe sites, so it's mostly the thinking is you already have a broken experience, so...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it's perfect. Okay, my project of the week is called [pkg](https://www.npmjs.com/package/pkg). It's from Zeit; they're the creators of [Now](https://zeit.co/now) and [Hyper](https://hyper.is/) and a bunch of other awesome stuff. It's Guillermo Rauch's new company, who started Socket.io. Pkg is something that I've wanted for a long time, which is basically take all of your Node projects - your code, all your dependencies, everything - and Node itself and turn that into one single executable file, so that somebody can go and take that and run it on a similar environment. If you have native dependencies, it's gonna have to be on the same architecture, I would imagine... But they could just go and run that wherever.
+
+This is something that Go has had since day one, they designed it for this, but this has always been kind of a challenge with Node. They have got it working apparently, so I'm really, really excited about this.
+
+Jessica, do you have a pick for us?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** I do... \[laughs\] You'll have to just google this, so I don't have to read out the URL... It's a [Medieval Fantasy City Generator](https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator). \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's awesome.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** I saw it come through my Twitter feed this week. It's just a site someone built... I guess it came out of some procedural generation subreddit. You can choose if you want a small town, large town, small city, large city, and it will just keep generating you medieval cities... Like, in plan. They're really cool-looking maps.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[52:16\] That's really cool...
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh, I saw that! It's like top-down view of the architectural diagram.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah.
+
+**Rachel White:** I actually have the URL for this; if you give me one second, I'll post it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Is it watabou.itch.io? Is that it?
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, okay. We'll have the link in the show notes for sure. Adam Stacoviak just found the link to it and put it in the live chat.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Yeah. Well, never mind... \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** If you look at the live chat, you can pull it up; it's really cool. Yeah, this is really, really cool. And it even has labels over stuff. That's awesome.
+
+Alright, that's our show for today. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Sorry that we were a little bit late on the live broadcast, but that's cool... For the majority of people listening to this at home, you probably don't care.
+
+Thanks for tuning in, that's all for today. We're out. Thanks, Jessica, for coming on. We really appreciated it.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Thanks for having me!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And thanks to npm.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Bye, everybody.
+
+**Jessica Lord:** Bye!
+
+**Break:** \[53:22\]

JavaScript Fatigue, AMP, Paths.js_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,379 @@
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Hey, welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript! Joining me is Rachel White, say hello...
+
+**Rachel White:** Hello.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And Alex Sexton...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You don't tell me what to do? You just tell Rachel what to do?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Yup, exactly... And I'm Mikeal Rogers. So let's dive into it today. We have some pretty deep topics that I wanna get into.
+
+They just had an AMP Conf (Accelerated Mobile Pages Conf, from Google). Alex, why don't you tell us what the hell these are? What is AMP?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure. I work with AMPs a lot. They're small (sometimes large) electronic devices that use voltage multiplication usually through like an op-amp or a series of transformers, resistors, capacitors, in order to increase -- different amps. Okay... \[laughter\] Accelerated Mobile Pages are a thing Google came out probably within the last year (I don't think it's been quite a year yet; something like that). You've seen them... They're best viewed in a light as kind of Google's answer to all of the in-app mobile browser fast insta-reader type pages that exist; there were like Facebook instant stories, and there were the same thing on different platforms, and then there were ways you could save articles and then read them without ads, and stuff like that.
+
+Specifically, what it actually is is something you can kind of opt your content website in. This is usually news articles, they're by far the number one use case. You opt in your content site to AMP, and then you promise to fulfill a few somewhat difficult to fulfill things where you don't use external CSS and you don't do this and you don't do that etc. Based on those things, your site can be really fast, and then on top of that, Google will then cache your site on Google's servers and serve it edge-cached and even faster, optimized, because based on the rules you agreed to follow, they can super-hyper optimize and pre-load articles even on your phone before you even click on them.
+
+The resulting experience is that when you go to Google and you search for a news article, there's a little carousel up top; it seems unimportant, but that's actually why most people do it, to get in that little carousel. And there's little lightning bolts next to the websites in order to incentivize people to build AMP websites and for users to click on them, and when you click on them, they load instantly, and they're not bogged down with ads or interstitials, and they work on mobile, and all that kind of stuff.
+
+The negative side that people dislike is a) Google is hosting all the content, so they end up being the controller and the gate and have all the information about all the traffic, and then also the URLs are really not great, because it's gonna be google.com/AMParticle/yourURLtoYourWebsite... Which is better than them hiding it entirely, I think, but still somewhat negative. So you have this whole new ecosystem of AMP web pages, and it's kind of hard to -- as a user, I don't necessarily wanna opt out of it, but I often wanna break out of it. It's improving slowly... We can talk about what we think about it, I guess, outside of my explanation of what it is. Is that helpful at all?
+
+**Rachel White:** \[04:01\] Yeah, that's helpful for me. I actually didn't even know what AMP was until last week when everyone came to New York for AMP Conf, but I had noticed while browsing the internet when I'm trying to fall asleep and I'm trying to read the articles... I've had these - now that I know - AMP articles pop up, and I've been trying to send them to my friends, and I'm like "Why is there not a link?"
+
+I'm okay with the speed; obviously, that makes a lot more sense, but please, someday let me copy a link faster somehow...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, so I think it's gotten better very recently... You can click on the URL of the article, which is in the top bar; they always put this nav bar above your nav bar that kind of says the real URL - I think now you can click on that and go to the real website. If that doesn't work, you can always do the "Request desktop site", which usually would do the trick.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You said that it makes things faster... Sorry, Rachel...
+
+**Rachel White:** It's okay, you go ahead first.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's a merge conflict. So you mentioned that it makes things faster - what is making it faster? There's a new format, which is HTML and JavaScript, so it's somewhat different than the web...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Was that a joke?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, no... Go ahead.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sorry, I guess I don't understand what you're saying then. It's still all valid HTML/JavaScript. You add a lightning bolt to your HTML element (it's a fun little UNICODE trick) and then you write regular CSS and JavaScript, but you do things like use custom elements for your images; that way, your images aren't pipelined to load immediately, if that makes sense. So you use an AMP img instead of an img, and then they can decide, "Let's put in the above-the-fold images and not the below-the-fold images." And then you agree to not have external CSS and only have 50 kilobytes of in-lined CSS. So it completely reduces the amount of CSS you can use, but it's still just regular CSS and you can do whatever you want in that 50 kilobytes.
+
+So there's a bunch of rules, and they have a JavaScript you can inject on your page that will validate all these rules, that will say "Hey, you're not following this rule; you may not be pipelined into the superfast AMP experience."
+
+The other part is if you use Chrome, Chrome can do extra things to pre-fetch, and stuff. I don't know to the extent of which that happens, but they absolutely could do that, based on their rule set.
+
+They're pretty much like asm.js that we talked about last week. Asm.js is a completely valid subset of JavaScript, but once you only restrict yourself to that subset, you can make certain speed improvements happen. The same thing is true of AMP. And I think the arguments are more or less the exact same for and against them. It's like, this seems fundamentally weird that we had to do this thing; it's just weird that in the past Firefox was the one who was like, "Hey, add this comment to your JavaScript and it will put it into asm mode and it will speed up", and Google was like, "No, we can just make things fast all the time." Now, in this case, Google's like "Add this comment or this property that's attributed to your HTML and we can make things fast", and Firefox is like "No, we can just always do that." So I find them very related.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So what's making it fast? That Google caching it and Chrome creating it differently?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's both.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Or is it the fact that you can't insert your ads and you can't do all these things that destroy performance?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[07:51\] It's everything. I think one of the primary benefits... I think out of context, AMP is a bad idea and we shouldn't do it. Why would we do that? It centralizes things and it's bad, and blah-blah-blah... But I think in context, if you look at -- I can't remember the exact stat... If you look at some graph that was released recently, it's some insane amount of browser UAs that content websites get are the Facebook browser. The Facebook browser is one of the top three browsers in existence. Even though it's not a real browser... The whole goal that they're doing there is to make these fast experience, without ads, so you don't have to deal with the web as it stands today.
+
+So Google's one-upping them, saying "Hey, let's do this all with the real web, without apps, without all these things... And if you don't follow these rules and you don't sign up for AMP, you don't put the attribute and you don't do any of these things, your site's gonna be so much faster anyways...", so it's kind of like the asm fallback; it's like, if your browser doesn't support asm, it's still gonna be superfast anyways, based on the things that we already have in place for making websites fast. But if we run it through our thing, because we know the constraints, we can make it even faster... If that makes sense.
+
+So it's kind of a little bit of everything, but the fundamental thing is AMP could die tomorrow and no one would be screwed. I think that's pretty critical.
+
+**Rachel White:** I have a question.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure.
+
+**Rachel White:** So people that are participating in this... If I'm a news publication that decides to integrate these AMP pages for my articles... Say The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Chicago Sun-Times all write similar articles about the same thing - is this gonna affect who shows up?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah.
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh, that's interesting.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, only kind of. Here's the low-down here... If I may put on my tinfoil hat for a second, I think one of the primary motivations here is to make the web better. I think the intentions are good. Like Malte Ubl and Paul Bakaus, some of the people working on this are absolutely fundamental believers in the web platform, and I don't think they would do something like secret embed, or whatever. But the incentivization for why people do this - I think they recognized right off the bat that "Make your website faster by using AMP" is not something that people would necessarily respond to, so they've used SEO and ranking and that kind of thing - not directly; somewhat indirectly - as kind of the carrot to the stick of harder to build web pages, or at least constrained web pages.
+
+So AMP web pages show up in a carousel above the results. Now, speed is already an indicator in pagerank, but AMP is not a specific -- like, you could have a faster page than an AMP page and technically be ranked higher... It's not the fact that you're using AMP is good. That will automatically change some things. But you get the little lightning bolt on the page results, which is not nothing... If I saw two articles and one had a lightning bolt, I feel like I'd click the lightning bolt one, but also the carousel is pretty much what every content creator right now wants to get in there. It's like this thing that pops up above all the other results, and you can kind of swing through that.
+
+Actually, a lot of people don't know this... If you click on to an AMP page from the carousel, you can see the contextual relationship -- I clicked on the middle one, and the article before was this, and the article after was this, and they're all part of the same new story, even though they're different, specific articles; it's all about Sean Spicer wearing his United States flag upside down, or whatever.
+
+\[12:08\] There are arrows in the top nav bar, and you can click actually between the carousel from the different websites. You can just page through the different articles somewhat instantly, which is something I've never used, but also seems kind of cool. But absolutely, all the feedback from content developers is "We want to be in the carousel", not "We want a super fast web page so our users can whatever-whatever-whatever..."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, so I hate this. This is terrible. So there's the AMP format, which is basically a set of really good practices, for being a good mobile citizen, and making your stuff fast on mobile. That's great. They've done a great job there, it's great to get people on that bandwagon, but all of those positive arguments immediately kind of fall away when you start to look at how they're incentivizing people to create the content.
+
+You can stand on a high horse and say, "We're doing this on the web, whereas, say, Facebook and Apple News aren't; they're doing their own proprietary thing." But all they're doing is their one-off proprietary thing on top of web technologies. They're only putting content into this carousel that has specifically opted into their crazy thing.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you cannot conflate web technologies with the web platform.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool. So the fact that they're using web technology to distribute their own things is irrelevant.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. Classically, what Google does is they go out into the web as it is and index it and try to make some kind of sense out of the chaos with the search product, right? This is going the opposite direction, where it's saying "We're defining a format that ostensibly we control. In order to get into this incredibly valuable space in the number one search engine in the world, you're going to have to conform to these rules. We're going to have to host your content for you."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it doesn't change your rank, but it does show you above even the first result. But theoretically, once everyone did AMP, the carousel would be correctly ordered, I assume.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So basically once everybody changes the entire web, then... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I was being hyperbolic.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I understand you were being facetious, but this has some really bad consequences today. To get into the politics/fake news side of things, a lot of really terrible, pseudo-news organizations have adopted these technologies before more reputable organizations. An example of this... Just the other day I googled for Joe Biden, and the thing on top of all the search results that were reasonable was a Breitbart article about how Joe Biden used taxpayer money to fund hookers and blow, or something... Some conspiracy theory, and it was ranked higher than real search results, because Breitbart has done a better job of implementing AMP before anybody else.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... To be clear, I think that is a specific case of a larger problem at Google, and with the political -- like, the same thing is true if AMP doesn't exist, where Breitbart is the second result in the organic results. I think it's just a very difficult thing, because those articles have so much traction and are so highly linked and believed by people, that while being totally unfounded based on current algorithms that don't take into account truth or reputability in that manner... This is a problem outside of this.
+
+I think AMP certainly adds negatively to that pile; so I'm not defending AMP for this, but I don't think killing AMP would in any way solve that problem, for what it's worth.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[15:58\] Well, it seems like they have more solutions in their regular search results than they do in AMP right now, at least. Or there's just less content, so it's easier to game.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure. It's early days.
+
+**Rachel White:** Is all of this stuff that I've seen recently because of the fake news things? Where people are like "Google gives you these horrible results when you search for things politically..."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's what I'm saying, it's true regardless of AMP.
+
+**Rachel White:** Okay.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sometimes Google... Like, the instant answer thing will be just as bad -- "How much does Joe Biden make per year?" and then the answer is "Joe Biden siphons money out of the pizza restaurant in Atlanta", or whatever. I think it's just an extremely hard problem. Maybe they shouldn't be doing it because it's a hard problem, or they should remove all politically related things - I don't know. But I think sometimes it's really -- like, "Where's my closest polling place?" has really good answer and that's a really good feature... So it's hard to weigh the bad versus the good.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I also just worry -- there's a lot of work that people put into making their content accessible to AMP, so in this new context --
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's only kind of true. AMP is actually pretty easy to integrate with. I think easier than literally every other performance framework that has ever existed for these content creators, for what it's worth. The reason why every major news organization already has AMP pages is because it's so easy to integrate, and I think it says something.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, but the centralization aspect of it is concerning to me. That is a performance boost within the Google ecosystem, but that doesn't solve performance outside of that context at all.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, it does. It solves performance outside of the context, just not to the extent that it solves it inside the thing. Like I said before, I think one of the saving things... AMP is not my favorite thing. I know you dislike it, so I'm trying to at least have an interesting discussion, but the idea that if AMP died tomorrow, or if Google ceased to exist, that nothing would break and all content would be available is the exact opposite of how all those other -- things solving the same problem all fail that test, and I think that's one of the fundamental things why centralization is bad...
+
+It's because we're relying on Apple to maintain their App Store in order to get software, and if their store stops existing, then all of a sudden we have no software and we have to redo everything from scratch. And that's absolutely not true with AMP. I think it still maintains the web, it just never directs you to that web currently, which is weird... But it is fundamentally different. I'm causing a lot of long pauses on your end today... That probably just means I'm talking a lot.
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, I think that neither Mikeal or I really knew too much about the integration methods or the reasoning -- well, obviously the reasoning behind it is kind of self-explanatory... But I knew nothing about it, other than it was a thing that existed.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, you can turn on a Wordpress plugin and your site is AMP-compatible.
+
+**Rachel White:** Uh-oh... Well, that explains a lot.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I mean, you can break that with other plugins, but yeah... That is pretty true.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm still incredibly skeptical of this notion that adding AMP support to these sites is actually making them better generally in terms of mobile performance. There are sites that come up in that carousel all the time - like The Huffington Post - that I know for a fact when I pull up on mobile are terrible. If you pull up the actual site...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sorry, better than they were before...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I don't even know if that's true, though... It seems like they're taking a lot of the garbage and just putting it around the AMP thing now, and just saying "We don't even need to worry about mobile performance anymore, because most people are reading it through this AMP thing."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[20:12\] Sure, that's a very good criticism. You can serve different things to Google than you serve to users; that's pretty tried and true. They have a UA, and all that kind of stuff. So absolutely there could be this backlash. If I'm trying to jump into the heads of the Google engineers that did this, it's like "Hey, we have this problem where increasingly, even web articles, content that people are writing on the web, people are consuming in centralized, native applications, and one of the core reasons that this happens is performance. So we need to fix the performance cost." And they're saying the ends of centralizing and doing these things justified the means of eventually all websites care about performance in the future. It creates a new environment where performance matters... But I definitely understand the notion that if people don't have to do any work in order to have fast websites on AMP, then perhaps they'll actually invest fewer resources in making their actual websites faster, as long as they could separate those two things well enough.
+
+So I think it should be a fundamental goal of the AMP project to enforce somehow that regular website are getting faster along with the AMP websites. I think that would go a long way to assuage those fears.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, I'll reiterate again... And full disclosure, Malta, who's one of the lead engineers over there, is a good friend of mine... \[laughs\] The format is great; I wish that people followed the format and didn't have all the other garbage on their websites. I think that the issues that we tend to have with it, the carrot and stick that they're using to get this adopted through its integration with the Google product is really problematic. But that's all that we have for this topic... We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back we're gonna get into a topic that I've already forgotten about, but I'm sure that I'll remember by the time that we come back. \[laughs\]
+
+**Break:** \[22:19\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, now we're gonna talk a little bit about JavaScript fatigue. I'm certainly fatigued... I even forgot that the topic was gonna be JS fatigue. There's been an amazing amount of tweets and articles about this, and it's already reaching the point where people are just referencing JS fatigue and assuming that everybody knows what they're talking about, so I feel like it's probably gonna be really good to come back around and into this a little bit.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** We already have JS-fatigue fatigue.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, exactly. Rachel, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you think this means? What have you seen out there in the New York community about this? Because I know a whole lot of these articles have actually been written by the New York crew.
+
+**Rachel White:** Alright! Well, let me tell you... I think the JavaScript fatigue is like the burden of choice of "I have so many things to use. What should I use? What can I use?"
+
+\[24:04\] Now I'm reading this thing and it's right down all of the framework, build tools, libraries you can think of for 30 seconds straight and stop. You could keep on writing the whole entire 30 seconds.
+
+There's so many different JavaScript libraries that all achieve the same end goal but in various ways, depending on what you need for it. There's multiple bundlers, there's multiple things that handle your routing in Node, there's multiple ways to do JavaScript animations, there's multiple MVCs, there's multiple package manager options... There's so many different things, and I think that aside from there being so many different JavaScript libraries for people to choose from, I think that the fatigue is not only not being able to choose, but also having the feeling of not being able to keep up with how fast these things are coming out.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's almost a social thing. It's like "I don't wanna be the person using the old, broken thing... What's cool to use?"
+
+**Rachel White:** Exactly.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I know it's not entirely that, but there's a part of that that's there.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I mean... Whenever something comes out, people always jump on trying to learn it as fast as possible, so that they don't have that FOMO of not knowing about what's hot in the JavaScript library. The worst part of it is you're gonna get as many different responses for "What should I use to achieve this goal?" as you'll get from asking somebody "Where should I go eat tacos in Austin?" You're just gonna get so many different answers, and it's hard to pinpoint what to choose.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** To that example, as an austinite, you'll get a ton of different answers, but in general, I feel like a) good problem to have, and b) you're probably gonna have good tacos regardless of what you choose. I hate -- this is a very rare moment in my mind where I think... Mikeal probably has some good opinions about this, but I think, Mikeal, you've done more research around the npm ecosystem than most people, and you like to hype just raw numbers sometimes... But I feel like also your experience in the Python community prior to Node and JavaScript - why is JavaScript different in this regard? Why does JavaScript have such -- and maybe every community thinks that they're the community that has the paralysis of choice with fatigue, but I don't believe that's true.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No... It is pretty unique, yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** As a second follow-up question - is it better? Does it mean we have revolutions more often, that cause better things to occur, and we move faster? Or is it worse, in that everyone's constantly learning new tools, and the quality of output doesn't get any better? Those are my two questions... You have 20 seconds.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Okay, so a couple notable things. One is that we used to just call this 'framework fatigue' before npm took off, and this problem actually predates even the npm ecosystem. Obviously, you could think of it as being a little bit accelerated into the npm ecosystem, but we've always had this issue where there is a new framework every year for people to build their web applications in, and everybody wants you to learn it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** There were the framework wars before JavaScript fatigue, and the framework wars were like five frameworks, not 500 frameworks.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, no... It was five frameworks until jQuery won, and then people argued about what framework on top of jQuery to use jQuery that you were gonna build onto... And it's all the same thing, which is that...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I still feel like it's exponentially exploded since... I think you nailed it with npm...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[28:05\] Yes... So it has exploded, but here's the thing... One of the reasons why you get this more in this space than in the cloud space, or enterprise, is because people build more new web applications than they maintain web applications. People build new stuff all the time, and so when you have new things to build, you just have the opportunity to take a new tool.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** But isn't Python primarily -- like, what about... People build websites with Python constantly too, but I guess it's because JavaScript is the common language among every Python, PHP, Ruby or whatever website, that it's multiplied times all the other languages?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I mean, I know people that have Python backends, and they've swapped out -- they built three completely different web apps on top of the same backend... So they actually haven't swapped out the backend, and it would cost them a lot to swap it out, and they'd have to write a lot of new code again... Whereas when you're building a new UI, you have to build a new UI; you can't take a bunch of your old code and just reuse it again.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, you can...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You can with npm, but think about it from the top-level framework perspective - you can't. So there's an opportunity for people to do this more often, which is why we have more of these frameworks. But I think a lot of the fatigue really comes down to higher order libraries - particularly frameworks - have a lot of hidden semantics in them, and as you learn the framework, you start to embed more and more of those semantics in your understanding of just how things work. And when you have to switch to a new framework, all that understanding gets thrown out the window; it's not really applicable anymore.
+
+Also, operating under so many layers of semantics, it actually gets kind of hard to just think about applications and build applications. You start having to think in terms of frameworks, rather than in terms of problems that you're solving, and that makes it much harder for you to switch to the new thing when everybody's talking about the new thing.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. Specifically, I definitely find that interviewing people, even people that I work with from time to time - and this was true in the jQuery days; there were people who knew jQuery and nothing else, but I can talk to them and they know so much about... Now it's pure functions and functional programming, specifically around immutability, and all these different, extremely technical computer sciency ideas, compared to history. They have very concrete ideas around state management... Essentially, they live in this Redux/React world where they know so much there, and then it's like, "Well, we want to get a key event from the browser" and they're like "I've no idea what you're even talking about. What's a key event?" Like, "You write browser applications..."
+
+You get sucked into this specific world where it feels like you can solve everything, because... I don't know. I see people who are brilliant programmers who have such a narrow worldview that it's a little bit sad, but not in like a sad-sad way; they're all smart enough to learn, it's just weird that they haven't noticed the outside stuff yet.
+
+**Rachel White:** Do you mean a narrow worldview in the sense that they're stuck in the way that they've been programming for so long that they're not open to new ways to do it?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's usually the opposite. It's usually extremely smart, brand new developers, started two years ago when Redux and React were coming up, and they've come up in that world, and that's how they solve anything. I don't wanna be the "get off my lawn" person who's like "You gotta learn the DOM API before you can learn framework", but because those tools are so powerful, I think it lulls you into this false specialization, if that makes sense.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[32:00\] I see what you're saying. Well, it is the world that you have to live in, right? I think it's notable that Substack doesn't have this problem, and I'll start off by saying "We can't all be Substack." This isn't a solution for everyone. But if you are really diligent about not using frameworks, not using a lot of vertically integrated plugin architectures, and you just use these small components that have understandable inputs and outputs - so there may be a lot of complexity behind the module that it's doing, but what you understand is you give it this input and you know that you get this output. And if you string those together, you can adopt new modules that replace old ones all the time; every time that you take on a new project, you're just adding a couple tools to your tool chest. Long-term it's a really sustainable strategy for this particular problem.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** For one person.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** What?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** For one person. And I don't even think just Substack. I think any application that can be written by a single person could very easily adopt that strategy -- not easily, but could adapt that strategy with success. I find as soon as you add a team of 20 people, all working on an application, you can't have 95 different documentation points, for instance.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think it's a false dichotomy. A lot of people do write applications that way, with larger teams than just one person, and even a lot of the Substack builds he built with other people... But a really large team likes to have some of these larger frameworks because it standardizes the way in which people interact with very messy web APIs. I think the way that the web platform works is messy, and everybody's sort of opting into a way to make that simpler; it is a little bit simpler for larger teams...
+
+A lot of the problems that those frameworks solve, like redefining how the event system works, or how mutations work to the DOM... There hasn't been a ton of small modules that solve those particular problems, so that you can standardize on "Oh, we'll use this module to solve that problem." But as we move along into the future, I do think that we're going to get closer and closer to that place.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm with you, but I think all of the conversations we're having apply to a backend application written in a different language. The idea of small modules versus a coherent framework is not specific to the web platform being messy. To quote Tom or Yehuda on the Ember team, it's like Ember is not just like one big file called ember.js, it's a bunch of small modules with expected input and output just like a framework pieced together by those; they're known to work together, and they're tested together, and they're planned together. They just happen to be written by the same people. But Ember is made up of 300-something individual small modules that have expected input and output.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, so was React and so was Angular... I think they're all kind of built that way now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I didn't mean to say that Ember was the only one, I'm saying that I think the false dichotomy is that you don't have this option of small modules that get expected input and output, it's the fact that you have to choose them yourself, and I think that's actually what plays into a lot of the fatigue... If you do the small module thing, you have to make a decision about which library to use a hundred times, versus once with a larger framework... Which may be not what you want, because you actively have opinions about all those small modules, but when you get to a certain size or a certain level of caring, you say, "I just want to know something works and is supported", and then you kind of make the tradeoff that says, "I'll let the framework library developers choose that small module for me, rather than choose it myself."
+
+So I think frameworks actually help to prevent the fatigue that a lot of people feel by making a lot of choices, by default.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[36:12\] So if the problem doesn't lie with the frameworks, and ideally the groups of people that are working on these frameworks are making the best decisions for modules to implement into those libraries, could the JavaScript fatigue then just extend to the module makers that are making so many different versions of the same thing, I guess...?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I used to hope for a better outcome for this kind of stuff. When I started to see all these frameworks be built out of more small components, I thought that we would have a lot more longevity and a lot more sanity around them, but what we've actually seen is weird consolidation and plugin patterns, and a lot of the underlying tools turning into their own frameworks.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I agree.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Babel has a crazy plugin system, and Webpack has a crazy plugin system, and React uses all of these together to make its crazy thing. So even when you move on to the next framework that you built on top of Webpack and Babel, you're still gonna be locked into these weird - for lack of a better term - proprietary plugin systems.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But they're not proprietary.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Democratized in the authorship of those... But yeah, so to kind of jump back to the other question, since I think we could talk about small modules versus large modules (and I'm sure we will again), is the pain that JS fatigue causes - does it pay off? Theoretically, if we can go through more iterations of ideas on how to solve the fundamental problems of the web and applications development, then we can have better applications faster. So the tradeoff would be if we spend all of our time learning the new things, then we don't actually gain any speed, but my feeling is that free markets - I hate saying that - kind of dictate that people have a desire to learn new things; they have problems with their old tools, and it's kind of nifty that in our community somewhat seemingly uniquely new solutions come out so quickly and are so easy to put out that we can solve some of our fundamental problems much more quickly that the Python 2 to Python 3 transition -- or like a Rails upgrade in other ecosystems.
+
+So I feel like maybe the web and JavaScript tooling can move forward more quickly because of this, and is it worth the tradeoff in that thing...?
+
+**Rachel White:** I agree with that, plus if there's so many options and people are trying them out, the ones that don't work aren't going to get widely adopted anyway, hopefully...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that there's two competing ideas about where innovation in this space is driven... So is it driven by new capabilities being opened up in the web platform, so we need new frameworks and tools to take advantage of them, or is actually driven by completely new use cases? I tend to not buy into the "things are driven by the underlying platform, but they're actually driven by new use cases."
+
+When mobile was on the rise, we saw a new slew of frameworks that solved mobile; it's not that the old frameworks were bad at solving older problems, they just weren't particularly situated well for mobile.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right. I think specifically that Carrot in this case is like what are native apps doing... It's almost entirely the generator of new ideas... How do we compete with more or less a better experience in almost every default case from the native apps and the web; by kind of the way it works it's always gonna be a little bit behind the proprietary curve because of its constraints. But yeah... I don't know. Sorry, I cut you off again.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[40:20\] No, that's notable. I don't know what the next thing is going to do that React can't adapt itself enough to handle, and so we'll get a new framework... But I do think it's notable that one of the problems that React solved was creating this componentized model, and in order to do that, they basically had to invent subsets of the language and run everything through a compile chain in JSX... And that we actually do have language-level features that supplant most of that. With tagged template literals you can basically not have to do such a crazy compile chain now, and you have these language-level subsets, but there hasn't been a new framework that has really taken advantage of that. Everybody taking advantage of it isn't kind of the substack -- actually I'm this a bit, too...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Styled Components I think does a pretty good job with CSS in-line, for what it's worth.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Again though, but Styled Components feel like they're going after some newer use cases as well... Or at least they're being adopted there. I feel like a lot of even the underlying platform features that we've gotten that are gonna make this nicer are actually gonna play out once we know what the next thing that we need that deal with is. Maybe it's peer-to-peer real-time stuff, or offline... Who knows what the next set of patterns are that these are gonna work on, but that's when we'll actually see people take much more advantage of all these new features in the platform.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I think it's time for a break.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and when we come back, we'll get into the project of the week.
+
+**Break:** \[41:51\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And we're back. Now we're gonna get into the project of the week, Paths.js. This is a library, it's pretty sweet... It's for doing SVG paths and stuff like that. You've spent some time looking into this, Rachel, why don't you tell us a little more about it?
+
+**Rachel White:** No, I didn't... You did! \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We're gonna now finger point...
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, I mean... Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. You submitted it, you talk about it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's an interesting library... It has a low-level API, mid-level API and a high-level API. But even the high-level API, you need to have a bit more of an understanding about curbs, and stuff like that. It is sort of designed for people that maybe know a little bit about how SVG works, like a better library for creating charts, or a quicker library for creating charts, rather than just doing things by hand. Does anybody write SVG by hand?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Wow... I'm impressed.
+
+**Rachel White:** My brain can't comprehend writing SVGs by hand, so that's pretty impressive.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I always start trying to write them, and as soon as I have to declare the size on the board in two different places, I'm dead. I don't know if you guys have ever done it by hand... It immediately confuses me.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[44:00\] I mean, I could do a square, but that's about it, probably. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** There we go... I think something interesting about this is that it's really giving you a lot of simple code paths for declaring and doing different kinds of math. You could build a lot of great libraries for just doing interesting math operations on these primitives... So I think this could actually open up a lot more of an ecosystem on top of SVG stuff.
+
+**Rachel White:** I mean, the mid-level API seems really accessible for people that even aren't used to writing a lot of intense SVG stuff by hand, because it defines the shapes in plain English where then you just have to supply the parameters for the points where your shapes are going to be created in the graph. I don't know if you took a look at it, but it's just allowing you to do things a lot easier.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it seems to open up a lot more... There's plugins for D3, right?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, there's a lot.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, there's a lot of plugins, but they plug into that API; they're not abstractions on top of it where you give them different parameters and they spit out new stuff, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I think that's pretty common, actually... D3 is so low-level that there are plenty of charts libraries that just use D3 as the underlying thing. I'm sure you can supply D3 objects and things like that, but there are whole charting libraries where you don't have to know that D3 exists, that use D3 under the covers... For what it's worth.
+
+So this would be similar to that... You don't have to know SVG. It depends.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think you have to know D3 in order to get a D3 plugin in. Also, I haven't seen anything that was in npm install, this library... Or even just a library that you could take off the shelf that included D3. A lot of those chart libraries that you're talking about, I always had to include it as a script tag ahead, like 2015 style...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Bower for sure. \[laughter\] Yeah, most of those libraries are so far from working, even in JS DOM. It hasn't been a huge thing. But now that everybody uses Webpack to be able to pull vendor stuff out of Node modules and into actual files, I think it's all there.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Not everybody uses Webpack. I don't use Webpack.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sorry... \[laughter\] Every time...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, this is really nice, though. This seems like something that could be used together with a lot of other libraries. It's exciting.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Just to throw in some negativity - not specific about this library, but D3 is a big doer of my problem... I cannot read any of this...
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh my gosh...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I've never been able to look at this... They're constantly using Xs and Ys, which I understand is fundamentally the thing they plot, but it just instantly looks like garbage to me, and I have no idea what's happening. I just want way more comments or a much higher level API than this. Like, "make graph"... \[laughter\] There's an old joke about makefiles, where only one makefile has ever been made, and everything else is someone copying that makefile, then modifying it to their needs...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And I think that's true of D3. There is no D3 visualization that didn't initially come from Mike Bostock's demo set of visualizations, modified from there. I'm not sure I could use this library; I don't do a ton of SVG, but I don't know if I could very quickly pick this up, because it kind of fundamentally means you have to know a lot about plotting and math.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[48:05\] I don't think it's for you... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It would be part of my job to implement some of these things, for what it's worth. The graphs is absolutely something I could get assigned at work at any given time.
+
+**Rachel White:** I think that the people that primarily do data viz programming, it's helpful for it; it probably makes a lot more sense. I'm looking at it and a lot of it makes sense to me, but also why do you have me put in a semi-regular polygon -- oh! Those make sense...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I get it... I can read through it, and eventually be like "Alright, so we're doing a modulus of this; that way, the colors change, and we're doing a list of these little elements that show up next to each other, with spacers..." - I get it. It's just... Compared to all other types of programming, it is much harder for me to read. And it's not a problem with this library, it's a problem with visual programming; it's a whole different beast, that isn't natural to me, specifically... Or a lot of people who program other things.
+
+But there are things like processing JS that kind of flip that on it. I can understand processing JS, or processing... The goal of that project was to have syntax that makes more sense for visualizations. I don't know... Interesting.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I still feel like this stuff is more understandable than any WebGL stuff that I've ever seen, even with good tools... Even with Regl and Mikola's stuff, it's like, "Okay, import this algorithm that does I have no idea what, that operates on an N-dimensional array." \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... To be clear, my concerns with this have more to do with my own inadequacies than it does with any inadequacies of these libraries. I think that I have a common inadequacy when it comes to visual graphics programming like this.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that this is why they invented the DOM... To give a semi-usable way to do visual programming. Even though it's such a mess, at least it doesn't have that kind of bar to get over.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So with that, I think we're gonna move on to the individual picks. Let's spend a little bit of time this week talking about that. Rachel, why don't you go first? I was checking out your pick...
+
+**Rachel White:** Sure... My pick isn't necessarily new, but it is exciting and I feel like not enough people that do creative coding really know about it. It's called Tracery. It is a library where it allows you to write grammar objects to make generative stories in an easier way. A lot of people that do Twitter bots or art projects on websites with generative poetry, it just makes it a lot easier to swap stuff out, instead of having to write your own randomized picker for certain types of grammar.
+
+The way that it works is you have an object with key-value pairs for each item that you are going to swap out, and the value is an array of a bunch if different strings that it could be for that object. I've seen a bunch of really cool poetry things done with this, but the main reason that I wanted to talk about Tracery is because George Buckenham (v21 on GitHub and on Twitter) made this really awesome Node.js library that also allows you to implement it into projects even easier. But he didn't stop there. After he did the Node library, he decided "Hey, wouldn't it be awesome if instead of grammar, people could swap SVG variables out?"
+
+\[52:15\] So there's this website called cheapbotsdonequick.com, and it utilizes Tracery and allows you to automatically create your own Twitter bot. One of the most popular ones that I usually tell people about when I'm talking about this is @softlandscapes (which has a ton of followers on Twitter). What it does is every 6-8 hours it tweets out a really pretty, gradient, pastelly landscape of a gradient sky and a mountain range, and it's just really nice to look at.
+
+If you go to the cheapbotsdonequick.com site you can see the source code, and it hurts my brain to look at. It's the Tracery JSON for the SVG that is generative. So that is my pick of the week. It's fun, and it gets people to make some stuff. That's it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Do you want me to go next, Mikeal? Is that what your silence implies?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh my god, I was just talking, but I had it on mute. \[laughter\] No, I was just saying (like, to nobody) that this library is sort of like those "fill in the blank" stories, where...
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, mad libs.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Like ahead of time, somebody's like "Oh, hey... Give me a name of somebody, give me a thing that you do to somebody else", and then you get a hilarious story at the end of it. Mad libs, that's what they're called!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Rachel said it earlier.
+
+**Rachel White:** Have you played mad libs as an adult? Because now they all just turn to horribly inappropriate things.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I don't know... When I play, it's always just like "A butt walked into a fart, and farted out a butt." \[laughter\] Pretty much the same as when I was a kid.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, so I'll get into my pick. I picked Lemonade Stand. It's a repository from Nadia Eghbal, who is the co-host with me on Request For Commits. She put together this amazing page of basically every open source funding model that you can think of... Everything from getting paid by a company to work on open source, to donation buttons, to crowdfunding, to grant funding... Literally, starting a company and getting venture capital. She has all of them listed with different case studies of different projects that have done it this way, and links to articles, and pros and cons list... It's really cool, so look for that in the show notes - Lemonade Stand.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[54:56\] Cool. My pick of the week is a polyfill, so it's really a pick for the DOM... It's the Intl.js library. I think a lot of people don't use Intl, they're still using various random plugins, but I would love to see more standardization around internationalization, and formatting, and things like that. If you're unfamiliar with Intl, it's an object in most modern browsers (as well as Node now) and it can help you do number formatting, currency formatting, daytime formatting - all that kind of stuff, all in the native web platform, which is beautiful.
+
+And the polyfill is Andy Earnshaw's polyfill; that just goes on top. It doesn't do things like collation, because it's really tough and there are some algorithms it doesn't do, but it's pretty good, because Safari obviously is still hurting us here. They don't have Intl.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Does it convert foreign exchange rate currencies?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No, no... Obviously not, Mikeal. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's a very specific question, though... You should hire someone.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] I'm actually looking to go to Europe soon and I'm so happy with how strong the dollar is right now, it's really nice. I've actually never gone to Europe this cheaply before, so..
+
+**Rachel White:** Humble brag.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Really? Going to Europe is bragging? Okay...
+
+**Rachel White:** No, the cheapness of it... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** "I've never gone to Europe this cheaply before..." \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** I already booked my flight... I should have waited. I could have had all that extra money to spend on caviar.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] With that in mind, everybody, definitely go to our GitHub repository - github.com/thechangelog/jsparty and give us topics. You can even suggest potential co-hosts, because like I just said, we're gonna be in Europe pretty soon, so some of us will not be available as panelists and we would love to hear the kinds of people that you'd like to have fill in for us while we're out. Also, rate the show on iTunes and subscribe to all kinds of things, subscribe to The Changelog, and thank you very much! We are out!

JavaScript in Latin America_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,383 @@
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript. I'm Mikeal Rogers. We've also got Alex Sexton, and Rachel's internet went out this week right before we were about to record, so luckily we were able to get a guest host in right away. Say hello, Juan Pablo Buritica.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Hello! Do I have to repeat my name, too? Hello, Juan Pablo Buritica.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** There you go, yeah! \[laughter\]
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** How's everyone?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Awesome!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, so let's just jump into it today. Because we've got you on, we're taking the opportunity to talk about a topic that we wouldn't have had the expertise to talk about if you weren't on... We really wanna get into JavaScript in Latin America and what the whole scene looks like. Why don't we start with you telling us a bit about yourself and how you got involved in JavaScript community stuff?
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Sure. I am now an engineering manager, I live in New York City and I work for a company called Splice. It's basically like GitHub for music producers, and that where we're gonna leave it; it's pretty cool.
+
+In parallel, in my free time I've been very involved with the JavaScript communities for the past seven years, mostly in the spirit of paying open source forward. I never saw myself as someone who would have enough time to maintain open source software, so I chose to paint and create open source software communities, especially focused in Latin America where I saw there were a lot of holes and things that we could bridge. So that's what I've been up to lately.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Juan, I have a question for you... Who has been to more conferences for JavaScript - you or me?
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** You have. I think you've been in Brazil, you've been in Uruguay, you've been in Argentina and you've been in Colombia, so you have the four -- you've spoken at the four existing JavaScript conferences in Latin America. I've only been to Colombia.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, really?
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Yeah, that's it. I've only been to Colombia. I meant to go to Argentina, I meant to go to Uruguay... I think I may end up going to Uruguay at the end of this year, and in Brazil I haven't.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, now I feel like a jerk because I thought the answer was you, and I was trying to set you up, but now I just...
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** It's okay. I've been to more JSConf Colombias than you.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's for sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So how did there get to be so many awesome JavaScript events in Latin America? I don't know that every language community has that.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** It's been pretty cool... I think some of it started in parallel from different groups. The biggest challenges that we always have is it's really hard to get access to high-quality content in Spanish. Before JSConf Colombia we started boa.conf, which was just a general software development conference in Latin America (in Colombia). Then there was StarTechConf in Chile, which was just general. I think we didn't have enough density to only do JavaScript, but then a couple years later I think JSConf Argentina came up, because Guillermo talked to Chris Williams.
+
+\[03:56\] I think it was actually the second even to pop up, or the third one, other than JSConf Europe. He hosted that one, it went pretty well, and then once we saw that there were enough people interested in JavaScript in Colombia - I think we had at the time probably six meetups, so it meant that we could at least try to get 300 people together, and we threw JSConf Columbia in 2013; that was the first one. Uruguay I think was born in the same year, if I'm not wrong, or maybe a year later. Brazil was probably around 2013 as well, or maybe even earlier.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think it was 2013. It only lasted a year, but there was also BrazilJS, which was huge.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Yeah. I think Google has organized JSConference once or twice, and then BrazilJS was just gigantic. Brazil is like a continent on its own.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I don't know if it still maintains, but at the time it was the most people who had ever come together for a JavaScript conference that anyone could think of.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Yeah, they were aiming -- I think they actually made the purpose of hosting the largest JavaScript conference in the world.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It was like 1,200 people, or something like that.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** A handful.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** So I think over the past five years, and even especially with the rise of Node, there's a series of events that we have - I think four conferences. We tried to get some in Central America, but we're still trying to figure that out, and also in Mexico, which is North America.
+
+There's a great amount of Node School events, also there's NodeBots events... So there's a lot of JavaScript interest. Just in Colombia I believe we have ten regional meetups, which is pretty big. It's pretty cool to see it grow.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. We don't even have that in Texas. We have three, four... Something like that. \[laughter\] Anyways... You mentioned something that I'm gonna spider off from; you mentioned that it's hard to find content in Spanish... I've had these conversations a few times in a few different places, and one theme that comes up that is very interesting to me that I would not anticipate - I talked to some of the people from Platzi as well, which is a primarily Latin-American learning platform for code. People trust the courses that are in Spanish less than the ones that are in English.
+
+The same person could give the same course in English and in Spanish, and people will listen to the one that's in English because they assume that the content isn't as good in Spanish. Is that still true?
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** It is true. We have a pretty heavy cultural problem in Latin America which is we don't trust each other, because we tend to take a lot of advantage of each other, too. There's a lot of sketchy content or refurbished content, or just not high-quality content. If you search for web tutorials or programming tutorials in Spanish, the majority of stuff that you're gonna find is just very old, outdated content, because the bleeding edge is written in English. This probably happens across many cultures. Mariko and I have talked about this a lot.
+
+The bleeding edge usually starts in English, and naming rights come from English. Then as you have people who are bilingual who have enough time to translate this content, then they'll do so. But you end up also having a lot of people who are bilingual who start with introductory content, so they start translating that, and ultimately you end up with a lot of outdated introductory content. So it's easier to just jump straight into English and just default into trusting English.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[07:51\] I see. I guess why I brought that up is it feels like the conferences that you ran - JSConf Colombia, and I spoke at a few of those other ones, too - is the talks were half and half in Spanish and in English, depending on who gave the talk. Then there were translations there and Platzi I think does a good job of having actual good Spanish content; I don't speak Spanish well enough to do that, but that's what I've heard.
+
+Is this changing? Is this something that is getting better? Obviously, I understand that if someone writes a new React library in English and writes the docs in English, you have to be able to speak English in order to get that information on day one... So it makes sense, but it seems almost critical that we reach people in the languages that they speak, at least on the long tail.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Access is definitely improving. I think that definitely Platzi has had a huge impact. I think the first JavaScript course I gave was on Platzi and that definitely had a really -- I think it was Node, writing an API in Node... And it had a really broad audience.
+
+One of my current engineers who is from El Salvador in L.A. saw my Platzi course before he worked at Splice, which is just mind-blowing.
+
+There are several educational initiatives that are trying to get really good quality content in Spanish, and I really -- I support Platzi especially because they're already going after changing the way that people get educated in Latin America.
+
+The other portion - a lot of the initiatives in Latin America are interesting... One of the things that we did in Colombia and I'm really proud of is that we've always aimed to highlight the local talent, and not make it a conference where international speakers come to talk to us. Overall, we usually have a portion of guest speakers - we always launch with three or four guests speakers that we invite, that we curate. Then there's a portion of international speakers that we have slots open for the CFP, and then we have to have Colombian speakers - there has to be someone for Colombia speaking - and then we consider anyone Latin America as a local speaker, and then we do simultaneous interpretations for both Spanish speakers and English speakers.
+
+There's a really fun video of Alex's talk in Colombia, I think we should share the link because it's a really funny intro. But the aim has always been to connect, to bridge, and not to have the colonial approach of "Here we come to educate you."
+
+One of the founding principles of JSConf Colombia was that within the first five years we wanted to have one of our local attendees speak at an international event, and I think right now there's three of them who've spoken, who are attendees from JSConf Colombia locals, who have spoken internationally. We're really proud of that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** The Argentina group does really well these days too, at JSConfs and things like that, I see... I went there, and then at the next JSConf I was like, "Oh, I recognize all these people..." So I think that even outside of bringing stuff to these places, which is helpful and helps give people access to things that they may not have had access to prior, but I think they're really good jumping off points for people in these communities to go out into the international scene. That's really nifty.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I know a few people from the circuit that kind of started out in Argentina or Uruguay or Colombia...
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Argentina and Uruguay... I think the culture of the Southern cone of America is very different from the tropical area, and Argentina and Uruguay - you can see there's a lot of content produced in the Southern end of Latin America, much more than in the tropical region. I'm actually pretty jealous of a lot of the frontend stuff that comes from Argentina, because they're really good at organizing and leading many things.
+
+\[12:12\] You have Pony Foo... There's a ton of React stuff, and of course, all the things that Guillermo Rauch does. It's pretty cool.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** What are the particular challenges of doing this kind of work in Latin America, community organizing in general? Because you've done a lot more than these conferences; you also do one of the largest JavaScript meetups in the world is in Colombia as well.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Yes... We've mostly tried - and I haven't done this work myself, so I have to highlight my co-organizers, because I'm in New York and I don't really do a lot of this stuff... But the objective has always been to give access and to include people who either are excluded because there's not enough density in every tiny city to start a JavaScript meetup. You may have one JavaScript developer in a remote area in any country of Latin America, so we've started initiatives to increase access online; that's the one that's called Charla, which is like an online meetup. We've had three episodes of that one, and I can tell you a little bit about that later.
+
+We have the local meetups, which is how we started. After the first conference we did in 2011 in Bogota, we started Bogota JS, which is now five years old. It started as the first JavaScript meetup in Colombia, and then we moved one year later to Medellin, and then we moved to Calle... We've tried to motivate people to start their own regional current.
+
+We do something that's called the Empanada Offer, which is I personally offer to sponsor the Empanadas of your first meetup; I will pay for the soda, I'll help you find a venue, I'll help you organize that, as long as you commit to have the event, and find the speakers and adopt a code of conduct. That worked really well.
+
+We have 11 meetups in Colombia right now, and between Medellin and Bogota, which are always sort of like fighting at the top for membership, I believe we have 6,000 people in total between those two meetups. Right now, Medellin is larger - which I'm very proud of, because it's younger - and it's spread out... We've helped start a couple in Venezuela... In Central America I think I've talked to the Costa Rica guys... It's been pretty cool.
+
+Ultimately, the challenge is threefold. First, content - finding people who know a lot about JavaScript locally, who have had the experience to learn and then share it, is really hard. If you look at, for example, BrooklynJS or WaffleJS, or any of these meetups where every event is almost a conference, the quality of the content is just incredible, and then you look at the content that we generally have in Latin America - it's more introductory.
+
+So finding people who have been given a chance at work to try something really innovative or to do a lot of stuff is hard. I think we'll have to continue to rely on international audiences for the majority of the innovative content. We're producing some good stuff.
+
+The other one is language - we try to fill during the events by having simultaneous interpretation and that sort of stuff, but it's always just challenging. You can't expect everyone to speak English; it varies a lot from country to country. I've also noticed it varies from community to community. I've helped the Ruby committee kickstart their conference in Colombia two years ago, and I think only 30% of the attendees required interpretation devices, wherein JavaScript around 60% of the attendees required English interpretation.
+
+\[16:10\] I think the last one is resourcing. Local companies don't sponsor; the majority of the money that we usually get is from international companies. The local companies expect something in return immediately, like "Okay, if I give you $100, then what am I gonna get? Can I speak for 30 minutes?" There's a lot of cultural challenge there.
+
+Finding a venue is super tough. I think Bogota still after five years doesn't have a fixed venue; we've been trying to solve that. Even multinationals and the people who are evangelists for multinationals in Latin America have a very different culture perspective. I'm not gonna mention names, but a large software company in Colombia loaned us their auditorium, but then we found out after the fact that they wanted to do a 30-minute pitch of some of their services to our audience, in exchange of it. That's something that we don't really like. We appreciate the necessity of sponsorship, but there's just some abusive practices that we're not really fond of. So that's sort of like the three angles that are hard.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That kind of stuff isn't unheard of in the U.S. as well at meetups. There's just so many companies that you can usually find some that are thinking a bit more long-term than that and aren't trying to do something so sketchy. But I actually have been at U.S. meetups where they tried that kind of thing as well.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And sometimes as an organizer you ensure that doesn't happen, and then suddenly someone's giving a 20-minute pitch on your stage, and you have to figure out what to do.
+
+Juan, is there an upcoming conference in Colombia?
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** There is. I think the event will happen in November - the 1st to the 4th November is the dates that we have the venue. We're opening the CFP right now today. JSConf Colombia right now has three confirmed guests. We're gonna have Tom Dale (I think some of you know him), we're gonna have Suz Hinton (some of you know her as well) and we're gonna have Elba Sánchez, who is a local Colombian rising star. She worked with me at my last company, and she's been writing a ton of Node, and working with AI and bots and stuff, so we're really happy to have her.
+
+Then we're looking for workshoppers and speakers. We pay for travel, we pay for accommodation, we pay for your significant other if you're a new parent, and we'll also arrange childcare as well... So it's a pretty sweet deal. We're hoping that at some point we will be able to pay speakers, but we're not there yet; it's a challenge.
+
+The URL is cfp.jsconf.co. Please apply. I think it ends in June 11th or 12th. It'll be a blind CFP, and I recuse myself from judging, because I know how some people write... But it'll be pretty cool to have a broader audience. It's been super fun to have people come to Colombia, because we've been generally isolated from the world, for some fame we've gotten ourselves into... But we've had some pretty fun times. I think, Alex, you had some good food...?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I had more than good food, but yeah... The food was very good. I really enjoyed JSConf Colombia. I haven't had a bad experience at any of the conferences in South America or Latin America, so I would encourage everyone to go to all of them. You're only kind of related... You started this a while back, and now it's Catherine and Julian...?
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** \[20:11\] I'm coming back this year.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, you're coming back... So you returned.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I retired...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** 44, MJ.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Jenn Schiffer gave her last tech talk at JSConf Colombia 2014, and then I said that was the last conference that I was ever organizing (2015), but this year I just realize I miss it too much, and Catherine has also started spreading out to other events. Today, right now she's actually at a ScaleConf, which is a distributed systems conference that she organized with a different team in Medellin.
+
+So Julian and I are going to be co-directors this year. I think the goal for this year is to get three junior organizers, who will be able to inherit the relationships, the sponsorships, all the stuff that we've built, which is what has allowed us to do them, and do a really nice hand-off over for next year. That's the plan.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, man... I just realized, as we come up on a need for a break, that the three of us organized conferences; I think maybe in a future episode we could talk more about the organize part and less about -- I think the Latin America conversation was much more interesting \[laughter\]... But the idea that you eventually get tired of running the conference and having a known successor that can do it with your for two years, who can inherit those relationships and cow paths, is such a good idea that I really wish I did, because if you all noticed, TXJS takes a year off here and there... \[laughter\] Just like JSConf US did, just like NodeConf does, and the HTMLConf, or whatever.
+
+I think a hundred percent of us seem like we could have benefitted from that... So keep us up to date on how that works out.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I will, that's the plan. I tried to do it last time, but there's five main organizers and we wanna be actually conscious of passing it off and not just own everything, so... That's a plan. I'll keep you posted, definitely.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. Alright, we're gonna take a break real quick, and when we come back we're gonna talk a bit about all this JavaScript tooling that's out there. Stay tuned.
+
+**Break:** \[22:37\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, let's talk a little bit about tooling. Gina Trapani wrote a good article explaining modern JavaScript for ancient web developers, which I'm realizing I actually fall into the category of now... And I think you two too do as well, so this is probably not the best panel to talk about this... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Speaking of tools, Mikeal... \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[24:03\] That's brutal...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** ...how do you feel about the explosion of them?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Yeah...
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I love tools.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, so I'll run a real thing that happened to me by you all, and you can tell me if you agree or not. I was curious about something that was going on in Yarn... In particular, we had this issue where we were thinking about adding an install step into Node Core for npm packages, then I went "Oh, Yarn wrote that, too... Let me go look at the Yarn code." So I go into the Yarn code, and this is... It's just a command line tool, and it uses Webpack, Babel, Flow and Gulp. And just getting into the code just a little bit, I was just kind of pushed back, and ended up just giving up because I was just like "I don't wanna learn all these tools just to figure out what this code pack looks like." Am I just like way too old now?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yup.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Do I need to be put out to pasture? Is this the new reasonable thing to do?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I mean, you mentioned those tools like they all do the same thing, but they don't.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** They don't, but it's a command line utility. Are they really necessary?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, if you want to write code that is type checked, then you can; you don't have to, but they chose to, because it'll make their command line tool better for some reason for them. Then if you want to write in ES6 or whatever, and still work in older versions of Node, which is a requirement for them, then you have to compile, which is Babel, and then if you wanna watch that compilation or do anything like that, you can use Gulp and Webpack for separate parts of that.
+
+I don't see a problem... My favorite response to that is just like "It still works without all that stuff." If you want to personally write all your scripts by hand, using only VARs and ES3 prototype methods, that also is compatible and you can do that. But forcing your idea of a baseline of tools on people seems arbitrary.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, first of all I'll argue a little bit with that notion that you can't use modern JavaScript features and support older versions of Node... You should not be supporting 0.10 or 0.12. Those are literally not even getting security fixes anymore, so it's detrimental to your community to support it.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Yeah, but that's very idealist.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, it's not idealistic, it's actually practical.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** But for a company, it isn't.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Especially if you're a company. You are literally not going to get critical security fixed anymore. Like, that's gone.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Right, but I'll give you a real-time example. Elizabeth & Clarke - my wife's company - has one engineer, and what he works on depends on the time, and I'd rather have him work on mission-critical business stuff than him catching up to date, because we're literally a three-person company. So it sounds like we could do it, but unless -- we can't compare and expect or everyone who's a developer to have the resourcing that Facebook or other large companies that have maintenance-dedicated teams to do this.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But this is a false dichotomy. If you've got some stuff up in 0.12 and you don't wanna upgrade it, fine. But you're also not gonna get the newest Yarn installer either. Like... No. You're not gonna get the newest dependency and have that support these ancient versions. You either aren't updating this at all anymore, or you're updating it and you're using a version that actually gets critical security fixes, period. I don't think that those are like--
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[27:59\] If you put out a competitor to npm and npm has a set of version that it works on, and you don't work on and you don't work on those versions, then you instantly are at a disadvantage.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** New versions of npm do not work with 0.12 and 0.10.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** They do.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, they don't.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Terminal challenge.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No... New, new versions don't work with 0.10 and 0.12.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Fine... But they did two weeks ago.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Do we have a live fact checker?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** If they are still working with them, I'm gonna yell at Isaac tomorrow, that's what I'll do. I think that we honestly owe it to ourselves as a community to push people in the direction of actually being secure and not being open to huge security vulnerabilities, and part of that is pushing the off of 0.10 and 0.12.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I am aware of security vulnerability landscapes, but there is a different vector, there is a different amount of possibility of security problems when you're talking about a build tool versus a runtime application. So if you only use Node as a build tool, which I think is a massive portion of the way people use Node...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Huge.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, like half or more, it feels like... The amount of security vulnerabilities that you have are vastly reduced, and the need to upgrade versions of Node on your Jenkins server is much lower than if you run Node in production, serving requests and things like that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, that was a really bad example, because we've had to upgrade Jenkins because of Jenkins' security vulnerabilities like twice a year, so... Yeah, sorry... You hit my sore spot with Jenkins, it's awful... Awful, awful software!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Man, I feel like we're about two levels off of the actual discussion here, though... So I'm not talking about upgrading Node...
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Cause like because being a manager and having the chance to only write JavaScript in my free time, every time -- I said I have a random side project, and I'm like "Okay, I'm gonna try out Flow." I wanna learn a little bit about this type-checking stuff, because I think I've come to the point where I have to learn it, and I spent an entire Saturday setting my environment up, because there's all dependencies that I had not been aware -- there's all this cargo cult that... Culture cargo -- I have no idea what I'm saying... But I felt like I needed to know a lot about the state of the JavaScript community to even get a tool working. I felt -- I don't know if old, but incapable of writing certain stuff, and it was rough. So I think for the tooling perspective, it is becoming less new-people-friendly sometimes, I believe.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This is an interesting topic, because a lot of the people who advocate for these tools say that it's actually lowering the barrier to entry. These tools add a bunch of value that makes programming easier, and another set of people (which I think we're representing here) are saying "No, it's a bigger barrier to entry because now you have to learn all this extra tooling."
+
+At no point in time does this tooling become entirely universal, right? Not even all frontend developers are using this exact toolchain; there are other competing toolchains out there, even for the frontend stuff.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think there's two discussions here. If you expose an API that you document, that has nothing to do with Webpack, Gulp, Flow or whatever else you mentioned, and you use those tools to build that library or API, then use a thousand tools if that's what makes you productive and that's what you wanna do, and then expose the correct things... Unless you're writing a Webpack plugin.
+
+\[32:06\] If you are leaking out those abstractions from outside, then I agree with you - you're forcing people to learn it. But if you just wanna pull in a tool like Yarn, it'll maybe build all that stuff, but to use Yarn, you just "npm install --global yarn", and then you can use Yarn. It doesn't matter that they use Flow, or anything like that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's a really good distinction, actually. That is a really good distinction. I didn't care about what Yarn was built in until I wanted to look at the code for some reason, which means that I'm not the normal user of that software. But to Juan's point, when you wanted to go and use Flow, it wasn't like you could just pull Flow down and start using Flow; he had to move his mindset into this, I'm assuming, Webpack mindset, because I haven't' actually used Flow, so I'm just assuming that it's embedded into this other Webpack workflow... But I could be wrong.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I was trying to get it with Babel. I basically had an existing project that I wanted to bring in, but I was also using AVA, the test-runner, so it already had a config... It was just very weird. I finally got it to work, but then I was just not encouraged enough to actually try it out, so I just removed everything and I switched back to my regular branch and I just said, "You know what? This is not the time for me to learn static typing anymore."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You literally got it set up to learn it, and you were like "I'm burned out now." \[laughs\]
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I was literally frustrated, because I could have spent my Saturday working on my bot, but I couldn't.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You could... You chose to try to install something that was hard to install. Nothing forced you to try to use Flow.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** My curiosity...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure, but it's an experiment for a reason. Some experiments that you try are gonna fail, and that's part of the deal, but I guess it's an amortized cost. I agree that there's some overhead to learning some of these tools, but if you spend the day (I guess that's what it took you to be able to hook Babel and Flow)...
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I'm exaggerating, but like four hours.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I would give you more than that... It can be hard. I would definitely encourage any new developers to always use a starter kit for these types of things. Go find a React, Redux, Flow, Babel starter kit; that exists, you can go get it, you install it and you run it, and it immediately has all these things directly in it, with none of the configuration. Create React App has most of that stuff in it out of the gate. So get used to using it, and then once you need to customize it, then you can go into it.
+
+You're gonna tackle that problem slightly differently, 1) because you are a pretty experienced developer and you assume that you should be able to just pull something in and it'll work pretty easily... But for new developers, I think there actually are quite a few tools that can make this instant and nice, without them learning how to set it up. But let's say it even costs you a day to set up Babel and Flow, but how many days do you have to use Babel and Flow before that dividend is paid back to you? I would say it's not that long.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Oh, right... Don't get me wrong, the return on investment - it was attractive enough for me to spend a day trying to figure it out, because it's an awesome thing. I think a lot of these tools have ultimately maybe a better developer, and not even having any formal computer science training, the fact that I got to a point where I valued static typing and type-checking because I thought it would be useful for my project is awesome.
+
+\[35:57\] If I were writing code every day, it would have definitely paid off within a few hours. I do think that even as more open source projects start adopting all this tooling, they become less new contribution-friendly, and I think that's the only problem I have with it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I agree. I think it should be a goal of any popular project, or of any project, but it becomes a higher priority goal of any popular project to have a "Run these exact things and we promise it will work and you don't have to know about the build chain" and "Separate the concerns of building and authoring", and things like that. Mikeal, you were talking about Yarn and doing all those things - those are parts of the build chain, but I can't imagine that any algorithm Yarn is writing for dependency resolution is gonna have anything to do with the configuration of those tools, right?
+
+I understand that in order to get it running on your machine, that kind of sucks, but the actual reading of the code shouldn't have necessarily been affected, other than you might see some type definitions here or there. Does that make sense?
+
+I feel like the "npm run configure" or whatever would be a really nice thing to maybe standardize or become more of a popular thing, to where it's like a one-click install type of things. But honestly, it really feels like npm install does most of that already.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** StandardJS does a very good job of this, right? You can run it as a command line thing, it just works; it just works in whatever linter that you're plugging it into... If you have some giant toolchain, you just kind of plug it into one of those places. It doesn't really have an opinion about how you integrate it into these workflows. It's exposed in a really nice way.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I really like that one.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's Feross', right?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I wanted to come back to the thing you said about Create React App, and generally there is some kind of bootstrap Get Started thing. Every new framework and every new library, or every new big piece of software that comes out has one of these, and they tend to actually define the standard workflow. In fact, people that are really good React programmers that have built tons of apps with it and know it really well still use Create React App to start out.
+
+There continues to be this argument, like every time that they put a new version of Create React App or something similar, people complain about the size of the dependencies that are included in it, and it ends up being this massive, massive dump of code... Which is always kind of hilarious to me, because I am one of those people that kind of care about that, but I also am not the kind of person that would use Create React App, so I'm wondering where is the overlap in these use cases exactly? \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So you just hate yourself...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, no... I don't complain about Create React App because I'm never gonna use Create React App, so I honestly don't care... So I don't understand the argument from that perspective, but we are getting to the point where these are getting huge. The baseline to set up is just enormous.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... I think actually the Ember community nailed this before more or less anyone else with EmberCLI. EmberCLI is one of the best... Like, I did Ember before EmberCLI, and I did Ember after EmberCLI, and baking in EmberCLI is like an officially supported thing; the docs for Ember have EmberCLI usage to where you don't have to know how to create a new file because you can just Ember New up a new file and you can run the test through it and you can install things to it, and it can check extra things that npm doesn't check, and you can do add-ons... The whole ecosystem can be built into this tool, and I think that far and beyond even Create React App, that ecosystem is one that people can instantly spin up and do with very little trouble until they wanna upgrade it, which is its own problem with those bootstrap things, because when you're generating files it becomes very hard to then upgrade the runner of those files that generates new types. I mean, they have good strategies, but it's a hard problem.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** \[40:13\] I'm with you with that, because EmberCLI is to me the de facto example of how these tools should work... But what I respect from EmberCLI is that they have a vision; they had a vision and they implemented across add-ons, across templates... All that stuff just works. But I've had the opposite experience and I know that the Angular CLI is still an RC candidate, but I've come to the point where I expect so many things to actually be done by this, and it just doesn't work. We've struggled a lot at Splice, even having people dedicated at just fixing some problems with getting some of this stuff working, because once you have to do AoT because if not you're shipping a giant... Like, either you are doing tree-shaking or you wanna get a faster response time on your shipped build, it gets super frustrating. It's one of those things that if it doesn't work properly, then I'd rather just not have it at all.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, the Create React App eject stuff I think is a good idea for those situations, to where you always a way of just busting out of the thing; it writes the configuration files that you already have and then says "You can figure it out from here." But that's when updates become hard.
+
+I think the thing that the Ember community accidentally really nailed is that the community bought into the tool, and since it's officially supported, when you write an add-on or when you write a third-party thing, it's your job to integrate it with EmberCLI rather than Create React App, which has to manage all of its own dependencies and say, "Alright, we'll pull these in and update them as they come in." And then if someone else is using Create React App and they wanna use a third-party library that isn't compatible, then they have to bust out no matter what... So flipping irresponsibility of compatibility to the third-party author I think is a solid community idea. Also writing docs with it... Because it's best for new developers, I think docs are critical here.
+
+All the docs for React are still just "Open this file. Write jsx directly in it and try to run in this way or that way", whereas the Ember docs say "npm install EmberCLI and then run these commands through EmberCLI". So I would love the React community to switch the docs to default to Create React App if it became an official thing. There are problems with that and more considerations than me just saying that, but I think that's a really nice initial experience.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** On that bit of advice, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back we're gonna get into the project of the week. Stay tuned.
+
+**Break:** \[42:57\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Now we're gonna get into the project of the week. Since Juan's here, I wanted to continue to embarrass him and call him out a little bit... You wrote this great guide called The Collaboration Guide; it's on your GitHub. I wanna feature this as the project of the week because it's awesome. It's literally just a guide to help people collaborate when they're in remote teams, and I think these are problems that every company that ever does some amount of remote working runs into. This is really the bestest breakdown of like "Here's a nice diagram for how to get a hold of somebody without annoying them." It's really good.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Thank you... Now I'm blushing over here.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] So why did you write this?
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** It came from the real struggle that we were having at Ride, basically seeing the rest of the company try to adapt to the fact that engineering was completely distributed just motivated me to make sure... So these guides had to purposes. First, telling engineering how I expected them to communicate and to collaborate, the default of our values, and then we shared this document to everyone else in the company, basically telling them "This is how we work, and if you need us, please adapt to this." Because the constant interruption, the Slack channeling all the time, or the DMs... The missed expectations meant that I had to do a little bit more of a deactive management, but it came out really well.
+
+A lot of it is, of course, inspired by the open source way of working, but it was mostly to just define the culture of how we communicated, and it turned out pretty good. I've applied the majority of this stuff at Splice now, and it's worked really well. You'll probably see me every now and then tweet about "Please don't use 'adhere' all the time, don't abuse it" because one of the most challenging things with distributed teams or hybrid teams is the constant interrupting, which is just like in an open office just being touched on the shoulder and like "Hey, can you look at this?" and you just break the entire flow. So that was the inspiration.
+
+A few people have forked it, and actually I've seen some better or more thorough ones -- I forgot the one... I think it's LenaSun; she has a broader one that she did for her company. I'll find the link and I'll share it, but it was even more detailed than mine. It's pretty cool to just bring that and open it up and see how people react to it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** When I hear people talk about having remote people and remote teams, they tend to bring it up in this context of like "Oh, you can just hire these really good people that are somewhere else", and I've worked with a lot of companies that have done this and it hasn't worked out very well when they have a few remote people, but they still have an office, or they're still centralized in decision-making somewhere. Is your company laid out where all of engineering is distributed and that's just the way that everybody works, or are there a few key people in the office?
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** At Splice right now we have an engineering office in Santa Monica, California, and that's engineering only; that's where the CTO is - the CTO and founder, Matt Aimonetti is there. We have two QA engineers, two backend engineers and Matt. Then the rest of engineering is distributed between Latin America and the U.S., and I am consciously and on purpose not hiring anyone in New York for engineering, to force the rest of the company to act distributed, because we do have the entire product team and the entire business team in New York, in office.
+
+The reason why people think that being collocated is better is because we're just lazy around communication and being around people; everyone ends up finding out about this stuff that's going on in the company. But when you have one person out of the office and you're actually remote, you have to do a conscious effort of keeping everyone in the loop.
+
+\[48:16\] So I wanna keep that until we grow; right now we're 12 engineers... Probably around 20-25 I'd be open to having people in the office, but it's something that Matt and I are still trying to figure out, because we really like the distributed engineering culture and the vision of just letting people be adults and work on their time, work on their projects and so on.
+
+If I ever - and of course I do wanna start adding more junior members - that will switch my approach, because then I'll probably have to instill some really solid support structures for entry-level positions and that will require having people in office, or at least very available for them... That will probably switch things a little bit, but it's a little bit too early to get together.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** What are the key benefits of having a remote team? Do you think it adds a lot of more diligence in how you do communication and how you do the planning?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Can I jump in on that? Because I have a strong opinion. As a remote employee for a large Silicon Valley company...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That has a big office of engineers, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, a ton... So I wanted to talk to you about not hiring people in New York for a little bit - that may be an extreme case, or whatever, but that's fine... Stripe I think has learned that you definitely don't wanna have one engineer who is remote on a team if you can help it.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** No.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's like a team of ten engineers, and one is remote - it's almost always gonna be a bad situation.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Was that you for a while, though?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh yeah, for sure. We were only 40 people, it was gonna happen. But there's some critical mass, and I think we actually have some percentage number - that I don't know, so I'm not gonna say one - of a team needing to be remote before the whole team acts in a way that is helpful for all remotes. But there is this line that every company using in their hiring: "We wanna hire the best engineers in the world", or "We have the best engineers in the world" or something like that, and I always find it very interesting whenever companies that say that only hire locally... Because it's like "We hire the best engineers within a 15-mile radius of downtown Chicago, which we are now considering the world." So I find it silly to think that everyone is gonna be collocated within a short distance from your office. The talent pool grows so...
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Right, it's math. It's just math. I like the exposure to cultural diversity as well, and also remote work enables people like single parents who probably just have to be next to their kids all the time... There is just a very different approach to distributed teams that I like, and I philosophically prefer having the adult mindset in my teams, so people who are not just "Listen, you have to be here, and this is how you're going to do your work. Here's all the lunch, so please don't..." - I don't like having pampered, entitled people on my team, so I go with the other approach: "You're an adult, this is your mission, this is your job. Tell me what you need to do it, and do it." It's much easier to do so from a distributed perspective, at least in my experience.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This is actually a really good point. The more that you can break up a workload into asynchronous steps, rather than this synchronous working mode, the more flexibility people have in their schedule and the more kinds of people that you can get. There's a lot of people out there that just don't have the schedule flexibility to do this kind of stuff.
+
+\[52:04\] I've talked with the people from Free Code Camp about this, and how they've designed their learning curriculum so that you don't have to sit down or go into a bootcamp to learn it. It's really asynchronous, so that people who have kids, people that maybe already have jobs can follow up when they have time and it works with their schedule.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Big shocker, Mikeal's advocating for an asynchronous, non-blocking I/O for learning... \[laughter\] Mark it on the board!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh my god... Yeah, and like me -- if you're working remotely, which I do, you should probably live in the most expensive place; that's a good idea, so that's what I do.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Like downtown Manhattan, like I do.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... Anyway, let's move on to picks. Time for picks! Juan, do you have something for us?
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I need five minutes. I am a procrastinator.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'll go first.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, go for it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I generally use maybe like a 1 mm pick, usually with like a grip, maybe like a good Dunlop... \[laughter\] My pick of this week is another specification, which is the CSS Grid specification. It recently went into production with Firefox 52, which was earlier this year (6-7th March). It was kind of the last desktop browser holdout for CSS Grid, so if you built grids with class names, like "the bootstrap grid" or "flexbox grid" or something like that, it's a pretty different concept, but it roughly gets you a similar thing.
+
+There are definitely the long tail of things that you could do with it that are very confusing, but the core use cases where you set up a grid, you literally just describe a grid in almost a grid format in the CSS, in order to explain the column and row layout that you want. So it's really powerful, but also really approachable from the usability, the dev experience standpoint, and not just the power behind what you can do with it, and for that reason I think... Maybe don't -- I don't know if you should use it yet, because if you support mobile at all (which you should) it will be difficult to get to work. You can have decent fallbacks in place, but then you have to write two things... Whatever. But look into it - CSS Grid specification is out there.
+
+There's an old CSS-Tricks article that's pretty good on it, but there's also GridByExample.com, which is based on a book that Rachel Andrew wrote, and there's just a bunch of very simple examples of what the different parts of CSS Grid are and what the different words mean, which I assure you are much easier than the flexbox terminology, and then a bunch of code to learn how to do layout, and all that kind of stuff. Go check it out.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Cool. My pick is kind of interesting - Bcrypt... Ian, who works at Brave, put out this great tweet this week that was asking what people's favorite security UI is, and what I said was I really like how browsers have started to move towards the default look of a page and the default UI elements around security have gotten more and more strict over time, and it's been this gradual shift. So if you were using a web browser five years ago, you'd notice that there was a lot of fanfare added to SSL certificates, but if you weren't using a certificate it looked sort of normal.
+
+Now, if you're not using SSL, it looks broken... It notes that this is just not a secure page, unless you're using TLS. In that vein, all these same browser vendors have been amping up the requirements to get a lot of that extra fanfare and what that looks like, including starting to dig and investigate some of the security authorities. So SSL securities authorities were supposed to do a bunch of vetting of companies to get these upper-level certifications that make them look extra good...
+
+\[56:16\] So not just the LetsEncrypt, like "Just get a certificate and encrypt stuff", but actually websites that say that they are from a particular company. Literally, you'll see the name of the company in the URL bar where the security information is.
+
+Some of the certificate authorities have not been actually investigating those companies, not actually vetting those companies like they're supposed to, including Symantec. And the more that they dug into Symantec, the more that they realized that something like 30,000 improper certificates were given out by Symantec... So what Google Chrome is planning to do is remove the trust certificate for Symantec, and they will not be considered a valid certificate authority anymore.
+
+This is pretty unprecedented, for a major browser vendor to go after a certificate authority like this. And I actually expect Mozilla to fall in line, as well.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think Mozilla has done it in the past as well with a few... There were the people who lost their private key or whatever -- it's happened before, but not on this scale, and Symantec is definitely a larger CA than others. If you don't follow Tavis Ormandy, I think he is the one who finds a ton of this stuff with the different security companies, and LastPass and a bunch of stuff. His bug reports are always very impressive and very scary in how easily he constantly finds massive security vulnerabilities in security company things.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I want this dude's job, that sounds super fun. \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's part of a... It has a name, like "Google something." I can figure it out and put it in the show notes. There's like a team whose job it is to just make security on the web better, so that's literally his job, to go around and find security vulnerabilities in the web.
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Nice. Staying on the Latin American team, I was playing around this weekend with NextJS, and I found it to be sort of a very refreshing way of making websites kind of the old school way, but with modern tooling, with React. NextJS is by ZEIT, I think... Guillermo and his team. It's an isomorphic frontend framework; it's React-based, but you can do some server-side stuff, so it's pretty cool.
+
+I was impressed with the way I was able to just get everything running. It's extremely fast, although I do some CSS and some JavaScript code-splitting, which was impressive. If you wanna see it running right now, if you go to Zeit.co - that's what they built to power that site, and then in the spirit of open source they published it. They've been moving really quickly, and the deployment also with Now is fantastic. So that's my pick.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I'm using Now, as well. Now is fantastic. And just a bit of background for people that aren't aware. Guillermo also wrote Socket.IO, which kind of made websockets real-time usable in the early Node.js days... So a really long-time impressive figure in creating beautiful, easy to use JavaScript APIs.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, he also did JSConf Argentina. I went to JSConf Argentina and I was asking if anyone knew where Guillermo was, and they had no idea what I was saying. I remember that the double L in Argentina is pronounced differently...
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Yeah, it's pronounced differently.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** They had literally no idea what I was saying. As a callback to my thing - Google's Project Zero is the security team that I was talking about. But that might be all.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that's all the picks. Thanks for tuning in. If you have any suggestions for show topics for us to take on, you can head over to github.com/thechangelog/jsparty and log an issue or send a PR with great new topics for us to check out. We record live on Fridays, so you can listen to the live stream and pop into the Slack, as well. Rate us on iTunes to get the word out, and that's all. Thanks everybody for showing up!
+
+**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Thanks for having me too, and shoutout to Rachel and her internet.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Can we get a sample from the board for Rachel? Can we get a cat hair sample...?
+
+**Rachel White:** Is it like "Um... Hold on, I have cat hair in my mouth" \[laughter\] \[\\01:00:56.04\] Gilmore Girls, I know what that is...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's amazing.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Brilliant! We live in the future! See y'all next week!

Meet Alex Sexton_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,247 @@
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're here with Alex Sexton. This is part of the kickoff shows for JS Party. We're excited about this show because a lot of planning, a lot of fun's going into this. Alex, when Mikeal mentioned you as one of the potential hosts and then you agreed to participate, Jerod and I were pretty excited... Don't you think so, Jerod?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, absolutely. I was saying to somebody that the name JS Party was partially inspired by a show that you used to do, Alex, which was yayQuery. It was a fun show that I enjoyed briefly, so I'm absolutely excited to have you on the show that we're doing. Thanks so much for hosting with us, and welcome to JS Party.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Glad to be on.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The point of these pre-shows is to get to know our three co-hosts/panelists a little bit. In that light, why don't you give the audience a little bit of your back-story, where you're coming from and how you got to be a co-host on JS Party.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure. So I was born in March 1986. My mom... Okay, probably not that far back.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like the fact that you're born in March... We're kindred spirits, then.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... I was lying.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You were lying? It wasn't March?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay, it's March.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, it's March.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't even know who to believe at this point. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You know, I don't want anybody stealing my identity. \[laughter\] Let's see... I know Mikeal from JSConf and NodeConf, so we go kind of far back. We were both staff with Chris back in the day, pretty early JSConf stuff -- maybe not the first one or two...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Chris Williams?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Chris Williams, at JSConf. Then I spun off and did TXJS with Rebecca Murphey, and then Mikeal has done NodeConf, so we've all kind of staffed each other's conferences and things like that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was at the first TXJS. I didn't know you were a part of that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that was Rebecca and I, as part of yayQuery, doing a conference. We had done North Carolina JS, the first time, and then I've run every TXJS since then myself, but haven't had one in two years.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is it coming back?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It will come back... I've just had babies and lived in San Francisco for a summer, and those kinds of things, so it can be tough. But anyway, that's how I know Mikeal, and I used to be a crew with Paul Irish, Adam Sontag and Rebecca Murphey back in the days when jQuery was a little more popular. Not that that podcast was much about jQuery at all, but it was kind of a good basis for discussion back in the day for general frontend fun stuff.
+
+I've been doing JavaScript for like 12 years now, which is kind of crazy... It's a long time to be doing anything, so JavaScript is definitely what I've spent the bulk of my career working on.
+
+I worked at a few consultancies... I worked at a place called Bazaarvoice, which was a big job I had, and now I work at Stripe. Those are, I guess, the most interesting parts of my working history.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You've been there for a while now, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I've been at Stripe for...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Four years?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** ... almost four years now, which is a long time...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's strange I know that, because I don't really know you, so I'm kind of wondering why I know that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No, it's creepy, but it's fine. \[laughter\] Stripe has been a pretty cool company to be a part of. I work remotely from Austin, Texas, and Stripe has grown quite a bit. Since I don't work in the office, every time I go back I don't recognize anyone, because it's growing so fast. But I know their Slack handles and such, so it usually works out.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[04:11\] That works out, yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm not sure exactly what you guys want me to know; I can talk for a long time, so if you have specific questions about my past, I think maybe that would be more courteous to the audience members who want to listen to me speak.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, let's just give a little bit of your JavaScript background. Like you said, you were involved with jQuery, you were on the board of directors, you also have a lot of work put in the Modernizr, so thank you for that. Maybe give your open source background, some of the stuff that you're involved in, kind of like your angle into JavaScript.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I went to -- I think it was the jQuery Conf, because the ones before were jQuery Camp... But I guess if you scroll even further back, I joined the jQuery IRC channel on FreeNode way back in the day... I don't remember how long ago. That's where I met Paul Irish and Rebecca Murphey and Adam Sontag, which eventually turned into yayQuery. But we all decided to go to that conference together, and that's where I met John Resig and all the different jQuery folks back then and kind of got involved in jQuery.
+
+I'm trying to remember when that would have been, like 2008-2009, something like that. We did some small commits; I wasn't on the team, but I contributed for a long time. It was a goal of mine some year - I think my new year's resolution - to contribute to a major open source project, and jQuery was that. And then eventually, I joined the teams and then eventually I became an advisor for the jQuery Foundation, once they became a foundation - that's its own whole story. Then I eventually became a full-on member of the board, until that board dissolved whenever I joined the Linux Foundation very recently. That's the whole arc in that. I'm no longer a member of the board of the jQuery Foundation because of the new setup, which I totally support.
+
+I don't have a ton of code in jQuery, but that was certainly where I came up in the open source world, along with a lot of those people. Modernizr was also written by someone in the jQuery IRC channel originally -- well, not really, I guess... Faruk Ateş wrote it, and Paul and Ben Alman, who has a couple plugins in the jQuery world, they decided that Modernizr needed to be rewritten to be better, so they kind of rewrote it entirely - almost entirely - to be better, and I joined shortly after that.
+
+Ben didn't necessarily stick around on the team, but Paul and I - we were pretty good friends at that point. I think we were at JSConf EU and we were talking about how people load too much into their browsers - we were way ahead of our time, I think it's still the argument on Twitter - so we decided to try to use feature detection in order to not load all the different stuff, and that's kind of where yepnope came out of, which was a library I wrote as an external library to Modernizr, but really it paired very well with Modernizr.
+
+The goal of yepnope was that you only developed the code that the browser can either run or use, rather than every possible version of your code. I've since killed that project, because there are new, better techniques, like using HTTP/2 server and the build tools that exist today to load bundles and do things; there are better tools, so I don't think in order asynchronous loading of dependencies is always the fastest thing anymore.
+
+\[08:06\] Other open source stuff - probably my other most popular project... There's this CSS color checker that got a lot of press and tweets and things, but actually doesn't do anything; I don't think anyone uses it. It was a very popular project that everyone starred one time and then never used, so I won't talk about it too much. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's funny.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Very big flash in the pan. The goal of it was kind of cool... I mean, I think we use it at Stripe...? It was kind of like a warning at Stripe; it came out of an idea from an old Nicole Sullivan talk from the original TXJS, where she was like, "I consulted with Facebook to try to help them with their 8-mb CSS file", and we went through and we found 82 different values for what Facebook blue was, because everyone would just eyedropper the middle of the F in order to try to pick the color and paste it in...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That was how things worked back in the day; there weren't variables or anything like that. So they moved over to a system where it was harder to make those types of mistakes, but I still found that whenever you had the giant variables file, people would get Facebook blue right, because that one's easy. They would get pretty much every other color wrong anyways, because how do you know something's called "deepbackground--2--xlight" or whatever crazy variable ends up as trying to be a generic name for background of this specific modal, or whatever.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How about "grayer"? "More gray".
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Grayest, great. I realized I said I won't talk about this plugin, and now I'm going very deep into it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You are. I like it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[laugh\] It's kind of a fun thing... So this thing just pulls out every color, and it finds colors that are different than each other in value, but that a human could not perceive the difference of within some range. And so, there's an algorithm for this, the CIEDE2000 algorithm. It's used in compression, and that way they can use less colors and then be able to compress better. The human can detect differences in blues different than they can in reds and yellows, so it's a somewhat complex algorithm. But someone actually already wrote that algorithm and put it in npm, so I did not port that to JavaScript, I just used it in a post CSS plugin that finds things that are within a threshold and then says, "Hey, these should probably just be the same color", and that's the whole thing.
+
+The actual value that I think I've added since jQuery Modernizr days is in internalization tooling, which I got pretty deep into at the end of my time at Bazaarvoice, and do a bunch of work on at Stripe as well. MessageFormat JS is something -- if you've ever used GetText or tried to do pluralization or interpolation of variables into messages or text in your website, then MessageFormat is a very good solution. It's a standard, but it didn't really exist in JavaScript outside of a few Google things that were very googly, that you couldn't get it out of... So I wrote a parser for that, as well as an implementation.
+
+There is another competing library, React Intel, that we actually at Stripe, and it uses my parser underlying, kind of; it's kind of been changed a little bit since then. So a lot of the internationalization tooling that people are using today actually kind of came out of some stuff that I did, and I think it's a very good solution and I would advocate for it very heavily, so that's the only reason I talk about, not necessarily because I did it.
+\[11:59\] I really think that internationalization is super undervalued and the tooling needs years of work in order to get good; the thing I wrote is just a very basic start to the ecosystem of tools that you would need to do that well. How's that?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's good.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Clearly, you've got some opinions, which is great. I mean, that's the whole point of the show, just to kind of bring some different perspective towards this JavaScript web platform landscape and discuss the various things that are going on - both current events, to a degree, but then also some tried and true arguments that haven't been fleshed out enough or could use different perspectives. So clearly, you're bringing some opinions here... But I'm curious why this show for you? What exactly about the prospect of this show gets you excited?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I guess you picked up on the fact that I have opinions, and when someone offers you a platform for advocating for those opinions, it can be tempting. I mean, I'm very excited to do it; I think that Mikeal and Rachel also have very unique perspectives.
+
+I'm not necessarily excited for the listeners, right? I think they can make up their own minds; I'm not saying they're going to be imbued with my opinions and then become better people or anything like that, but if listeners happen to find the things valuable, then I think my excitement will turn from potential excitement to real excitement, if that makes sense.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So right now you're skeptical then?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, sure, yeah. That's the default, I think. I'm not doubtful, but there wouldn't be a great reason to do it if I was just making people angry, or annoying them, or something like that. I'm very excited at the potential for having discussions with people that are valuable, and I hope they're valuable.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I absolutely agree, and that's our hope, to have a shared discussion amongst all the people in the greater JavaScript/frontend/web community in a place where it's like the watercooler; that's why we wanted to do a live show. We want to have interaction with the chat room, because there's more people adding to the show than just the three panelists, or in some cases maybe four panelists who happen to have microphones that day.
+
+But one of the reasons why I'm so excited, Alex, to have you on, is because Mikeal has convinced me that you are excellent at arguing with him. I love a good debate - I think we all do - so I think we'll have not just a shared discussion, but hopefully some entertaining discourse as well, as I hear you're pretty good at taking the other side of the argument, regardless of what it is that Mikeal has to say that day. Is that the case?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure, that's how Mikeal would portray it. \[laughter\] Yeah, it's been a pastime of mine to, I would say, keep Mikeal honest. I'm sure he would say, "Always take the other side, no matter what." Mikeal actually has cleaned up his act quite a bit, but if you go back three or so years on his Twitter, he was always just saying the most asinine stuff... \[laughter\] Just to -- I don't even know...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Just to fluff the feathers, something like that?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Ruffle the feathers.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** As someone who knew Mikeal and knew that he would know that it was coming from a place of love, I took it upon myself to try to call out anything I thought was potentially, let's say, unfair. So Mikeal and I go back a long time, of comfortable, but heated discourse.
+\[16:05\] Now that you say that, that is an also very exciting aspect of this... \[laughter\] In the past - a year or so - we've tended to agree on a lot of stuff, so it maybe hasn't been on the forefront of my mind, but I'm sure if you bring up some topics we'll have some different opinions. He's softening at his age, I think.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** If you had to characterize your perspective, just with regard to frontend in the browser - progressive enhancement, graceful degradation... Are you a single-page app? Do you believe in frameworks? Do you not believe in frameworks? Give us a taste of where Alex stands in some of the hot topics, in the frontend at least.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm definitely a pragmatist when it comes to most things. I have strong opinions about how things should be done, and they don't necessarily line up with how I do things, and I think that's good to an extent. I would love to make everything a hundred percent accessible and super fast, and sometimes you give up those things.
+
+I think it's very important to know what you're giving up, to make those conscious decisions rather than make them not caring decisions... But I feel very strongly that accessibility is extremely important, and fight for it at Stripe; I feel very strongly that performance is something that is very easy to say, "Well, we're not performant right now, and people love our thing", and they don't realize how much better it could be. And so it's very easy to ignore those types of things, because it's like, "Well, no one complains that they can't use our app because it's not keyboard-accessible, or whatever", and that's because they can't use our app, so they just went and used something else.
+
+It's the same with mobile support... It's like, "Well, we don't get any hits from mobile." Well, that's because no one can use the website on their phone. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No one wants to. It's a bad experience.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So I both am aware of those types of gotchas, but I also understand... Getting something out there and shipping something, and just having a product at all that some people can use can often be a good start to something that you can eventually have all those other things on. So even though I feel very strongly about those things, I won't necessarily be mad at someone for not doing them... The only reason I bring that up is if someone ships anything that doesn't have every single feature or every single important topic imbued into its core, and implemented perfectly, then someone is outraged. And outrage is fine... I understand the tradeoffs.
+
+I guess that's a preface to all my opinions - I feel strongly that these things are right, but I understand the need to sometimes skip them temporarily; or something might die before I ever get to it, but... So I come from a big performance background. That's what I worked on a bunch at Bazaarvoice and at Stripe early on. A lot of the performance I worked on at Stripe has been in build processes and things like that, so not necessarily the same thing.
+
+I wrote an article a while back, and ran a conference called Frontend Ops. It's on Smashing Mag... There are now job postings on StackOverflow for frontend operations engineer, which is kind of cool; I mean, not that I took two words that already existed and just said them next to each other, but it kind of links to some other stuff.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a mashup.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[20:04\] Yeah, a mashup. There you go. So a lot of the work I do is actually in the frontend operations world. It's less writing the end UIs these days, and a lot of it is the infrastructure parts or the build tooling or the measurement, internationalization, things like that. Or measuring performance - that's another part of frontend operations.
+
+I guess single-page apps... There's a big war -- if you can even call something a single-page app... Or something's document vs. app-based, and I don't really care what you call it... I think server rendering is a good solution for lots of pages that people talk about. Anything that you're gonna read or you'd want to be SEO-ed. But as soon as you add a login and put something behind a login, then need for server rendering -- like, do I need to server-render my SVG graphs or the lists of customers in the Stripe dashboard, or something like that? No one hits the customers list page from the server; it's always navigated to that. I don't know... I think there are so many tradeoffs that it's silly to say, "If you're not server-rendering, you're doing something wrong." Measure the actual experience, rather than the technology behind it. As long as the experience is good, then I really don't care what the implementation is.
+
+I'm a pretty big proponent of progressive enhancement... I think more so than some of my colleagues at Stripe. Stripe does really awesome landing pages and things for new products that we do, and those are designer-lead things, and I think they're cutting edge, so it would be silly to progressively-enhance some of them. But I feel pretty strongly that things should work for everybody, even on crappy connections, and I try to advocate for that, but I also understand the tradeoffs.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're a pragmatist, you said before... Right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. So I guess I agree with everyone who are the purists, but my actions don't always fall in line with those things based on other constraints. I believe very strongly in the idea of the web, and links, and openness and open source and all that stuff, and I try whenever possible to embody all those things. But I think worrying too much about how pure you are in those regards, as long as you don't slowly drift off into terribleness - you know, slippery slopes, and such... But I feel like we liked to talk in lots of blacks and whites, and...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And we live in a world that's gray.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I don't know, that's a little bit of a cop-out answer, but...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm sure we'll hear more from you over the next several episodes, and see how true this is for you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Plus, the nice thing about conversations is you can always represent the purist in a conversation, because the real-world constraints aren't necessarily in front of you.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, absolutely.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So that will be fun. This kind of leads us into our next question for you. When you mentioned you believed in the openness and links and the web fundamentals, what's your favorite thing about JS or about the web platform?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[24:01\] The accessibility of everything -- not necessarily in the handy, capable sense... Just the fact that there's no app store, it's federated, it's fully open, the specs are open. People can kind of break away from those things... Pragmatism-wise, browsers can do their own thing a little bit and see if other people will wanna go along that path, rather than do some pure "Alright, let's sit down with the specs organization for the next three years and try to figure out how we wanna do X, Y or Z."
+
+I like how the web moves forward. It's slower than the proprietary platforms, but I think it's outlasted every single one of them by a triple at this point. You even see with the iOS App Store - the ten most popular apps of 2016 were made by three companies, or something like that.
+
+So the world where young (or not necessarily young; don't be ageist) -- where new and inexperienced people can have a good idea and breakthrough... The web is still just leaps and bounds above every other ecosystem, and the fact that everything is open and all the tooling can be open is just... It's such a welcoming, wide space where there's room for everybody, and I really appreciate that. I think that's one of the reasons why, even though it moves more slowly than other platforms -- and I think those platforms are necessary to the growth of the web. When the web was winning a hundred percent, it didn't grow at all -- the languages didn't get any better, the features didn't get any better. I mean, partially it's Microsoft's fault, but when things started competing with it, that's when people were like, "Oh, we need to get external device things into the navigator object, so we can do the same things as apps", and that's a driving force.
+
+I think the ecosystem of the web is more open and welcoming and harder to use and more frustrating, but ultimately the best real output of what we can do. It's the pragmatist's platform, I guess, in some regards.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you'll get probably both mine and Adam's amen on that. I think the lack of having to ask someone's permission in order to do a thing... The platform that allows you to just set up shop and start a business without having to have some sort of gatekeepers' permission is a powerful thing.
+
+On the flipside of that, you kind of alluded to a little bit and you said it's frustrating - what's your least favorite thing then?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Least favorite thing...? Safari... people who don't do it right I guess. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Jerod's favorite browser.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh I use Safari all day every day.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, cool... \[laughter\] The people who take from the web, but don't give back to the web, or things like Safari -- it's not Safari itself; Safari is pretty good because Apple's so currently good at what they do that it ends up not mattering a whole bunch... But anytime the web tries to innovate and Safari doesn't agree, they can almost always automatically stifle that innovation, and that is really upsetting to me. Things like service workers... The whole web is behind, and just no one knows whether Safari intends on doing it or not, or whether they think it will cannibalize their other marketplaces. That stuff's really frustrating to me, because they very much profit from the web and they don't necessarily give back in the ways that I'd want them to. They always give back in the ways that help their other platforms, which can be sometimes extremely useful, but also not friendly to openness.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[28:19\] This is a little meta, but are you a listener of Request For Commits?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Not currently.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Since you're on that subject, there's one episode you've got to listen to. It has to be something you do this afternoon.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's the one called "Funding the Web with Brendan Eich". You will never get more of a historical background to funding the web than you will ever get from that, roughly a little over an hour (I think it's 74 minutes long, based on the timestamp here). That's the good one there.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Brendan is an old JSConf speaker and a TXJS speaker, and we've done the speaker circuit together, so I may have heard a lot of that information first-hand before, but I'll definitely go listen, too.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, listen to it and then you can tell us how much of it you already knew.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, how accurate is... How in the know are you, Alex.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I'd be interested.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** On that note then, we look at the future of this show... We asked you a couple questions like, "Where do you stand on certain controversial issues? What are your favorite/least favorite things about the web, JavaScript?" things like that, but I'm kind of curious on what particular topics you may be excited to talk about in the near future.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Current stuff? Service workers have been around for a while, but that world of the web is very interesting... I also do a lot of work on a large application at a company where people use something a lot, so frameworks are something I think that Rachel and Mikeal are a little less interested in and that I have some experience about, and there tends to be a revolution every two or three years, so we're kind of due; Fiber could be it, in React...
+
+I'm also a pragmatist when it comes to choosing libraries. There's a lot of hype around React, and React is amazing and great. I think I intro-ed Tom Occhino and Pete Hunt at JSConf before they announced it, whenever it got like a terrible, terrible reception from everybody, so I feel partially responsible... But there are tradeoffs -- React is super hyped, but if you want something that already has a fully-baked ecosystem and build tooling and all that kind of stuff, you can't beat Ember for that. You have other tradeoffs like file size, and things...
+
+Also, people reach for React and they need the modification of the onchange event that React does, and that's the only thing they're using in the entire library... So kind of back to a world where maybe people are reaching for libraries that are too big. I'm interested in where this goes. There's currently Preact and a few other ones that are tiny versions of it...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Mhmm, Inferno.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, there are versions of things where people want some of this to be baked in, you know DOM-diffing baked into a browser specification, and all that kind of stuff. So I'm very interested to see where the frameworks world goes, even if I'm not necessarily writing any frameworks currently.
+
+What else... Build tooling is also something I care a lot about that I think we're due for another revolution on. I don't know how much people care about that, but things like Webpack and those systems...
+
+\[31:54\] I was a contributor to RequireJS back in the day with James Burke -- I mean, James Burke did 99.9999% of it. I added a little bit to the spec on behalf of the jQuery team, but that's since been mostly dead, and now Node is working on implementing ES6 modules in an asynchronous way, which is kind of full circle, which is fine...
+
+Those two things I guess are pretty boring frameworks and build tools, but that's probably why Mikeal had chosen me for those opinions, because they weren't necessarily represented between him with Node stuff and Rachel with robotics.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right... Well, you would be surprised, because we went back and looked at our states on the Changelog over the last couple of years - two of our biggest shows had been 1) React and 2) most recently was Webpack 2. So people love hearing about those topics... Even though we may have to convince Mikeal and Rachel to talk about them.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... There's enough drama to it though, they'll come up naturally, I think. The third thing I'd say that maybe isn't represented but also is under-represented in total is web security, which I do a lot of help with at Stripe. I spoke a bunch the past two years on content security policy, and kind of trying to help people write secure applications. I think a lot of the frameworks are moving in directions that help people do that a lot, but it's still a very sad and dangerous world out there, and I'd like to advocate for those technologies, as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can't wait. To wrap up, let's figure out your perspective on who you think might listen to this show. Each host brings their own perspective, as we've already talked about in this preliminary show... But I'm kind of curious who you think might/should listen to this show - anybody out there... You could even name a name if you know particularly somebody who's like "This would be a great listener", or a style of a listener. Who do you think should listen to this show?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure. I mean, they have to be able to put up with a lot... You have to be patient and not dislike Mikeal too much... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're limiting our audience...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, we're down to like maybe 10-15 people or so... You could also hate-listen, though; I think that audience could be quite large. No, I think if you're the class of person who has a Twitter account but can't keep up with every possible piece of drama, or doesn't care to, or wants it distilled down... If you're someone who likes the newsletters that come once a week that says, "Here's what happened in CSS this week", and if you also drive to work, I think this could be a good compromise.
+
+\[34:55\] And also, possibly if you're only interested in currently a single section - you're coming in from Node or robotics, it could also be good to kind of reach out your mind into the other sections and find the cross-sections between you and the other portions of the community.
+
+I think anyone's a potentially good listener, I don't think we're precluding too many people. Also, you've heard me talk for the last hour, so you have a certain type of person to be able to fully enjoy my mumbles. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think you're great. We've teased on the call with Mikeal - which listeners will be able to go back and listen to - about putting out the pilot episode you all recorded, which I felt was really great. Actually, I was excited about the show, but once I heard that pilot between the three of y'all and how well you had chemistry already in terms of being able to argue with Mikeal or share an opinion or share how you weren't clued into a certain area... Just the honesty in the conversation was really cool for me, so I'm excited to put that out there for everybody, but I also was personally excited based on that pilot. We'll see if we can put it out for sure, because we've teased it enough that we have to do it now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I didn't know that plan was to not out that out, so there you go...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, news to you... Surprise, we might ship it. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh no, the opposite is what I've said - I didn't know the plan wasn't... I thought that was going to go out, so you should ship it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. So you're surprised that we might actually do what you already thought we were gonna do in the first place.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, Alex, I'm excited, man. Thank you so much for this time today to kind of kick off things for you and just share your portion of the story as you bring to this show. Thanks, man. I appreciate it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I appreciate you having me.

Meet Mikeal Rogers_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,212 @@
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright, we've got a fun thing happening here - a new show, JS Party...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Party time...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a party every day. It's a party every Friday.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's gonna be a party every Friday.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But JavaScript...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're hearing Jerod Santo (managing editor) and Mikeal Rogers, host of RFC, and now JS Party.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Welcome.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We are.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Launching a new show, it's cool to have a few in the feed already, so if you've just come to this brand new, you may have listened to it live... We may be several months down the road and you're coming back and you're listening to episode one for the first time, and you wanna know who's behind this, so we thought it'd be kind of cool to rewind a little bit, and Jerod and I can sit down and talk with the hosts behind this. We'll have a conversation with Mikeal Rogers, we'll have a conversation with Alex Sexton, we'll have a conversation with Rachel White, and kind of get to know their back stories, their ideas, plans and fun things for this podcast.
+Mikeal, maybe the easiest way is to help people understand who you are, maybe your credential. People that come to this show, what should they know about you?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Sure, yeah. Well, I won't get into the whole thing because that'd take too long, but I guess I'll just get into my history of the web. I didn't really start writing a lot of JavaScript and working with web stuff until I worked at Mozilla and started working on the platform. So in this really weird way - but honestly, this is kind of how my whole career has gone - I learned it from the bottom up, rather than from the front. So I didn't start writing websites and then slowly worked my way down the stack... I actually started by tearing apart the web platform and figuring out how to do automated testing of the Back and the Forward button, and digging into the guts of the Mozilla platform. That was how I came to JavaScript and to the web platform. I really kind of fell in love with it, and then was pretty primed to be really into Node.js when Node.js came out as well.
+
+One, because I have a networking background, so I really loved the non-blocking aspects of it; I loved how close I felt to the network layer with it, but also it was just so nice to be working with JavaScript in the web platform and on the backend.
+
+This was like the first week of Node being released, that I got really into it. I literally told people at Mozilla that I was working for and writing predominantly Python and JavaScript that I was no longer going to write Python anymore.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You were that bullish on it, huh?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, yeah... I mean, first of all, I had spent maybe four years working on a project called Windmill, which was very similar to Selenium, except we had figured out how to do a lot of cross-domain stuff before they did, and rather than being in a privileged environment, I wrote this really insane HTTP proxy that basically rewrote everything to look like it was all coming from the same domain even when you were bouncing around different domains, so you wouldn't violate the security policy. And to get the tests going faster, I had been optimizing this HTTP proxy for about four years.
+
+I was doing everything that you could do to make something fast in Python, and to make it killable when you hit Ctrl+C, as well. I had alternative versions of most of the standard library, I was digging into the guts of how you do iterative responses - what we now call streams, but what then was kind of like a generator type thing in Python. I was really doing everything you could possibly do at both the Python level and also at the HTTP protocol level. I was parallelizing a lot more of the requests than you would normally do... I had a lot in there to make that fast.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So were you using Python Twisted in the evented tools, so that \[unintelligible 00:03:52.21\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[03:58\] So I had used Twisted. I worked for the Open Source Applications Foundation on a project called Chandler, and that was using Twisted... And there was an early version of Windmill where I tried to use Twisted, but in that environment it wasn't that big of a wind, compared to just using WSJI with a generator and getting iterative responses that way. There wasn't quite enough parallelization going on with one test browser to really justify all the overhead of Twisted. So it didn't make it much faster, but you did need to iteratively return the responses, so that things would start rendering right when you got data. I was familiar with that.
+
+In the Mozilla stuff that I was using, I was also using Asyncore, which is another non-blocking library -- not as bulky as Twisted, but also much buggier than Twisted, and it comes with the standard library, so you know it's terrible. \[laughter\] So I had done all the things that you could do to make Python programs fast.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So when Node first came out, the weekend right after Jan Lehnardt said, "Has anybody written an HTTP proxy in this thing?" and I was like... That Node thing looked cool; I wanted to learn it, it's the weekend - why don't I write an HTTP proxy? I know how to do that. This was when Node still had this awful promisy thing that didn't look anything like Promises today; it was really bad. It didn't really have streams/streamed data yet, but all of the interfaces had different APIs, so you couldn't just plug them together, you couldn't pipe, there was no Pump -- I actually wrote Pump later... Which was the precursor to stream.pipe. It was not that great, but it was still less than 80 lines of code...
+
+So I got this proxy up. When I ran it, I was really kind of blow away. First of all, when I hit Ctrl+C, it would just die every time. You have no idea...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Little things...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** After writing Python for like five years every day, writing a program and hitting Ctrl+C and having it consistently end - I can't describe to you how great it feels, how warm in your tummy you get when that happens. So that was one thing... And two, it was faster than that Python proxy that I had written. I knew all the things that I could do to this to continue optimizing at the protocol level, but it was already just way faster.
+
+So at that point, for the things that I was using Python for, it was just so clear that this was a better way to do that, and that this had a lot more longevity. I mean, this is just starting our and it's already better. If I can get involved right now, I can make sure that it stays better.
+
+Also, when I first got involved in the community and started with Ryan and all these early people, a lot of my frustrations with the Python community -- and I think that this was probably the same among a bunch of communities... But all of these languages that had hit a lot of growth and traction and gotten a lot of new developers, when Moore's Law was in really obvious effect, when the processor speed was doubling every year - we weren't going multi-core yet, we weren't cutting things up in the Docker images yet... Why would you sit down and optimize something and make it efficient when you're gonna squeeze out 25% and computers are gonna get twice as fast in a year?
+
+So there wasn't a very strong focus on being very good at parallelization, actually parallelizing I/O tasks... So not thinking about threads, and stuff like that. Anyway... I really felt like the Python core community wasn't listening to what people actually needed to do with it, and when I started to get involved in Node, there was a huge focus on "What are people doing with it? What do we need to do to enable this big community? How do we keep the core really small and enable a ton of innovation on top of it so that we don't have to hold anybody back?"
+
+\[08:01\] Everybody had their head on straight in the early days, and I felt like it was a very good opportunity for me... At that point I'd been working in open source nonprofits for four years straight. I was one of the first people to try and get people using GitHub inside of Mozilla, I had a lot of thoughts about building community, about how to grow and gain a lot of traction in the ecosystem, and it was a really good place to do that work - it's a brand new language, with a BDFL that really does not want to maintain a giant standard library, so he's more than willing to create a great ecosystem instead... It was a good place to be.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... Coming from a scenario where you're a user of Python, which is an established, large language with a huge ecosystem around it and where you probably wouldn't have as much of a voice, here is Node - a brand new scenario where your voice can be heard and your desires could be expressed...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And you can have some impact.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, it was true then and it's still true now that it is so much easier to make change - especially a huge change in something new, than steering an old ship in a new direction. Reforming projects is considerably harder than starting new ones. Even the reforms that have been made to the Node.js project that I've been involved in, getting into the foundation and all of that, a big part of that and one of the reasons why that was actually easier was that we'd literally forked it and we had a lot of greenfield opportunities to really shift things into another direction and prove that they worked before we merged all of that back into the project.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So as we fast forward, speaking of the fork... io.js (the fork) was actually where we met you, or at least -- I don't know, Adam, if you knew Mikeal beforehand, but that's when I met you... We interviewed you on the Changelog about io.js and the forking at that time. Then we got you back on to talk about the merging and the surprise where the community actually made it through and it was stronger for it... Take us where you are now in terms of your relationship with Node as a project and what you're doing in your day-to-day life and your work.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, so I was one of many people leading the io.js effort in the fork; I lead an effort to get everything merged into the foundation as well. Because of my work doing that, the Linux Foundation really wanted somebody to take the reins and lead the foundation in the early days, with a focus on making sure that the merge completed and that everything remained stable. There's a lot of people with really strong opinions, all coming together and trying to work together... They really wanted to make sure that everything went smoothly, so I was hired to lead the Foundation and to make sure that all that stuff went well.
+
+It did go really well, and I'm still with the Node.js Foundation. From the time that we merged, the core communities I think probably quadrupled in size. There's so many more contributors, so we've had to continue to scale how that community works, and I've been involved in that, as well. But it's certainly not in danger of falling apart of collapsing, the way that people may have been concerned in earlier days. My role is much more administrative now.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a lot of work too that you put in. I remember when we first met you around the io.js timeframe, and the side chats... We had a couple emails, we talked to Scott Hammond from Joyent, I got some advice from you on how to best navigate that conversation... And I just remember thinking how busy you were; I think you were at DigitalOcean at the time and you were transitioning to different roles, and I was just thinking, "You do this for the community in your spare time." I couldn't believe just how much work that people like you would put out into these communities, outside of your day-to-day "I've gotta ship something". I was just astounded by it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[12:15\] Yeah, that was a really crazy time. I think one of the reasons why I was working so hard was that there weren't a lot of people that had history in the community that everyone that needed to be involved in the conversation would still speak to. A lot of what you didn't see at the surface was that it took a long time for things to get into the kind of bad state that they were in, and it wasn't just, "Hey, everybody is mad at Joyent..." A lot of people started to also get upset with themselves. Once there's conflict at all around something, everybody will start to conflict with each other.
+
+I had stayed out of daily core development as of 2012 - I think that was the last time that I put code id - and focused a lot more on the ecosystem. But because I had been there early, I had a lot of relationships with all those people, because I continued to do community conferences and a lot of general community work. People mostly like me, I think - or at least would still speak to me - so I felt like I was one of the only people in the position to bring everybody to the table and get everybody on the same page.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's a lot of work... I remember seeing all the issues on the iojs.org and the Technical Steering Committee conversations, documents being created on how the government should be formed, and obviously that made you fast forward to six months ago when we started Request For Commits - it made you a great co-host with Nadia Eghbal. That show, and just a lot of rich history... I think it's even been said - in the recent behind-the-scenes of the ending of the first season of Request For Commits... Where it was like your stories from the battlefield. You come from a "been there, done that", "been in the war, came out, slightly scathed", a happy growing loving community...
+
+Now we're here at this point where we can actually talk about celebrating the direction we're going. You've been through all these bad times and now it's like, "Here's some good times. Let's celebrate them." Jerod and I had this desire to do a show around JavaScript for a while... We had kind of resisted this camp-based type show where we've always had The Changelog, and we went into GoTime for the Golang community... We felt like that was our next great step, but we just didn't know when or how best to navigate that, so when you said one day in Slack, "Hey, y'all should do this", and we were like, "Hey, we should do this." That was like 6-8 months ago, and that sort of pushed us over the edge, and now we're here, at this point... People may be listening to this months down the road from now, loving JS Party.
+
+We've got some awesome music, a fun theme where it's a party every single week, we're celebrating this great community... It's not just simply JavaScript, it's the entire web platform, which is why we asked you some stories about your back-story. But let's talk about this show today, let's talk about where we're going with it. What do you love about the idea of JS Party?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm really interested in chronicling the web platform expanding beyond the browser into IoT, into mobile, into now desktop applications... It's crazy. So not just extending what the web can do, but also how we use it. Obviously, Node has been a critical component in enabling that to happen, but it's an enabler, it's not the story. If you're gonna talk about IoT, Node is a part of that; Node enables JavaScript to be on IoT, but without Johnny-Five I don't think that anybody would be using it, right? \[laughs\]
+
+\[16:03\] There's even more to that story, as well... Johnny-Five wouldn't have been written without Serialport from Chris Williams who started JSConf, and I don't think we would have a community if it weren't for JSConf, so... There's a lot going on there, and I think a lot of it is somewhat untold, and as it continues to expand, I'd really wanna dig deep into that story. It took us a while to really figure out what hosts would be good for this...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or even format - what was the best way to roll it out... Jerod, I gotta hand it to you, man; the original name for this was a bit pretentious - JS Matters. We wanted it to be a play on words, like JavaScript matters - like it does matter, but then also talk about JavaScript matters of substance... That was one thing, but you're always this -- I don't know how to describe it, but one day you're like, "JS Party", and as soon as we both heard it (Mikeal and I), I know for sure it was like, "Yeah, that's it." \[laughter\]
+
+It needed to be something that was playful. We didn't want to come to the table with this -- sure, it's a serious podcast, but we wanted to come with this whimsical attitude to some degree where it's like, "Come and have fun. Let's just not sit down and argue about things." And Mikeal's perspective of like, "We should have differing opinions. We should have people who come on the show and we should have panelists who oppose one another - in respectful ways, but can speak - and not just simply agree with one another to move the conversation forward." I think that was a good perspective.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I think you can only do that with a panel, right? Because you get into a rhythm where certain people will play devil's advocate, or at least try to advocate what the opposition to your opinion is saying, even if they don't believe it, and you really only get that rapport if you have a consistent panel. If you're just interviewing people, you really don't wanna take a hostile tone with your interviewee.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, there's a lot of interview shows out there, too... The Changelog, Request For Commits - even though they're highly conversational, they're very much interview style shows where it's two hosts and a guest. This is a bit different - you mentioned panels. Alex Sexton is one of the panelists, Rachel White... We've got a couple backups; we haven't exactly firmed up, but the panelist as we know it now is you, Mikeal Rogers, Alex Sexton and Rachel White - all coming from different perspectives, different paths, too...
+
+When we sit down and talk to Alex Sexton and Rachel White about their story, like we did with you today, we're gonna hear a very different perspective, how they came to where they're at, and then obviously be a part of the show.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I mean... Alex Sexton loves to disagree with me. He was one of the first people that I ever thought of.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** He's like, "Yes, can I do that on a podcast, so everyone hears it?" \[laughter\] Sweet.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Even if he agrees 99%, the first thing he'll say is this 1% where he's like, "Yeah, you're full of shit about this...!" \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was kind of funny, because in the pilot -- we've gotta air this at some point, since I'm mentioning it... I remember in the pilot that we had done - and this is even like three months back... We've been trying to iterate on this idea to some degree for a while now, but even in the pilot, the very first ten minutes, or ten seconds, I think -- not ten minutes, ten seconds... He's already on you, in that degree. So I can see that you've got that rapport with him.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, he's great with that. He was the first person that I thought of for that. Also, he has a very different perspective than I do. He came in it much more from the frontend world, from building websites and then getting involved in the web platform. And then he has a lot of context around the other web platform work that I really haven't been all that involved in. But then, when I thought about having the two of us on there... It's like, we're roughly the same age, we've been speaking about the same amount of time... That didn't feel like rounded enough for me at all, so I immediately started thinking of like "Who are some of the newer voices with really, really different perspectives than we have, that we could bring on?" and that was how I thought of Rachel, who's amazing.
+
+\[20:09\] She's relatively new to the whole scene, but is at the top of most of our speaking lists for different conferences and stuff like that. She's just been amazing. And she comes from this IoT community that I think me and Alex know about, but aren't involved enough in to really know what's going on. We know enough to know that there's a ton of stuff going on there that we have no idea what's going on with that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, I didn't know Rachel until you introduced me to her, and my new question for her every time I see her now is, "What have you built lately? What's the latest robot you've built?" And she's always got something funny, and every single time it's got something to do with cats... That's Rachel. She's awesome.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... She's also super funny. Alex and her are both actually really funny, so that's great, because I'm not super funny; that will really balance things out and make it a fun show. If you're gonna call it JS Party, you need some funnier people on.
+
+The first time I met Rachel... I think it was actually the first time that she spoke at a (I guess you can call it) a tech conference, but barely... I was doing this thing for a while called JS Fest - it was a week of smaller, half-day events, and because you can have an organizer just pick talks and not have to deal with the venue and all the other logistics, you can start to really experiment with different formats. So one thing that I started to put together before this one that we did in Oakland was this DHTML conference, where we had literally funny talks that were sometimes somewhat fake; we were sometimes pretending that we were in the past... Really self-referential humor type stuff. And I decided to have Jen Schiffer start curating it, because she's just brilliant, and kind of lives in the satirical world a little bit with her work \[unintelligible 00:22:04.09\] and stuff like that. So she found Rachel to give a talk called, "I'm kind of famous on the internet", that was just brilliant. \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a good title from her, I'm sure. That's her humor, too... She's got such a fun attitude. She's so much fun to be around, she's so much fun to talk to, and when I got to know her better, I totally understood why you thought she'd be a great panelist for this show.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it's gonna be a fun show. It's gonna be really good.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One thing that we're trying to do with this show - we've mentioned it's live. We have a set schedule, Friday afternoons - depending on where you are in the world; if you're U.S.-centric, you're either around lunch time or you're winding up your day, and we can all get together and celebrate JavaScript and the web, and the things that people are doing in the greater JS community. So that's why we wanna have all these different perspectives, we wanna be as inclusive as possible; everybody can come, share their opinions... There'll be a live chat room, so that will be a really fun way of interacting with the hosts, and I'm sure Mikeal, as you guys get to become more familiar with it, you'll get better or worse at responding to people as the thing goes on... So it's going to be lots of fun.
+
+But in light of our desire not to just be Node-specific, not to be just hardcore "people talking about V8" or just talking about frontend, new APIs that are in the browser... We wanna make something for all of us - frontenders, CSS design people, JavaScript hardcore programmers... If you touch the web platform and JS is in any part of your life, this show is for you. At least time will tell; that is our goal, whether or not we achieve that. So in light of those desires and what we're trying to pull off in terms of a celebration every week where we can all come together and talk, what are some of the things people can expect in terms of topics, conversations that we'll be having...? What do you expect -- of course, I'm asking you to prognosticate, because it will probably change as we go... We are iterating, and it'll probably be different by the time this ships than it is right now, but what do you expect in terms of topics that people can come and listen about?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[24:20\] So because we're doing it every week and we're trying to be really consistent, I think that we will pick up things that are topical. If some big web news thing goes out, or some new library ships that everybody's talking about - that will end up being a subject, for sure. We will follow that, and that will be kind of fun.
+
+I don't know about you, but whenever I see people talking about an announcement like that that goes out and I know a lot about it, everybody misses all of the context and all the subtlety, and there's a couple podcasts in the political space and in the economic space that do a really good job of deconstructing that and really coming back to like, "What does this really mean, with some of the background that's going on here?" So I hope that we can actually do that as well with some of these news items. I think that we have enough people and context to really suss that out.
+
+I think I also want to try - and this is a really difficult thing to do - to unwind a lot of stuff that's going on in the web and explain it from the ground up. We start to throw around jargon and words for entire sets of specifications or work that's going on like everybody knows what we're talking about, and at the end of the day most people actually don't know what that means. Even progressive web apps...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I still don't know what that means... \[laughter\] I'm pretty sure I've built a couple of them, but I don't know what that means.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, and you'll see people -- Nolan Lawson does this sometimes... [Mariko](https://kosamari.com/) does an amazing job of this. She's a programmer in New York. She will take a word or a subject that people throw around a lot that she has noticed other newer people are kind of afraid to ask what that means, and she'll dig into the entire history of it and explain it from the ground up for people that don't know what's going on, and that turns out to be pretty much everybody.
+
+When Nolan Lawson wrote that piece on progressive web apps, I think that everybody went, "Oh, god... Finally, I can stop pretending like I know what this means...", like there's actually this explainer now. So I really want us to try to do that, as well. When we bring up a news item about some topic in some area, we actually unwind it enough to go like, "Well, let's back up... How did this start? What does this actually mean?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You can teach all of us how WebRTC works.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I don't know if you can explain that in a podcast... \[laughter\] It's one of the more overly complicated parts of the web.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Visuals required?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Maybe, I don't know. I think we could probably get into some of that; I think that I can explain part of that. I think that you just have to talk about the data part and the media part separately, that's the difficult bit.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, don't start teaching us now, or we'll never get out of here. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So who should listen to this show? If someone's listening to this right now, what kind of thing are they doing, what role will they play? I know you mentioned the web platform, but that's one of those jargons you mentioned that you may assume "I'm part of that" or "I'm not part of that." Is is simply, "I build websites, so I listen to this podcast?" Who is the best fit for the kind of thing we're doing here?"
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that if you work on the web, if you use web technologies to build anything, whether it's CSS or JavaScript, if you work on IoT, on serverless, on any of that - we're gonna get into all of those subjects. If we aren't doing enough job of unwinding these topics so that everybody is on the same page, give us that feedback and we will continue to work to do a better a job to unwind that enough so that everybody can understand it.
+
+\[28:09\] Because especially with the breadth of the topics that we're talking about, even if you really understood one thing that we went and talked about, you wouldn't understand the next. You're not gonna have the deep, low-level network knowledge and the CSS knowledge, right?
+
+If we're not doing a good enough job of explaining it, just let us know and we will continue to get better at that and continue to actively unwind this stuff, so that everybody working on the web can really learn more about this, understand more of this. And as all of these new news items and framework etc. come out, I really hope that we can share more of what the "insiders" know about this with the general public. Having been in this for so long, you really forget how much insider knowledge there is around all of this, that is required for your context if you're gonna be involved.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Jerod mentioned earlier about a live chat room - that chat room is actually Slack, and we're piggybacking off of some new things we're changing about the Changelog community. We used to charge for accessing the Changelog community... It felt so weird... Jerod, I don't know about you, but when I was at All Things Open and I was sharing some news stuff that we had done - this was October when we rebranded the new site, and all that good stuff; I was trying to get people to desire to be a part of our community and be involved, and every time I was telling people that it was $20/year it just felt weird. Like, "Sure, join the community, but you gotta pay."
+
+Well, now it's free, we're opening it wide up. You get access to our Slack community, and part of that Slack community is the JS Party Channel; live every Friday we'll do this show. To get access to Slack while you're listening live, head to changelog.com/community. Back to what you said, Mikeal, about iteration - I think it's gonna be hard not to iterate this thing to where the community desires it to go, because they're gonna be directly involved if they choose to be.
+
+That channel, I'm sure, will be pretty active; I'm sure we'll have lots of feedback readily available every single week about what we're doing, what talks we're talking about, and I'm sure that we'll do things around opening it up so that the community can actually participate in topic suggestion, and things like that. We very much want this to be, in my opinion, something that's for the community. If it doesn't serve that, then we're missing the mark on what we're trying to do here... Because you can't celebrate unless you've got some people with you.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I agree.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or at least -- last time I've been to a party, it wasn't just me. \[laughter\] But to reiterate - live every Friday, if you're on the Pacific Coast; West Coast - noon; if you're on Eastern, it's 3 PM. It will be live at changelog.com/live. We're on Twitter... Our Twitter looks jacked up right now, so if you go there right this very second - literally, this second, as we're recording this - it's jacked up. It's @JSPartyFM on Twitter. We also will be at changelog.com/party. You can subscribe in iTunes, any other thing you can think of... RSS, you can listen online, you can listen live, which is what we encourage people to do, because that's where the fun is at.
+
+We've got some awesome music from Breakmaster Cylinder; we've worked so hard with Breakmaster to get this music to be true, true party. Any feedback y'all wanna share about your thoughts on this music?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Can we listen to it right now?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, okay. So play it, and then we'll give it some feedback.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Give me a second, let me set this up. Alright, here we go.
+
+\[31:52\] \[music playing\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm bouncing already.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I know!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It gets funky, too. \[laughter\]
+
+\[music ends\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, wow... That's awesome! I'm so pumped! I'm actually disappointed that now I don't get to do an episode of JS Party.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I know, right? Like, I'm ready to party right now!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's getting me in the mood.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. Well, the cool thing is we're actually setting up a soundboard, so when we have this show going on, we can actually play that music live for everyone. One thing we talked about doing, which is unplanned for this "meet Mikeal" conversation was taking questions from the community, especially if they're audio versions, and actually having them on the show. That soundboard might actually help us take some audio-submitted questions and actually play that audio live for everyone, and then include it obviously in the produced show that goes on the podcast feed.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's awesome.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We played the full track for you - it's a minute and forty-five seconds long. I hope you love it, we've put a lot of work into this. The album art was meant to show you that this is truly a party. A disco ball... You can't not party without a disco ball, okay? You have to have a disco ball, or it's not a party... Or a party worth being at.
+
+Alright... Mikeal, anything else you wanna share with the listeners who are either brand new to this show as we're launching it, or coming to this first episode months down the road, catching up?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[34:52\] Good question. No, I can't think of anything, actually... Welcome to the party!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, welcome to the party, for sure. I just hope that our ideas today are true three months from now.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I think that we're just gonna kind of follow where people want us to go. I think that we should also not be afraid to try some stuff out. In the planning for this show, we tried a lot of stuff that didn't quite work. It was a good idea, but it wasn't quite there, or ready, or whatever. I even wrote a bunch of custom code to play around with some ideas; then, once you're really using it, it's like, "Oh, this is 90% there, but not enough to really use and rely upon."
+
+I like the idea of having lots of different modes of engagement. It'd be great to set up some audio voicemail service or something where we can just get listener-asked questions that we then ask on the air; that'd be great.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's two ways that can happen, actually... We have one way, which is probably the easiest way; it may not be the long-term preferred way, but you can call 888-974-24-54 (888-974-CHLG, for Changelog). So you can call that and leave us a voicemail. We use Grasshopper for our virtual voicemail system, so you can call there and just leave a message, and we get mp3s dumped to us (although they are lower quality).
+
+Or you can simply just open up QuickTime or something and just record something and then email it to somebody or drop it on Dropbox and tweet us, and we'll grab those. We'll find a more formalized way for it in the future, but if you're listening to this and you want a way, that's a good way to start. We'll go from there.
+
+In lieu of getting this thing wrapped up, we've got live every Friday at noon Pacific, 3 PM EST, Changelog.com/live. Follow @JSPartyFM on Twitter, or also head to changelog.com/jsparty. Subscribe, don't miss a show.
+
+Mikeal, this was fun. Thank you for doing this, man.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, anytime!

Meet Rachel White_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,185 @@
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright, we're here with Rachel White. Rachel, I have told Jerod this a couple times... I was really, really impressed when I met you at Node Interactive. You're just such a fun, fun person, and I love it.
+
+**Rachel White:** Thank you!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I've never met anybody more fun than you. You have such a passion for what you do, and a care for inspiring people, and we need people like you in this world.
+
+**Rachel White:** Thanks! I try and have fun and inspire people with all the stuff that I do, and I'm just lucky enough to be able to have the job where they pay me to do that, which is really great.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I can back up what Adam is saying, because he has practically nagged me with how fun you are. Every time your name comes up, he's like "Yeah, Rachel, she's so much fun!" I'm like, "Alright, I get it, man... I get it. She's fun." I listened to your Spotlight episode -- by the way, for those interested... Spotlight is a show that we do at conferences; Adam met Rachel at Node Interactive, and you can listen to that conversation, which will probably have some overlap with this one... But fun things with Adam and Rachel, Spotlight episode \#11. Ever since then I've been very excited to meet you, because you are really fun.
+
+**Rachel White:** Thank you so much, I'm glad to hear that. I worry a lot that people think I'm mean...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, really?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah... I think that that is because of the way that I'm passionate about things; it's kind of hard to get a gauge through Twitter interactions with 140 characters, so my passion can come off as aggression sometimes, I guess.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What kind of passion are we talking about? Where do you get yourself into most trouble?
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh, god... Definitely politics, and feminism stuff, and diversity, and inclusivity... I'll get very passionate and (I guess) aggressive about those subjects, and then people will be like, "I don't wanna hear about this. Just talk about code", and I don't wanna just talk about code, because I'm a human being that has more interests other than just programming...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure. You're not gonna offend people with how they should require modules, or why Service Workers is not implemented in Safari, or anything like that.
+
+**Rachel White:** I mean, I might offend people if they -- I mean, especially the fact that I don't write production code and now all the code that I write is for myself... I don't have to write tests if I don't want to, I might not... So it depends.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm getting jealous over here.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I wish my code would just be for demos and funds... I would be a happy camper. I guess we should explain where you work. Tell us about your job, and then true/false "It's the best job ever."
+
+**Rachel White:** I work at Microsoft as a tech evangelist. My focus is the audience, which is going to talk to other developers. Basically, I get to take all of the services that Microsoft has, so Azure, a lot of the things that live in the cloud, our cognitive services, which is just REST APIs for machine learning and really cool stuff, and then I just build fun things with them and talk about it, and try and get other people aware that Microsoft is doing these things. They're not just making Windows and Xboxes and Edge and IE; there's a bunch of other cool stuff that's happening, and I get to make the cool stuff. And true, it is the best job ever.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[00:04:11.12\\\] It seems like it, to me.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah. Before I was at Microsoft, I worked at IBM Watson as a software engineer, and before I began Watson, I worked at Adobe Behance, and that was my first full JavaScript job, and I actually moved back to New York for it, because when I finally graduate college in 2010 -- I took a very long time to finish college... I couldn't get a job anywhere on the East Coast, so I left; I moved to St. Louis and I worked at some small IT company that wanted to do some web design, and I did everything: I ran the server, I did the design, I did the website stuff...
+
+From there I went to an ad agency where I was doing design and development. So whatever they needed me to do dev on - I would work with .NET sites, or every single CMS on the face of the planet. Then the last job I had in St. Louis was at a really amazing place called Spry Digital, and I did a lot of WordPress and Drupal stuff. I'd been working with WordPress since it came out, so that was really easy for me. Then I just stumbled upon the opportunity to work at Adobe, and came back to the East Coast. That was in 2014, so... So many exciting things have happened to me in the past three years!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... It seems like you're the kind of person to say yes to a lot of fun opportunities, and not feel like you - you said, "I've worked with .NET, I've worth with this", or you didn't say, "Well, I'm too good for that." You sort of were like, "I'll go anywhere and do whatever to enjoy what I'm doing."
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, that's the thing... I have a talk that I've been doing lately called "Alt-Ctrl: Scream into this Arduino", and it's my intro to a JavaScript hardware talk, and I started off by saying, "I'm not a great developer, and I'm not great at hardware" and the last slide is "I'm a great problem solver", because that is how I feel. Even if I've never seen a codebase, if you tell me the problem that you have and what needs to get solved, I can figure it out, even if it's in a language that I don't necessarily understand. It's been that way ever since I've started programming.
+
+I think it's an advantage, but it's not really an advantage for places that have quick deadlines and fast turnarounds, so that's why I think that this tech evangelist position is great for me, because I can focus on things that I care about, do it the way that I want, try new things, learn new things, and also have some time to contribute to open source if I want.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So why this show for you? This background, this rich history of who you are... As I mentioned in the Node Interactive interview that Jerod was mentioning, from the Future of Node series, Mikeal had introduced me to you when we were kind of early on, putting together the panel (which is you, Alex Sexton and Mikeal Rogers) - I didn't know who you were until then. Then I met you at Node Interactive and thought you were great, and now that you're introduced to what we wanna do with this show and some of the ideas we have shared, why does this show matter to you?
+
+**Rachel White:** I think it matters to me because I love Alex and Mikeal; they're both super smart and they care a lot about the community, and I would like to think that I'm here to be like, "Hey guys, what are you talking about? Can you explain this in an alternate way for somebody that might not be familiar with whatever topic we're dealing with?"
+
+\[00:08:00.01\\\] I think there's some things that they talk about that I don't know what they're saying, just because I don't have that super high level of understanding of Service Workers, or enhancements stuff. I'm excited to be their non-confrontational devil's advocate that's like a friendly devil's advocate.
+
+I also hope that we'll be able to explore a little bit more of the creative coding aspect of JavaScript. There's an awful lot of people that identify as technologists who aren't necessarily programmers, but they use programming in their art, and I think that's pretty cool, too.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's a great angle into the show. As we've said on the other couple of "meet the host" episodes, we want this podcast to be a weekly celebration of JavaScript and the web platform and all the different things you can do with JavaScript, whether it's you're at Wal-Mart and you're getting through Black Friday because of your JavaScript skills and platform, or you're an artist and here's how you add some animation to this thing that you're trying to do, or you're animating some robots... Whatever it is. That's the beauty of it - it's everywhere; the ubiquity of JavaScript... And because the browser's on one side and Node is on the other side, there's so many different things that are happening with it... It's worth getting together and having debates, having conversations and learning things along the way, and celebrating all the different things that everybody's doing.
+I think that you are doing so many cool things... We should talk about your Robokitty, the RFID chip in your hand... Tell us about some of these fun things so we can just celebrate that for a few minutes.
+
+**Rachel White:** Sure. My first Node and hardware project was in the summer of 2015; I had no idea what I was doing... It's called Robokitty. I was like, "I wanna make an automated cat feeder, because I feel like that would be easy", and I approached it the same way that I approach a project every time I start it - I got a piece of paper and I drew a storyboard essentially of the different steps that I thought I would need to achieve. It was pretty much just like a picture of a computer with a button on the screen, and then Wi-Fi waves, and then a food dispenser.
+
+That was my project, and it took me two months to finish everything. I open sourced it, and luckily, a bunch of people helped me clean it up and refactor it. I didn't even know how to do routing with Node, so somebody did that for me. No, I definitely know how to do all that, and I just thought it was a really fun intro for me to Node. I like telling people the story about how it was created, because I think a lot of times when you see people talking about stuff that they've made, it's just purely technical and it's not about the journey to how they got to the end result, and that's the most interesting part to me.
+
+I like hearing about thought process and mistakes that are made, and the things that they've learned throughout the process. I try and do that in everything that I do.
+
+\[00:11:50.11\\\] Let me see, what else... I have an RFID chip in my hand, because why not? I thought it would be funny. Right now all that it does is if you scan it with an RFID reader, it says, "Follow me on Twitter" and it has "@ohhoe" on it. It has a unique ID in it, so I can scan it with the RFID reader that I wired up to an Arduino, and then I have a simple little pseudo-console running in the browser that I styled to look like an old monitor with green text (glowy)...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Rachel White:** ...and when I scan the chip, it has a bunch of hacker text, like a computer movie scene hacker stuff that scrolls by really fast, and then there's an ASCII skull that says "Access granted." The problem is I got it implanted in my hand last summer, and I think it's moving around...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Uh-oh...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like up your wrist?
+
+**Rachel White:** Just deeper into my hand. Every time that I give this demo it's harder to do, because I have to pinch the web of my hand and try and find it, and it grosses some people out... So I might have to find a stronger RFID scanner, so I don't have to do weird things with my body to get it to work.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hopefully it doesn't get lost in there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're becoming a machine...
+
+**Rachel White:** If it does, it's fine...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It starts scanning different sections of your body, like your wrist, or the inside of your elbow, or something like that...
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, I don't think that it can go anywhere, like...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...too far.
+
+**Rachel White:** I mean, who knows...?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe.
+
+**Rachel White:** We'll see. Yeah, those are the weird things that I'm doing, and I'm actually learning React right now so that I can make a website that is like Japanese photo booths, if that makes sense to anyone... They basically just take four sequential pictures and then you get to overlay stickers on them, and make your eyes big and put make-up on your face. So I'm trying to learn about fancier ways to do things.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I just googled that, and I see what you mean.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, it's called "purikura". Obviously, since that kind of sounds like "purry", I'm going to call it "Purry Booth", because I can't make anything not related to cats, apparently.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's your brand.
+
+**Rachel White:** I know.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You gotta stay on brand.
+
+**Rachel White:** I know, but also I feel like people are like, "Ugh, I hate cats, there's that girl again."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's the cat lady!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** She did make it very clear in the Node Interactive interview talking about, Jerod. You said, "I'm a cat lady, but not in a weird way where I am buried in my cats at 80 years old..." - I don't know what you said, but something to that effect. You were like, "I love cats, but not to that level."
+
+**Rachel White:** Um, that's a lie... \[laughter\] It's definitely not a healthy level... \[laughter\] I'm allergic, and I have two, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're allergic to cats, and yet you own two cats.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow...
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, after I was hospitalized for three days, the allergies got a little better, so... \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Coming back to this React learning - I'd love to go that direction; I'm really curious what you're doing with it. So this purikura called Purry Photobooth - you're doing this in React; what is this?
+
+**Rachel White:** So I was like, "I'm really horrible at conferences, and I don't watch a lot of talks because I have short attention span..." Once you start going to a lot of conferences, it's a lot of the same thing over and over. I've been hearing nothing but React talks for the past year, and I guess I never paid attention to any of them, just because I was sick of hearing about React.
+
+\[00:16:03.08\\\] And then I was talking to a friend of mine who just so happens to work with me - Suze Hinton - and I was showing her the drawings of how I wanted this Purry Booth app to work, and she was like "Oh, that would be a really good React app."
+
+I told her I don't know React... I kind of know what it does. And then Jen Schiffer was like "Wes has that React course that's super affordable, and there's 30 videos". She recommended it to me and I bought it, and it's great. I hope I don't butcher his last name - Wes Bos?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, I believe so.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah. They're so good! I think I'm at 15 out of 30 videos now. He went over states in React, and props and stuff, and I was like, "Holy shit, wait a second! Why didn't anyone tell me React was this easy, instead of... Well, maybe they did and I wasn't paying attention." I don't know, it's my way of learning. I just have to get my hands in and make something myself, and have the right motivation to learn something.
+
+Now that I'm going through these and I'm actually seeing how all the pieces are put together, I'm like "Wow, this is really helpful", especially for cool, frontend type things, and I'm pumped. So maybe I should pay attention more at conferences.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go.
+
+**Rachel White:** That's one thing that I'm actually excited about being a part of this podcast, too - it's going to force me to have to pay attention to what's going on, more than just hearing about things offhand or hearing it when I walk past conference talks and not pay attention. Now I'll force myself to stay on top of things and actually have discussions about why or why not they might be beneficial.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think that's one of the virtues of podcasts, whether you're on the show or you're in the live chat, or you listen much later... Even if it's not something that you particularly are deep into.
+
+We have another show that's all about the Go programming language called GoTime. Our tagline for that is "If you're a Go programmer or you aspire to, this is the show for you." And I'm neither of those things. I'm not a Go developer, I don't even aspire to, but I enjoy listening to that show because it just keeps you abreast of what's going on over here, new ideas... You just pay attention kind of by osmosis because you're there, listening to smart people talk about it.
+
+From your perspective, Rachel, when you're on the podcast yourself, you're gonna have to be more on point, because you have Mikeal and Alex right there talking to you.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But it's such a great thing... That's why we love to bring conversations together around technologies and the people that are using them, because it's kind of one of these rising tides - we all have a shared conversation, we are all leveling up together as we discuss and argue and debate, so that's really exciting.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I'm hoping that I can be the one that asks questions that people might not otherwise necessarily ask, because of being worried that dumb question might be dumb, or something like that... Even though there are no dumb questions, but people are still afraid to ask things.
+
+I guess now if you have a technical for Mikeal or Alex and you're afraid to ask, my DMs are open.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm glad you mentioned that, because we actually have a soundboard now, and what we're gonna do -- we don't have a formal way to do this yet, so if you're listening to this, simply subscribe to the show or subscribe to our weekly email, Changelog Weekly... You can find that by going to changelog.com/weekly. But what we plan to do is actually have it where people can submit audio-based questions and we'll play them live on the show. That's one idea we have.
+
+\[00:20:19.18\\\] So if you're taking Rachel's advice and you DM her, you can simply just record it and share an audio URL and she'll pass it along, or something like that. That's something that we have found time for in the future. If we're in the middle of the show and so-and-so has this question, we play their question and you all debate about the different nuances of it, or your different perspectives or angles. That could be fun.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Real quick, because we get towards the tail end of this conversation... We wanna hit up a few things. First of all, two sides of the same coin - I want you to tell us what's your favorite thing about JavaScript and the web, and then on the other side of the coin, what's your least favorite thing, or what do you not love?
+
+**Rachel White:** I think that my favorite thing about JavaScript is how accessible and readily information is available to people that are getting started, especially self-learners. I feel like other than maybe Python or whatever else they teach in CS (I don't know, I didn't go to school for Computer Science), I hear a lot about people that are wanting to learn frontend and they're excited because there's so many places that you can learn... Wes has the free 30-day JavaScript course, there's Node School, there's StackOverflow if you go down that route...
+
+There's just so much research that's already been done at your fingertips that it makes it really easy to learn. And I just think there's so many different things that can be done with JavaScript, and now that browsers are implementing new things, like WebVR and some other web audio specs... It's ridiculous how much you can do, and it's exciting.
+
+The thing that I dislike about JavaScript is probably the egos around people that maybe have a traditional CS background and write JavaScript and are just not nice to people when they ask questions. That can probably go for any language really, so... I guess that's it.
+
+I feel like JavaScript has changed so much, and it's just changing faster and faster, the more web stuff gets better. It's hard to keep up with, but I think that with all the changes, you get a lot of different viewpoints and a lot of different ways that people can tackle the same problem. When one way becomes better than the other way is when you get into the arguments that I'm not really a big fan of.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think it's interesting that if you abstract both of your answers, it's people. The thing that you love the most is the resources and the teachings and the answers on StackOverflow, and all these resources that people create. On the other side, the thing that you dislike the most is also people, but on a different side of the spectrum. That's interesting.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, actually there's a new talk that I'm gonna be giving this year called, "Keep the internet weird." It's a community talk and it's about when I was learning JavaScript in the early 2000s through making personal websites, and the community that was around other people that would have their domain names were so friendly! There wasn't any ego to it; it was just like, "Oh, I really like this cheesy trail of stars behind your cursor. How did you do that?" And there would be websites that people made with code snippets on how to do arbitrary, non-important, meaningless, but just cool things, but everybody was so nice.
+
+\[00:24:17.03\\\] I feel like there's communities that have been opening up recently, that are encouraging that kind of nice, collaborative way to make coding exciting again, and not just part of your job. Or if it is part of your job, a less aggressive way to help out. I think that places like Slack - closed communities where people can find other people that have similar interests, and inclusivity working groups...
+I don't know, I'm excited... I'm really excited for 2017 and to see what other groups pop up to help people do more cool stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, on the note of community, one thing that you can do as a (future) listener of this show is go to changelog.com/community. One thing that makes this show different and unique is that it's live, and that we also have a live Slack channel called JSParty inside of our community, that you can participate in. In the case of the things Rachel is saying here, you can find the people that have shared or similar ideas and listen live and participate. It's supposed to be a fun environment, a celebration environment, as Jerod said before. That's something that we certainly embrace around here the importance of community and supporting one another.
+
+Let's close with this, Rachel... I could ask this question one way, but I think I wanna ask it slightly different, which is rather than saying "Who should listen to this show?", who do you HOPE listens to this show? Because it sounds like you've got a lot of perspective over your journey, your own experiences and the way you like to approach learning - being a developer being fun, and not just simply "I go to work, I do my stuff and I ship code" kind of thing. You make it whimsical and fun, really enjoyable to do. So who do you hope listens to this show?
+
+**Rachel White:** I hope everyone listens to the show, obviously... But if I had to be more specific, I guess people that aren't that just, you know, "I'm gonna come in and do my job and leave" - which obviously is important; there's nothing wrong with that if that's how you enjoy to work. But hopefully there's people that love to program and love trying new, weird things out, people that have the privilege to be able to do things outside of their regular job, and wanna explore things other than just MVCs or CMS's, and they just wanna get weird. \[laughs\] I mean, not too weird; a good, healthy amount of weird. I want people to listen that like to have fun with what they do.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[00:27:26.26\\\] Well, hopefully the music we've chosen to represent this show gets people in that mood. We're hoping to play the theme song during the live show, so that it gets everyone in the mood. I don't know if you've heard it yet, Rachel... Have you heard it yet?
+
+**Rachel White:** I think so.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, there were a couple different versions, and I listened to it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** About three weeks ago I think it was, Jerod, that we finalized the final version of it, so I'm pretty sure we've shared it with everyone involved... So that's pretty much it. We're trying to make this fun, we're trying to make it a celebration about JavaScript and the web platform, so we want nothing but positivity around and a lot of fun to encourage new developers and to encourage people who are already involved in the community. Thanks so much, Rachel, this was a lot of fun. I appreciate it.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yay! Thank you.

P2P Web, WebRTC, WebTorrent, IPFS, and React VR_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,377 @@
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Hey, everybody! Welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript. I'm Mikeal Rogers...
+
+**Rachel White:** I'm Rachel White.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And I'm Alex Sexton.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, and we have some fun topics today. We're gonna get into React VR. Before that, Alex, why don't you just give us a quick primer on React?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure. I talked a little bit about a lot of the parts of React in the past on this show, but in case this is your first episode or you just need a refresher, or you just love hearing the sound of my voice, let's do some React talk.
+
+React is a framework, and it's a framework primarily for rendering DOM elements onto a page, and doing that efficiently. The core concept behind React is that you write your markup inside of React, and you use their management of lifecycle of data changing, and then you try to build your HTML with data in React, and then as your data changes, React can somewhat automatically change your web page to reflect the data that has changed inside of your state.
+
+That's a core concept pretty much in every current framework, the idea of data binding. Different frameworks do it differently, and the novel approach that React took, which is very popular now, a few years later, is that they want to make re-rendering very cheap, so what they do is they render what's called a virtual DOM, which is really just a JavaScript object, and instead of having children, you have an array called "children", things like that; instead of attributes on DOM elements, you just have "properties" as like a second argument to an object. So really it's just this very simple representation of a DOM, and then anytime data changes, it goes and changes it in this object version of the DOM, instead of the actual HTML page that you can see. And then once it makes all the changes from all the data that's changed, it runs what's called a DOM diff against the old one and the new one, and it says "Okay, the only thing that changed is that the class name property on this one object way down on this part of the page changed. That's it. It would be silly if we threw away..." - back in the Backbone days you would throw away all of your HTML and then you'd re-render your entire page because one class name changed. Maybe you would just re-render an entire view, but either way, you'd re-render a whole bunch for very small data changes.
+
+In the React world, it knows which DOM element maps to that subsection of your page, and it can just swap out the little class name section very quickly. So DOM diffing is very fast, based on some of the constraints that they put in, so you can get very fast renders without having to manage which part of the page that you're updating manually; it just feels very data-bound, even though it's not necessarily data-bound in the same sense that people might expect out of Ember, or something similar to that. Was that a good overview?
+
+**Rachel White:** \[00:03:49.08\\\] Yes, and it's a good segue into why they wanted to make React VR, which is a brand new, young React baby. It's so young, there's stuff that was pushed to the repo like nine minutes ago.
+
+Basically, React VR was started as a way for people that are already super familiar with how to write React applications can just jump right in and craft VR experiences. It's not gonna be as super robust as being able to build stuff in a frame or a three.js for VR type things, but it will allow you to use a lot of the components and props and state that you use in React, and use those to create things in the 360 space.
+
+The starting example that they have for React VR is just crafting a 360-view from a panoramic image. It's like 20 lines, and it lets you set all of the properties in line in the component, and then it lets it wrap around. Obviously, this is only gonna be compatible with whatever browsers are WebVR ready... But if you go to the React VR documentation, it tells you all of the basic things that are available right now, and it seems like it's still obviously actively being developed on, but you're able to go in and try it out if you don't even know how to do VR, but know how to do React, which I think is the point; that's what they're going for.
+
+I feel like now React is going into every single space that they could humanly shove their way into, especially with React Native and now React VR. There's nothing you can't do with React.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that what's really paying dividends here is... React made a pretty big shift in the web framework world. Before React, web frameworks were like jQuery; you'd put them in a page and then get that API in the browser, and you'd mess around with it in the browser, in your code. And they were like, "You know what? Everybody is using all these compile toolchains. Why don't we build a web framework that's built as a compile chain? We will have some of our code in the browser, but it's actually gonna work in this toolchain that allows you to add features to the language, allows you to much more easily and more modularly pull in new areas, like VR and things like that."
+
+It has this much bigger extensibility model than web frameworks that we've seen before, so now we're seeing stuff like React Native and React VR. It's pretty cool.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, it's definitely making different ways of programming more accessible... I guess the right way to phrase it would be like "I don't need to learn all these different frameworks in order to achieve different things anymore." A React dev can just learn React and be able to do stuff cross-platform, mobile, iOS, now they can do VR, and gaming and stuff... There's not really a need to have too many dependencies or learn different ways to write.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it's pretty cool... Pretty cool stuff. I don't even use React, but I actually think this stuff is pretty cool, and this is a good approach.
+
+**Rachel White:** This actually makes me -- I was already starting to learn React, and this makes it more exciting. The potential for being able to get something out into multiple realms by writing it a certain way is super exciting.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I mean, normally I would be kind of skeptical of the modularity of building things this way and kind of tightly coupling them to React, but so far in the VR space and the 3D space what we've seen are a bunch of giant towers of code, that are their own plugin system and their own huge thing anyway. So there's not really a smaller module critique to this necessarily.
+
+I mean, if you just wanted to do not VR, but 3D programming, there is a bunch of great stuff there that Mikeal is doing with small modules, but for the most part, this is competing with other really giant frameworks as well, and being integrated into a framework that's much more understood than whatever random framework that somebody just wrote for their VR library, and it's probably a lot better.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, and it seems like people are really jumping in already. There's already 23 issues, and six pull requests to make fixes to the library... There's some small things, but I think that people that are already involved in doing stuff with React are going to -- I don't know, I think it's gonna be interesting to see.
+
+But also, what is it -- I mean, Facebook... Facebook owns Oculus, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Mm-hm.
+
+**Rachel White:** Okay, so obviously there's gonna be some kind of other VR thing here...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** If you followed F8 the past week, they're definitely into VR and stuff like that, and even the last F8 they had some big demo where Mark Zuckerberg went to his house and picked up things around -- whatever... \[laughter\] But he was talking about how the first wave of VR is actually going to be just augmented reality type stuff, and then they did a bunch of demos on just like the camera app with filters over your face, or with different objects in the room, different things like that. From what I can see, I imagine - obviously I don't use React VR yet, but it seems like this would be completely appropriate for that too, just not in stereo, and that would work as well.
+
+So I imagine this could equally be used, whether you have a stereoscopic 360 image, or if it's just on your camera.... But the interesting thing to me is I wonder how much -- if Facebook wanted to build an augmented reality app with this, based on facial recognition, and it can just pop up information about someone as it recognizes their face in the augmented reality, which is always the cool cyborg thing to do - the enemy, or whatever on the side, strength level and karma... But the interesting thing to me is how much of their Facebook React stuff could they pull in and use in both places? Because if they're using Redux and it's all just like state management via these pure functions that do X, Y and Z, then it seems maybe reasonable that they could pull in a bunch of the end points for passing faces down to a thing and then getting data back, and all sorts of stuff, or like befriending someone in the real world is like an action that could already be in there with Redux.
+
+It's interesting to me how much of their app they could use between their website, their mobile app, which is at least partially React Native, and then their React VR augmented reality situation. I'd be very interested to see code reuse.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah. I mean, they're already -- I'm kind of like creeped out about it, now that you say it that way... Only because, obviously, my only relationship with Facebook is going on and seeing whatever events I've been invited to for the week... But you can see the new -- I don't know... How can I put this? Well, they have the 360 video support now that's in the browser, and I'd be interested to see if that kind of stuff plays with this kind of VR experience. Because taking it from the 2D experience where you're dealing with it in your browser and then having the stereoscopic view...
+
+\[00:12:14.28\\\] I don't know, I think it's gonna translate -- I'm scared for when the web and VR integrate, because I don't want that; that's not my VR future. But I'm sure that's the monetization of the VR future that we're gonna be dealing with.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, for sure. I mean, Google Glass was ahead of the curve in the sense of like "One day we'll all have that contact in", or whatever... \[laughter\] Definitely behind the curve in what a human would agree to put on their face.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm just thinking... For a while, every tech article about the future of technology would just have some douchebag with Google glasses on, in a context that didn't make any sense to have it on. Lately they've been talking about VR future, and that's always somebody in a random place with a big Oculus Rift on their head. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, that was me yesterday, and everybody was making fun of me. I was doing some mixed reality work in public, and everybody was just like "You look like an idiot." \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I feel like if you go back far enough, every pitch for computers in the very beginning was like "It replaces a typewriter." Then it was like, "You can store recipes on them", and I think since then -- once they hit the business world more so, everything is "They'll change the way you do meetings." So first it was like "Second Life... If you'd just do your meetings in Second Life, everything will be good", and then "If you just do your meetings with Google Glass on, or with VR, or whatever..."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Meanwhile, everyone hates their actual audio conference software...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Exactly. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** If we could just solve the actual audio conferencing problem, that'd be great. My favorite one of these "in the future" things is this -- I think it was a Time Magazine drawing of somebody with a watch on with a floppy disk that they're putting into it... It's amazing.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Nice.
+
+**Rachel White:** I was just trying to look up more VR stuff, and I mistyped the URL and now I'm on one of those pages that just keep on telling me "Critical alert from Windows. Your computer has been blocked", even though I'm on my Mac. \[laughter\] Imagine this, but in VR...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, the blue screen of death, and you just eat it on a curb...
+
+**Rachel White:** This is my personal health... Alright, we're good. Sorry for derailing. \[laughs\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No worries.
+
+**Rachel White:** I mean... VR is such a personal thing... I don't know. It's interesting to me that -- obviously, Facebook wants to get in that space, even if it is a personal thing, but... I don't know. I want somebody to do something with VR that is cooler than what I've seen, and if Facebook can make it so that you can have more of a connected experience while you're in these virtual spaces, I'm okay with it, even if it is like a crappy Second Life.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm sort of surprised there isn't more effort going into just bridging the social networking stuff into games. Games are bigger than Hollywood movies now, they're huge, and it seems like this kind of technology would penetrate there before it would penetrate into a website that I visit.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[00:15:53.23\\\] I'm not a huge gamer, but I think there is quite a bit of social stuff in games these days. It is a little bit interesting that it's not super Facebook-heavy, though I'm pretty sure you can import all sorts of Facebook stuff. Part of it is like Microsoft v. Facebook, in some sense. Microsoft has their own identity management; why would you import your Facebook import when you could import your live account? Things like that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Because I talk to people on that live account all the time.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh yeah, I'm a big MSN Messenger user...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Lots of baby pictures on that Microsoft Live...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right... So I can see why -- like, Sony doesn't really have a competitor, so it's interesting that... I haven't bought a Playstation - whatever the recent one was - in a while, but I don't think there's a ton of Facebook integration... But they all have at least a Facebook app.
+
+**Rachel White:** The integration - I mean, I buy pretty much every single video game system whenever it comes out, just because I'm an adult and I can, and it makes me feel good, and pretty much the only social integration that they have with it in the sharing feature is just posting screenshots or posting videos to your timeline. It's not like I can tell who that I'm friends with on Facebook is also playing these certain games.
+
+There's the social stuff that's tied to just your singular Playstation account, your singular Nintendo World account, and then your Xbox live account, and I agree with you, there's definitely a missed thing there. But I also think that so many people don't understand exactly how data and privacy works, so they're a little more apprehensive about freely sharing that kind of stuff.
+
+I don't even care, so everyone get on my data, as long as I can play video games with my friends.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think they're missing a huge opportunity here though... I don't know about your Facebook, but mine is mostly dominated by my extended family, who are right-wing lunatics, and I would love it when there's some kind of political argument to just say "You know what, let's just take this to the first-person shooter."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** ...to Counter-Strike.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, like "Let's take this to Counter-Striker, settle it there. Let's shoot each other for a while. I think that we'll feel better at the end of it than we will be commenting on this Facebook thread."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... I think that's really where VR helps, because then you're actually killing your uncle... Which is great, that's what you want.
+
+I wonder if it's partially because video games' social aspects are often such a Hellscape that no one wants to attach their actual identities to their avatars... Or maybe even further - many games ask you to assume the identity of a different avatar, like you become the person, so I wonder if it would kind of take you out of it.
+
+Interesting dynamics, but I doubt any of those reasons I just said were the actual reasons they didn't have a Facebook integration.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... And I think it's about time for a break with that. Let's have a little break now, and when we come back we will discuss the decentralized P2P web.
+
+**Break:** \[00:19:25.18\\\] to \[20:08\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And we're back! Alright, let's get into the decentralized web. P2P web, decentralized web - I think it's best described actually as a movement. It's not like a specific set of technology; there's a bunch of technologies, a bunch of projects, a bunch of people... But a lot of different people are trying to decentralize the web, trying to take a lot of the centralized cloud services that we've now become so reliant on and are basically all of our data to, and trying to actually build applications that are more P2P, more decentralized.
+
+The interesting thing about this movement is that it has big bearded fellows like Max Ogden, and mad scientists like Feross, and Substack, and cyber hobos like Dominic Tarr... But also Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf and all these people that literally built the early web and the internet. So it's a very interesting mix of boomers and millennials that are all kind of crazy web people networking together on this stuff. Let's start rolling out some questions, and stuff like that.
+
+WebRTC is the P2P protocol in the browser right now, and it's very different from how BitTorrent establishes connections, so there's a lot of work to try and bring different ideas from prior P2P system to it, and also building new P2P systems on top of it.
+
+**Rachel White:** Is WebRTC what you're using for that one site that you're actually working on where you can talk to people in the browser?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, Roll Call.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool, awesome. So web P2P stuff isn't necessarily just -- I guess when I think of P2P I automatically just think of early 2000s' file sharing, or pirating stuff... This is more of a P2P type of sense where it's just data sharing in a lot of different ways?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah. But even the file sharing component - that didn't really work on the web before. If you wanted to share a file on the web, you would basically upload it to a place, and then have it be downloaded to people. Now Feross wrote WebTorrent, which really ports all of the BitTorrent concepts over to WebRTC.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Let me interrupt - I used to send transfers via AIM all the time, \[laughter\] and it works fine, unless you had a router that didn't support UnP mapping, or something like that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That was also not on the web, though... That was not on the web. That was in the AIM client, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You could put HTML into there, and it would change the text, so...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] So that counts as the web now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Mm-hm... It was the web; I don't know what you're doing. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah. I think the file sharing example is kind of interesting, right? Because unlike the regular web where this network is just up and we kind of know how to get to things, and if you give it an address, it can figure out how to download that content... In decentralized systems you have to establish new networks for distributing things, and you have to figure out how people connect to these networks, and if they stay on them or if they leave.
+
+We have now decades of file sharing attempts to do this, right? Everything from Kazaa and Limewire and Napster back in the day... And now BitTorrent is sort of like the best of breed of all of this, so if you wanna establish a network for transferring and keeping alive a large file, they've really nailed that, and WebTorrent is a pretty direct port of that. But for other use cases like "I wanna have chat rooms, phone calls", or all these other cases... How to establish that network is not as well -- people have not figured that out necessarily yet... Or figured out the best way for that yet.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[00:24:03.19\\\] This might not be a relevant question, but does blockchain type of distributed database things - does that fall into web-based P2P stuff?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, yes. A lot of them aren't web-based yet, but there are a few that are, and we're getting much more web support all the time. BcoinJS is like a Bitcoin client library as well. I know that people are working on an Ethereum one... IPFF is working on some blockchain stuff that will work in Go and in the browser at some point.
+
+I think the best way to look at blockchains is that if you wanna have a transaction log, and you wanna have a distributed transaction log, that's the best way to build it. It's not the best place to store large amounts of data (it's actually really intense for that), but if you wanna just store a transaction log, 1) it's a good, cryptographically secure way to do those transactions, and 2) kind of built into the way that you interact with the transaction log, it has everything that it needs to keep itself alive, and keep its network alive. That's one of the harder things to engineer, and the thing that we have for, say, BitTorrent, but we don't have for a lot of other use cases.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Would you build operational transforms on top of a decentralized blockchain web implementation? Is that what we're talking about...?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Possibly. You maybe could, but I'm wondering if -- well, we have so much other data on how to do operational transforms on top of Merkle trees and on top of all these other distributable data structures. I don't know if it's actually beneficial to do it inside of a blockchain.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So if you wanted to do P2P Google Docs, you wouldn't need the blockchain, or anything like that... Which is an encouraging statement to me.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I think with the blockchain, or any time that you really want -- a transaction log where more than one person is going to agree on every transaction, so you want it to be not eventually consistent, but always consistent, you're going to sacrifice some performance, right? If you're editing a Google Doc collaboratively with eight people and every few keystrokes you want to save that, that's going to be problematic in something like a blockchain... Whereas if you actually just take all the operational transforms, shove them into a log that gets distributed around everybody, people can agree to the same merges over time and deal with conflicts as they arise, and still have a pretty fast user experience.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Got it. Where does Bram Cohen fall on the cyber hobo scale?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] I don't know. I mean, he has a company that's been around for like 10 years, and a salary from that, so I don't know if he's in in cyber hobo status... \[laughing\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay... Good to know.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I mean, Dominic Tarr chooses to just go and build a boat that he lives on for months at a time in New Zealand, so it's a little different...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** As you do...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and then he comes back with an entirely new implementation of secure scuttlebutt or something.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** As you do. A serious question... The web, kind of like when we talk about app stores and we talk about -- what else; we've even talked about it on the show... We definitely talked about app stores, but either way, we talked about if you go and you put your app in the app store, you're using a centralized Apple control thing, and the way to win that back is to use the decentralized app store, which is the web.
+
+\[00:27:59.12\\\] So we often refer to the fact that you can choose any server as long as you can get an IP address, like all the different things... There's no single internet server, and then you have to upload everything to the internet server, and then they can turn things on or off.
+
+Certainly, there are states involved, and censorship and things like that, but I don't think that's really what we're talking.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's part of it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well yeah, but I think it's a different part of it. We're talking about the word "decentralized" a bunch, but in my opinion the web is decentralized; it feels more like pseudo-decentralized... I don't know.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So you're right and you're wrong... The web is decentralized; web services are not decentralized. Anybody can put up a web service, anybody can build something for the web. The people who engineered those protocols and built these systems really believed in that decentralization, right? But if I want to use a service to make a call, or I want to send a message to somebody else, I'm constantly putting my data into these services that are actually incredibly centralized.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** We have decentralized voice calling, right? That exists, I'm pretty sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, Skype is backing off of that, actually... So Skype isn't as P2P as it used to be.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** But we're not talking about P2P, we're talking about decentralization.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm talking about -- phone networks are decentralized. My service provider can talk to your service provider over an open standard.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, yes, sorry. Okay, you mean like real phone calls.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Voice over IP has a similar standard; use IP addresses instead of phone numbers, or whatever, but it works.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, but it also falls back to -- okay, so to make that call though, I log into a service that's centralized, I tell them where I am, they tell me where another person is... We're entirely reliant on them. They store all of the metadata logs...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think it's possible to set up your own servers... You may have to, like...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah... But again, we need to make this useable, right? And without setting up your own server, you can visit Roll Call and it will set up a point-to-point connection and never store any metadata or keep any kind of logs of that transaction anywhere else, and it's all encrypted and everything, so you don't have to worry about your providers violating your privacy, you don't have to worry about a lot of government intervention and stuff like that.
+
+These are issues that we need to start caring about as this becomes a bigger and bigger chunk of the internet. We need services that protect your privacy, and as soon as you wanna protect the user's privacy, the service provider loses access to read that data. So we have very different models. If you don't have a central point of authority, you lose that as well.
+
+Another part of this that we're not talking about that is a really big part of the decentralized web is building offline applications. One of the hardest parts about building offline applications is that you lose that central authority. When I go to Twitter and I get my timeline, it says that a bunch of people said things, and I only believe that they said those things because Twitter told me that they did. But if we're putting a bunch of tweets into a local offline feed and then we're replicating that offline with a bunch of other people, I'm getting data about Alex from Rachel, and she could have just changed it. I can't trust everybody in between anymore, we don't have the central authority, so we need different mechanisms to sign that data and cryptographically say "These are the right people" and all that.
+
+\[00:32:04.17\\\] So you run into a lot of the same problems with offline as you do with every other decentralized point. And once you solve these problems for offline, you naturally solve them for a lot of the other decentralized cases.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's a good point. I think the solution to everything is homomorphic encryption, right?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Why don't you tell us what that is? \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** This is one of my favorite things... Homomorphic encryption is whenever you can perform the same -- like, if you have a function, you can encrypt both the function and the input to the function, and the output is the encrypted version of the plain text actual output. If you had a function called Add 2, and then you sent 2 to it, the output would be 4; and then if you had homomorphic encryption, you would encrypt the 2, you would encrypt the Add 2 function and you would get something encrypted out, but if you decrypt it, it would be 4.
+
+The idea would be that you could have Gmail, and Gmail would be 100% encrypted on the backend, but one thing about an encrypted mail service is that you can't search in it anymore, and mail without search is effectively useless, in my opinion. So you'd either have to bring all the search locally, which means you'd have to store all your mail locally in order to search it, because that's the only place it could be decrypted, or you could use homomorphic encryption to say "Encrypt my search parameter, and then search for that encrypted thing in the encrypted email, and then give me the encrypted results back, and then I can decrypt it and it'll be correct."
+
+Essentially, you can perform a search on encrypted data. It's kind of early days -- not that early, but it's gonna take a long time for that to exist and be good, but I think it solves a lot of the trust cases, while enabling user experience at end-to-end-to-end-to-end performance.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** One of the most fascinating things to me about all this is that we're not really waiting on a lot of web standards anymore; we're not really waiting on even these cryptography libraries to exist. There are encryption libraries right now that will work in the browser. What we're really lacking - people just haven't figured out what the usability of this looks like, and how do you establish networks and move data around for all these different use cases. It's a very greenfield area for people to get involved in, if that's what you're passionate about, but we're way past the stage where you are the first person implementing any web standard, or you are the first person implementing an algorithm or something like that. Those are already there, it's just like we're all just figuring out how to use them still.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. To be clear though, the homomorphic encryption still has a long way to go, and there's not just like an npm package that's gonna do it for you, or any packages can do anything that I said for you, except for very simple math. Anyways, not a podcast on homomorphic encryption, by any means.
+
+So we end up with a lot of demos in this space. We talk about NodeBots, we talk about VR, we talk about P2P, and all of it I think is massively interesting and is the future, but it keeps being the future, no matter how far into the future that we go... It keeps still being the future, so I'm wondering...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I would push back a little bit on that. For instance, NodeBots were new and novel in 2012. I think I had talks at NodeConf on it and people were like "What?! Robots in JavaScript?"
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, for sure, but no one ships a NodeBot as their production robot.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[00:36:01.19\\\] Yes, they do... Yes they do. Skycatch is shipping basically a drone for commercial construction sites, that are now taking over all of Japanese construction, and building 3D maps of things... Everything on the bot is JavaScript and NodeBot, and in their cloud, in their frontend - it's all JavaScript. That's happening.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I guess what I really mean is it's not the normal case. Certainly, there are people doing WebRTC and stuff like that; even Google does parts of this stuff for Google Hangouts, but I guess I'm still waiting for the future where this is how you would build it... I don't know. That was more my sentiment than like, obviously, someone does something for real. But it is encouraging.
+
+**Rachel White:** The more people that are trying to do stuff with it is what it's gonna take in order to get it to something where it's more used practically.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... I guess my point isn't "We should all stop working on these things, because they're pointless, they're not gonna catch on." \[laughter\] That wasn't my -- the thing that is sounded like. I'm just wondering what we can do to make it the way people think map onto these types of ideas in a way that doesn't hurt user experience... Like, all those types of things - what can we do to make it better? And obviously, "keep working" is the easy answer.
+
+**Rachel White:** I have a question for both of you then... Is there anything that is currently out today that uses the kind of P2P stuff that we just went over, that you're excited about and see potential with it?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I'm trying to look at the name of it now, but I don't recall the name of the site.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** ChatRelay?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, no... So to back up with what Alex said, there's definitely been a longer timeline with WebRTC... We've been seeing demos probably longer than NodeBots maybe, and still haven't really seen a lot of big production stuff, and it seems like kind of never-ending. I think part of that is that the way that the audio and video is implemented is very kind of magical... Outside of that demo use case it doesn't work and you can't really modify things very well, and it's incredibly difficult to use.
+
+If you look at what I've had to do with Roll Call - for those of you that haven't seen it before, RollCall.audio... It's just like a little audio-only web caller. Because it's audio-only, I can take that audio that's coming out and pass it through a bunch of the other web audio APIs in order to actually do all of the stuff that you need to do with it. But if you look at video, you really can't mess with it very much. You don't get access to the kinds of things that you need to.
+
+Additionally, even with just audio calls - that app is never gonna work for more than nine people, because then you need to create super nodes and proxy audio data, and you don't have access to do that at the level that you need to. However, I will say that the data channel, which is actually newer than any of the audio and video stuff in WebRTC, the data channel has not been there as long and is already kind of farther along in terms of real use cases. WebTorrent, like I said, is using it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** The failure mode there, just to be clear, is that if you have nine people you're talking to, you have to make a connection with each of them, and each person has to send every single person their audio individually. So you're uploading eight versions of your audio. Everyone is uploading eight versions of their audio.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Exactly. And also, everybody in the network has to be directly connected to everybody else in the network, whereas if you have, say, a data network, you could have thousands of nodes with different nodes connecting them in between, and the data flowing between them. But you don't really have access to pass the audio through that way.
+
+\[00:40:04.19\\\] Anyway, so WebTorrent is quite a bit further along; it's using the data channel, and there is -- I can't find the name of it, but there's a YouTube(ish) competitor that is using WebTorrent. This is actually kind of cool - if you go back to...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Did you laugh at the idea of a YouTube competitor? Was that that little giggle?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Yeah, yeah. I'm somewhat skeptical of a YouTube Competitor. Popcorn Time - I don't know if you can still download it off of random, weird website or whatever, but Popcorn Time is basically like this Apple TV-like application that is just beautiful. It will go out to P2P networks, find all the latest movies and things that you're not even supposed to have, and then literally you click a button and they just start streaming, and you can view them right away. So not the whole normal rigmarole with BitTorrent where you download a torrent, add it into an app, and then wait for that app to finish etc. It's literally just plays. All of the underlying code there is all in Node.js, and a lot of it was written by Mathias Buus, who now works on the Dat Project.
+
+A lot of the people that made Popcorn Time are in hiding or arrested or something for various... He actually only worked on the lower level libraries, so that never happened and he's a free man. But he is doing amazing P2P work still. The big innovation that he figured out is that "Okay, we can actually in the BitTorrent protocol prioritize getting earlier parts of this file, we don't have to only go after what BitTorrent considers the least active parts of the file to keep it alive." And because we can do that and because we have Node Streams and because we can do all this really fancy math on the backend, we can stream this video over a P2P network in all these different chunks from all these different pieces. It's really cool.
+
+Now that's been adapted to WebTorrent, and you can just use that in your browser now. With this YouTube competitor, that's how it's working. WebTorrent allows you to add a web URL basically as a sort of peer of last resort; so if you can't get any data on the P2P network, like the file's not alive, it will just fall back to this CDN, essentially.
+
+So you can actually have a really decent experience for watching videos on the web entirely over P2P networks. And the cool thing for the creators of this service is that their bandwidth bill is gonna be a fraction of what YouTube's bandwidth bill is, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, but everyone else's bandwidth bill is going to be a large fraction higher than they're used to.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No it won't, because you don't pay for bandwidth that way, as a consumer.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You don't... I think a lot of people do. People definitely have caps. Most people these days - I think this is an accurate statement - most people watch videos on their phone.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, definitely.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah... So I will also say that I don't know where this ended up and I have no kind of insider knowledge on this, but Netflix did prominently promote a position of WebTorrent expert that they wanted to hire; so Netflix was really trying to bring in somebody that knew WebTorrent, that they could maybe integrate WebTorrent into their service so that they could maybe make their bandwidth bills go down a little bit as well. So this may end up being something that really underlies a lot more than just random pirate sites.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I'd be interested -- like, "If you click that button, you get a $2 off/ month", something like that. What would the incentive be for someone to be like... This could potentially be flaky every once in a while if there's a bad Node. It's not gonna be as solid for a while, right?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[00:43:58.00\\\] I'm more interested in just like "How do we make it more solid?" There's a couple of techniques that you can use to make it more solid.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Before that -- the point I guess I'm making is you agree to stream it to other people who you don't know, you're agreeing to be a part of that network. Like, "I get $2 for being part of the network, versus just being a consumer of the network." Something like that could be cool. Anyways, go ahead.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think for a lot of these though, you're only really sharing it while you're watching it; you're not still uploading in the background, or something. That's just not an experience that people are used to.
+
+I think there's a couple ways that you can overcome the performance issues. If you can establish the network that you're gonna get the content from before you need the content, then you're actually gonna be faster than traditional websites, because you're already gonna actually have a pretty good understanding of where this content is and how to get it and a direct connection is already established.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure, but that's the exact opposite of what you just said though, where you said you're never gonna be sharing something whenever you're not using...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You're right, I'm just trying to iterate over them. The other is literally just to say "Okay, we want a fast start to this." Netflix already definitely knows how much of the file they need to get in order to ensure that it will play immediately and keep playing without buffering, right? So let's get that from the CDN, and then start filling in the rest of the file from this content network.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure, or even like... Netflix has quite a bit of data and are very good at knowing what you're gonna watch next, probably with 70% accuracy, or something like that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's really smart... Oh my god, that's brilliant.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And so they could still even use the P2P to quickly download the first two minutes of the top 22 things that you're gonna probably watch next.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's scary. That would be really, really fast. That's a really good idea.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I mean, they could already do that, for what it's worth... They don't need the P2P stuff, they could just...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, so I think we're due for another break. When we come back, Alex might finish this Netflix interview... \[laughter\] We're actually gonna get into the projects of the week when we come back.
+
+**Break:** \[00:46:13.19\\\] to \[47:29\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And we're back! Alright, project of the week this week is PouchDB. Woohoo! Everybody out there who's a Nolan Lawson fan I think is gonna get a little giddy at this one.
+
+**Rachel White:** Everyone's a Nolan Lawson fan!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's a good point. That's a very good point. So PouchDB is a scaled-down version of CouchDB. For those of you that don't know about CouchDB or just don't wanna dive into all of that, the one thing that makes CouchDB unique is that it has a very different data replication model, so rather than having these master/slave, consistency etc., the way that CouchDB looks at it is like, "You will probably eventually need to take this data offline", so it has a model based on actually Lotus Notes from back in the day.
+
+\[00:48:16.13\\\] The way that you store data is that you get these revision numbers that allow you to essentially sync data with other people over time, whether you go online or offline, and you can handle these -- what you call three-way sync problems, where it's not just two people syncing back and forth, but there's actually a third person, and they're gonna get data out of order from these different people, and they're gonna get resolutions to that data, and so how do you solve that? Because that problem explodes once you add more than three people, essentially.
+
+So yeah, it's a really good project, and I encourage everybody to check it out. What are your thoughts on this, Rachel? Have you used PouchDB at all?
+
+**Rachel White:** I have not used PouchDB. I'm actually working on a new project, and was trying to decide which database to use, and Pouch was one of the ones that I was considering, only because I honestly haven't -- I have not very much database experience aside from your average, run-of-the-mill MySQL database, or I've set up Postgres a few times... So you tell me - what's a good situation to use PouchDB over some of the other options that are out there?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** If you're doing anything offline, there's really nothing else, really.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's just plain local storage.
+
+**Rachel White:** That makes sense, especially if it's stored.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... Explain local storage, or explain IndexDB?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I said "Just plain local storage." You can just use the raw tools, but syncing becomes a manual process; I think that's the difference.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah. Syncing becomes problematic. Also, PouchDB is really cool because it's so portable. It runs in the browser, it runs in Node, it runs in Node on top of a bunch of different-looking databases, the underlying data structures that are based on LevelDB. So if your data looks different than other people's data, you may find that one of these optimizes is better than another, so you can kind of swap them out, and stuff like that. It's pretty cool.
+
+It also syncs with CouchDB, normally... IBM Cloudant, so you can sync with them and with anybody else who runs a CouchDB somewhere.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. The project has a pretty interesting history that I think that we have time to get into. I think Nolan's given a few talks about this, because I think that in this kind of new world of open source, everybody who starts a project really feels this burden to continue to do it indefinitely, and one of the cool things about PouchDB is how many hands it's fallen through.
+
+In 2009 I left Mozilla to go to the CouchDB company, which at the time it had more names than products that got released, so I won't get into the name of the company, because I think everybody saw it with a different name. But while I was there, Mozilla was working on a new standard for the browser with IndexDB, and this had come out of people not liking WebSQL, and one of the questions that they had was "Can we build a CouchDB on top of this?" Because they didn't wanna ratify the standard until they knew that a CouchDB could be built on top of it. So as a proof of concept, I wrote this thing that was just like a CouchDB implementation on top of their standard. It wasn't in any browser yet. They were sending me one-off builds of Firefox that had the STDIN it.
+
+So that was kind of how the project started, and then it just kind of sat there as like this proof of concept on GitHub that nobody was really looking at. And Dale Harvey, who was doing the opposite - he was at the CouchDB company with me and then he was moving on to Mozilla, he took an interest to the project and was like "I really wanna get a couple more things going", and I was like "Here you go, here's all the commits and everything."
+
+\[00:52:06.17\\\] He then built a much bigger community around it and a bunch of different stuff, and then eventually he kind of got tired of it, and then Nolan Lawson was like "Oh, I have all these big ideas for integrating with all this different LevelDB stuff that's going on", and now Nolan has kind of taken on the reins and has been leading the project for quite a while and there's all these different contributors and stuff to it. So it has a really nice, rich history, that isn't about any kind of individual person, which is really cool.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's really kind of emblematic of the project.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. Oh, and credit where credit's due - Max Ogden came up with the name PouchDB. He's very into puns, and he thought that it's a small database, it's like a database that you put in your pocket, like a pouch, so that's where that came from. Just FYI on that one...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Do you know any production stuff that uses it?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I can't recall -- there was this hospital software that was using it... Hoodie uses PouchDB, so a big part of the Hoodie project is PouchDB. They've done a bunch of different big projects for places that they use the full Hoodie stack, and especially PouchDB, one of which is -- I think it was one of the things that was going on in Africa, but essentially this application for people doing a lot of on the ground working with different people and cataloguing various symptoms that they have, or other stuff, and then eventually syncing that with everybody else and making sure that it works and that people don't overlap and that everybody's getting all the data. But they're working constantly in areas that don't have enough internet for them to use, so they needed to work offline.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool.
+
+**Rachel White:** I think that the GitHub for PouchDB too is also super friendly to people that are interested in trying to contribute to it. I think that also has a lot to do with the kind of good stuff that Nolan encourages in open source and the Hoodie people as well. I know at least Gregor does a lot of stuff with Pouch, who works at Hoodie, and they try and do a lot of things with Your First PR. That's pretty much how I found out about PouchDB, because I was like "They're nice! Maybe I'll look at it."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I mean, if you're gonna build a spectrum of projects that are really good at the community side of stuff, bring in tons of people, are super nice, constantly getting new contributors, have contributors doing lots of non-code tasks as well... Hoodie is like the far end of the spectrum. They're doing the best that you could probably ever do with that, and then everybody else falls somewhere shy of where they are. They're really, really good people.
+
+If you're new to programming and wanted to get into open source, I would encourage you to look at Hoodie, because they'll have something great for you and they'll treat you really well, and they're just great people all around.
+
+**Rachel White:** There's also stuff that's tagged for first-time contribution, and non-code contributions, so there's some nice options in there.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Jenn Turner has mentioned that eHealth Africa is the app that I was just talking about; she popped into the chat and set us correct on that stuff.
+
+Cool. Okay, I think that we're probably ready to move on to our picks now. Rachel, I know that you've got your pick all lined up, why don't you tell us about that?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yes, I do! My pick of the week, which (I don't know) is pretty popular and it's extra cute and I'm excited - it's called tiny-care-terminal, and it's made by Monica (I don't know if I'm gonna say her last name right) Dinculescu, who is notwaldorf on GitHub. It is a Node.js app that -- well, it's a JavaScript application that lets you pull in...
+
+\[00:56:05.28\\\] It's basically like a dashboard, but right in your terminal, and it's there to let you know what you've worked on recently with your GitHub commits for the current day and the previous week, and then also... This is my favorite part - it pulls in three little current Twitter feeds, one from Tiny Care Bot, one from Self Care Bot, and one from Magic Realism Bot, which are just amazingly silly -- well, two of them are very nice; they're trying to help you have a good day and take care of yourself, and then the magical realism bot is ridiculous. If you know what magical realism is, it's mostly a literary and film genre type of thing that is just very fantastical.
+
+So you'll get a little tweet that says - I'm reading one now - "A mermaid paints the picture of a glass circus tent." They're just silly, but it's nice... People don't really build - as far as I know of - things for the terminal that aren't actual tools. This is just something nice, and I like that, and I wish more people would just build nice things. I'll post it into JS Party. There you go.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome! Alex?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool. Mine's pretty quick and easy. It's by Paul Irish, it's called pwmetrics. It's a command line application, it stands for progressive web metrics. It uses Google's Lighthouse performance measurement tool, and kind of combines it with the command line. So you just say "pwmetrics" and then give it a URL, and it will use some default configuration and give you this nice, pretty graph of your first content paint, your first visual change, perceptual speed index, time to interactive and first meaningful paint.
+
+So it kind of gives you a bunch of quick, easy stats, so you no longer have to go to the Lighthouse beta webpage and type in your URL and stuff like that. I don't know if I'd make this part of your build process, because you're kind of relying on other people's -- well, no, you're not really... It runs locally, so it runs a Chrome instance, so you need a headless Chrome, or you need the ability to xvfb or something like that on your build servers, but you could probably put this in maybe a non-critical build path and then get performance metrics from every single commit that you ever make to your stuff and be really nifty. Some really good frontend ops right there.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Cool! Awesome! Mine is a website, it's called GitHub. It's really cool, there's projects... No, I'm kidding. My pick is not GitHub. My pick is really self-promotional this week... Request For Commits is another podcast that I do on the Changelog network with Nadia Eghbal, where we dive really deep into open source. You can check out season one. We record them in seasons, so that we can kind of really think about who to talk to and what we're gonna think about in terms of themes for the whole season. But we have recorded some more episodes, and they will be coming soon to the Changelog feed - to the master feed and to the RFC feed.
+
+But in the meantime, you can go and check out the old episodes, because they are all very timeless there. There is no news in them, it's all -- we talked to a lot of people about projects that have been around for like ten years. If you're really interested in web stuff, I highly recommend the one with Brendan Eich, where we get into the history of the web and how browsers have been funded and sustained over time. So check that out - changelog.com/rfc.
+
+That's our show! Thanks everybody for showing up. Rate us on iTunes, do all kinds of things to promote us; tell your friends, tell your mother... Even is she doesn't write JavaScript, she can learn... That's it. Bye!

PWAs (Progressive Web Apps), Service Workers, Time, Glitch_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,423 @@
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Hey, welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript. I'm gonna say that every time, until Alex's head explodes. Alright, so today we're gonna dive right into it and we're gonna talk about PWAs, we're gonna talk about Glitch, which is Jenn Schiffer's new thing, who is the best person in the world...
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** It's not just Jen...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Chill...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And we're gonna talk about everybody's favorite part of JavaScript, the Date object. Alright, to kick it off - PWAs (Progressive Web Applications). This is a term that gets thrown around all the time, it's a term that I don't think anybody actually understands what it means... Rachel, based on your interpretation of what this means from maybe Reddit threads or tweets or headlines of things, what do you think Progressive Web Apps are?
+
+**Rachel White:** First of all, I would never read anything about programming on Reddit. Second of all, I literally know nothing, even though I've seen people talk about it... So my interpretation of what a Progressive Web App is is just taking the name and assuming that it's not an application that deals with politics that have advancing views...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's socially liberal.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's not Conservative Web Applications...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Exactly.
+
+**Rachel White:** Is it an app that progressively gets better...? Is it something that you improve on over time, or is it something -- I don't know, I have no idea what it is.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** First step to shipping a Progressive Web Application is you just ship a white screen. You tweet it out, and that's your application. Then you're like, "Boom! A button." It progressively got better. Next week, "Boom! Three buttons." Better still.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Three buttons are always better than one button, no matter what it is. \[laughter\] No matter what the use case is, you need three buttons.
+
+**Rachel White:** So what are the enhancements then? What is it doing...? Obviously, it's an application, but I wanna know what is the progressive part and what is the enhancement part? What does it take in order for it to be categorized as this thing?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool, so we'll start with your second question, which is what is the enhancement part? And I'll answer that by saying no one said the word enhancement until you did. I think you're getting that confused with progressive enhancement... Which is actually pretty related, so you're not all the way out of line there.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So wait a second... Progressive enhancement and Progressive Web Applications are two completely different things?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** This is a loaded question...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We're looking at Alex like it's his fault, like he came up with this... \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** They're absolutely in the same vein... They kind of come from two historically different places.
+
+**Rachel White:** Wait, so progressive enhancements - would those be enhancements that are made progressively, and then a progressive -- I don't know, just tell me... \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So it has less to do with the development cycle. Progressive enhancement for a development cycle would mean like you're fixing bugs and making things better over time. Progressive enhancement generally implies that..
+
+**Rachel White:** ...you're doing your job!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** ...you build a web application that works on the worst browser, and then as browsers support features, then you can make the experience better, you can enhance the experience progressively based on those feature tests.
+
+\[04:03\] Progressive enhancement - the word comes from the battled days when 20% of the internet disabled JavaScript... So the whole mantra was "Make sure your website works without JavaScript, and then progressively enhance it to have any JavaScript whatsoever." That's where that term comes from.
+
+Now it has been co-opted through each generation beautifully - I don't think that's a bad thing - so now progressive enhancement often implies that you're building a progressive web app, but a progressive web app is like a new term, mostly from the Google ilk, that I can break down if we're done doing the guessing section. I don't wanna ruin it for anybody. \[laughs\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You can explain what it is now, that's okay.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay, cool. So first of all, if you wanna follow along at home, Google kind of is the pusher behind the term Progressive Web App. I'm not sure it came from them, but I'm pretty sure it came from them. They have a checklist - you can go to developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/checklist and there's this simple 92-point checklist (maybe it's not 92; it's like 25, or something)...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Based on the simplicity of the URL, I'm guessing it's about 92.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... No, it's actually not bad. It's broken into sections... Baseline, and then Exemplary Progressive Web Apps. So before I go into this checklist, a Progressive Web App is generally something that is approaching a native app, in the sense that it loads offline and it's fast and secure and responsive on mobile devices; that's kind of like where it comes from.
+
+Progressive Web App means that it can work on a desktop, but it also can work on your phone offline. The progressive enhancement that's happening here is that it is -- Mikeal brought it up last week as the offline-first crowd... There's another angle in the same space, which is -- the progressiveness is if you have a network, then you can enhance the experience, but if you don't have a network, your application still functions and works, much like a native app often does.
+
+So really, if you boil down to everything, the word Progressive Web App really comes from the service worker kind of baseline, and you can actually do it without service workers of like old tech and some magic and some stuff... But really, service workers are what you need to build a modern Progressive Web App, and then kind of building from there is where it goes.
+
+I can go through the checklist, but does that make sense so far?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, that does make sense... Just for anybody that doesn't know what service workers are - it's basically a script that you run that is separate from the stuff on your web page, that lets you have other things that you can -- I'm really bad at explaining things... So you can use it for having that offline loading, or handling push notifications or other things that don't necessarily need to get loaded on the DOM. Does that make sense?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I think a key thing to know about service workers is that they're installed; there's not like an install pop-up, but they're inherently installed in cache, and then the installed service worker runs anytime that URL hits, and then they're inherently also coupled with a cache object. So those two primitives are very powerful, because once I go to AlexSexton.com, AlexSexton.com can install a service worker.
+
+\[08:00\] One of the most beautiful things about service workers is that by definition on the first load you won't have one, so it forces -- we talked a little bit about this with AMP, they're trying to force people to have fast website, but they might actually be doing the opposite in some cases.
+
+In this case, what they wanna force people is to work offline, but they don't want people to build websites that assume anything, assume a good network connection. Because once you're offline, everything's locally cached. The most beautiful thing about service workers is that the first time you load a page, the service worker cannot run because it couldn't have installed yet. So your website has to work on browsers that don't support service workers at all, as well as on the first load for browsers that do support it.
+
+And on that first load, you can install the service worker, and then from then on out, that JavaScript can run prior to the request for the page being made. That's kind of the key ingredient there - you now have JavaScript that can run without any network request on future requests. So what you may do is say, "Alright, use my cache..." -- you can choose what to cache and you can choose what not to cache on all sorts of stuff. So I have a service worker, I load up a web page, and it doesn't use the service worker the first time, because I've never loaded this web page before, and then eventually some JavaScript runs and says, "Okay, play this service worker onto AlexSexton.com". Then I reload AlexSexton.com and then I can say "Alright, I have a copy of the main page in my cache already. I'm just going to capture the network request and cut it off and not let it actually go out to the web, and just return what I have."
+
+Then I'll actually go ahead -- if I have a network connection, I'm gonna go see if there are any updates, like "Does Alex have a new blog entry?" And if it does, I can kind of put a little thing on the top that says "There are new entries here" or just immediately pop it in, depending on the experience, or something like that.
+
+So the idea is that data that you already have, a request that you already have can immediately be loaded, and then anything new in updates can come in secondarily. You can kind of manage that as is required by your application. Does that make sense for service workers?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yes!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool. So that's service workers, which is just one part of Progressive Web Apps. I think the key ingredient to why this is a thing with a name -- because the rest is gonna not come as a surprise to many people... The checklist has things like "Serving the site over HTTPS", so you need a good TLS cert... But again, service workers is important here, because service workers don't work on non-HTTPS sites, so you could not do the service worker thing without an HTTPS site. Quick callout to LetsEncrypt, if you need a free cert that updates automatically.
+
+The other thing is that it works on mobile, so it should be a responsive page - that's part of a progressive web app. It's kind of like... Responsive++ is maybe another way of thinking of Progressive Web Apps. It's a responsive web app that works like a mobile app, but also works offline with service workers.
+
+So it works on mobile devices, and then it also works offline. Maybe not completely offline... You definitely need network connections for a real-time chat, and stuff like that. It's not like native apps don't need a network connection to do networky things... But you at least get an experience, and it can tell you "Hey, we don't have a network connection, maybe find your settings and change your Wi-Fi" or whatever.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[11:49\] Also, one thing that exists on Android is an "Add To Homescreen" button. You can add metadata to your web app and say "Allow this to be added to the home screen", and then using service workers you can kind of add a web page as a native app, directly to your home screen, and then you can click on it like an app, and the URL bar goes away, and all that kind of stuff... And it works exactly like an app.
+
+That's on their essential checklist... I mean, it's not gonna work on half of the phones in existence for most audiences. That is very good, because it's not that difficult, but again, it's progressive in the sense that not everyone's gonna be able to use that.
+
+The other things are mostly like it's cross-browser, so it still fits into web, and it's fast on 3G, so you're only loading critical CSS. These are a lot of things that are difficult to measure... "Fast" is subjective, in the sense that every website is slow, and we just don't agree on how extremely slow they are. Then that's like fast transitions in URLs, and stuff like that.
+
+Server rendering gets into the Exemplary area... There's a bunch of things you can add; that way, you can have SEO and good history APIs and all sorts of different things, but I think those are less important for this discussion.
+
+**Rachel White:** So who does this benefit? If a lot of it wouldn't necessarily be accessible for everyone right now, who would use this? Who would use these practices?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's kind of why the word "progressive" is in there... That specific part isn't accessible to people with iOS devices, but it doesn't actually hurt their experience while they have a network connection. They don't have service workers or "Add To Home Screen", but when they go to the web page, it'll still be fast, it'll still be responsive, it'll still look and work exactly like it works on the other things... It's just once they have a crappy network connection or lose their network connection, it'll be the same experience they're used to across all their other websites. So it progressively gets better for people with more features... And I think I have also a catch-up here... I hate Safari for specifically service workers and some internationalization things, but I think they'll eventually cave here.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool. So the idea is just making it better for everybody, and there's not gonna be a degradation of services for people that might not have access to...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right... And according to the guidelines, it should actually be better than the normal website because it's fast to load over 3G and has good caching principles, even outside of different things. But yeah, I think the key here is that Progressive Web Apps are web apps that are really going hard after a native experience. I think that's the end goal here, even if it's not necessarily explicitly stated. Native really eats our lunch in some cases, and if you really nail at a Progressive Web App, there's not a whole lot of different feel of a Progressive Web App to a native app, and then also it works on the web and is of the web, and is open and meets all the standards of URLs and all the things that we love and wanna keep about the web.
+
+So the idea is it's the best of both worlds, and it doesn't break all the use cases. I think they're actively good... I'm sure some of the "Install to Home Screen" and stuff still has a way to go as far as security stuff; service workers have some security things, but I think it's all absolutely a great direction for the web, and kind of will help bring us into the next generation of user experiences that people expect, because of the native landscape.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So being that the base level here is the service workers, and being that service workers aren't supported in Edge yet, they're not supported in Safari (mobile or desktop), how much of this is Google just kind of pushing this on everybody, and how much of it is beyond that and much more widely supported than that?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[16:15\] Pretty much everyone has intent to ship service workers, so it absolutely benefits you to build a website with service workers to get 40% of the people who use Android, or whatever... Like, that's not nothing; we do things for far fewer people. But as soon as service workers are turned on in these next versions of these browsers, you'll immediately reap both benefits, and that's kind of like the whole point.
+
+I think everyone agrees that it's still early days, but it'll be a lot longer... If you think the service worker experience is good, I think Safari will implement it much more quickly if there are people actually building stuff with service workers, if that makes sense. So it's kind of push-pull. If no one builds anything with it, Safari won't ever build it and the experience will be worse. But if you build it now, you're gonna have to use the fallback, which is the regular old, poor network for Safari. Does that make sense?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yes!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's like an early adopter situation, in the sense that it's early for Safari and late for Google, but I think for the web, still not a whole lot of people are doing this, but absolutely you should, if you can.
+
+They also have a tool called the Lighthouse tool that will run over your app and give you your score against all this... So you can search for "Google Web Developer Lighthouse Progressive Web App" and I'm sure it will come up.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I feel like, why couldn't we have just talked about service workers? This seems like we have a lot of extra acronyms and ideas, but most of it seems to be really just about service workers.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'd say it's responsive design + service workers, if that's fair.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And responsive design is absolutely available on pretty much every platform. Mobile is the reason for all of this. People have solid desktop connections if they have a desktop, but there are now more phones than desktops. So I think that the fact that these web apps work on mobile -- the full design, not just like "You have stretchy divs" or whatever... Like, your interfaces adapt to the style and user experience that people would expect of a mobile device. I think that's critical to Progressive Web Apps.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. The way that you push around data for poor networks as well, and for offline, is very different. But a lot of those offline use cases seem to be either deprioritized or just not very visible in the Progressive Web App story. It seems like it's just become a shorthand for service workers in the meantime. But maybe as more people build offline apps, that'll become part of the story and we just have an early acronym here that hasn't really gotten filled out.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. Someone mentioned on Twitter, Dayton Lowell, that Safari does have "Add to Home Screen." It doesn't do any service worker stuff, it's just a link to a page. It's had that for a long time.
+
+If you download one of Google's beta browsers or something like that, it actually says "Install Application." There are also things that I've seen demoed - I'm pretty sure they're live - to where if you visit a progressive web app enough times on the internet, Google will helpfully say "Hey, would you like to install this as an offline app on your homescreen?" So it's kind of like this beautiful world where the web becomes the app store again. It's a pipedream, I'm sure, but the closed network of the app store becomes the entire searchable web again, which is how it was in the early days of the web; the applications were just URLs, and now that's kind of different. Hopefully we can get that closer to that.
+
+\[19:59\] I think it's a noble goal... I understand people's aversion to acronyms and to naming the same thing different ways, or pushing things that are new or hard or not necessary for everybody... But I don't think this is bad; I think it's net good, and if everyone did it, the web would be better.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** On that note, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back we're gonna get into timezones. Stick around
+
+**Break:** \[20:29\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, now we're gonna dive into date and timezones and this really rough corner of JavaScript. I love JavaScript as a language, it's really great in so many ways, and in this way it's really terrible. Anybody who's done JavaScript for a long time or has used another language noticed how bad our Date/Time stuff is, especially what comes natively.
+
+I don't know how much you all have had to deal with this, or if you have any horror stories that you wanna bring up right now... I'll leave it open for anybody to bring that up if you want.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Timezones?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, timezones and dates in general in JavaScript.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I sure have plenty of horror stories that I won't tell, but I think one of my favorite tweets was "I was really excited for us to colonize Mars until I realized how much harder date/time math would get in JavaScript."
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh my god...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Which is very fair.
+
+**Rachel White:** I think that even though it is something that's hard and everybody complains about it -- if you can hear the children outside yelling, let me know and I'll shut my window and just sweat again.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** We can, but I don't think it's significant...
+
+**Rachel White:** \[laughs\] Okay. I think that it's also an interesting aspect of what new programmers try and utilize when they're trying something new. I remember someone got angry about somebody making an npm module that would just do something super simple with a timer, but I think that new programmers just are like "This is something that I understand as a construct being time" and they want to be able to manipulate it with this cool new language that they're using, but that's probably why a lot of the date/time stuff sucks, honestly...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's a lot easier to understand once you realize that time is a flat circle.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[laughs\] Oh, god...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright... So beyond that, there's some real complexities in working with date/time and working with timezones. In the mid-2000s I actually worked on calendaring standards at CalConnect, and on like the CalDAV scheduling standards and stuff like that. So I'm very aware of the complexity you're trying to deal with... JavaScript happens to have one of the least sophisticated and built out date/time objects, so it doesn't help you very much.
+
+\[23:52\] Since really the early 2000s, we've been building these third-party libraries to deal with a lot of this. One of the problems that we continue to run into is that these are some of the largest libraries you have to include. MomentJS is really good, it does a lot of really good stuff, but it's huge, and it's not huge in a way where, "Oh, that should be a small module that does one thing..." All of the logic to do one of these things - 90% of that is required for doing the other thing. It defies a lot of the abstractions and a lot of the modularity that we like to talk about.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Do you want us to agree...?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I want you to say, "Yes, Mikeal, you're right."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay, agreed. Yes, Mikeal. Seems fine. \[laughter\] Go on.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** A funny story... When I used to work calendaring standards, a lot of different standards bodies were trying to standardize timezones, right? Trying to come up with some kind of a standard, and one of the problems that you continue to run into is that if you think about timezones as this logical thing that you can just go "Oh, this GPS coordinate you shift off that way, or this way" or "In this timezone there's some kind of rationality about when these offsets happen", you'll never get anywhere.
+
+Every attempt to standardize it failed. Essentially, there was this one guy who's last name was Olson, and he maintained this thing called the Olson database, which was literally like a flat text file that had every timezone adjustment that ever happened.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Tz data.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Now it's called tz data, but back then it was called the Olson Database. If you look through it, you can realize what it kind of defied logic, because there's stuff in there like "new dictator takes over this country, adjust timezone by 15 minutes." So within this arbitrary geographic order, there's literally adjustments like that.
+
+If ISIS ever gets its own country, one of the first things they'll do to prove that they're a country is adjust their timezone. It's just a dickhead thing to do, that you know they'll end up doing. \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's why ISIS is a dickhead, because of the timezone manipulation. \[laughter\] Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize that there are 30-minute and 15-minute offset timezones, and then there are some people who don't abide by daylight savings, certain states.
+
+**Rachel White:** Smart states.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, so it's definitely not something that's figure-outable by any programmatic means. You just need all of the data hardcoded.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and even DST isn't standardized. DST is just like an extra offset that you do sometimes, that you have to map for. It's really annoying.
+
+Yeah, so now we have tz data, but loading all that data takes a while. It's one of the things that makes these libraries so big, they have to load all that timezone data. So it'd be really great if the browser included that timezone data, or included a better timezone object.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, Mikeal... I have some good news for you.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, tell me.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Last week my project for the week was Intel. There is Intel daytime, so there is some motion here, for what it's worth.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and there's a new standard, too...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Like before '02?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** What is it...? I think it's called Temporal. Maggie Pint, who's done some work on MomentJS is keenly aware of how annoying this situation is, and has a new proposal that's gonna go to the next TC39 meeting for a Temporal object, which is closer to some of the stuff that they have in Java and some other newer languages.
+
+**Rachel White:** A Temporal object?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. If you read the standard, it essentially introduces two new types. It introduces what's called a local date/time, and a zoned date/time. A zoned date/time obviously has a timezone attached to it, and a local date/time is what you used to call a floating time. This is one of the places where scheduling gets really crazy, because even with timezones, you can essentially take a date/time with the timezone offset and then figure out what this numeric value is. There's a number associated with it that you can move around and you know numerically if it is greater than, or less than, or within certain boundaries.
+
+\[28:19\] But then you deal with floating times, and floating times are a real pain in the ass because it's literally a time somewhere. It should map to whatever you want to apply a localized date/time object. A good example of this is if you wanna say a particular day is a holiday globally, it would be that day, from the beginning of that day until the end of the day, in whatever timezone anybody happened to be in. So it would be a floating time, but that means that it isn't mapped to any kind of alphanumeric, which is really hard.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yes, Mikeal.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It just sucks, it's really painful to deal with. \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So you're saying the solution is just wait till it goes through all stages at TC39 and then it gets implemented in the browser and then \*Boom!\* five years later we've got good natives in the browser?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So standards don't just make it through the standards process; they need help. One of the goals in bringing this up here - if you're interested and have had a painful time dealing with date/time objects of have any kind of experience, it'd be really great to get 1) your input on the standard (it's on GitHub, it will be in the show notes), but also, if you have any connection into the standards bodies to help this kind of stuff move along, the more people that kind of pitch in and help to push it along, the better. Because nothing happens in standards if one person is pushing it.
+
+**Rachel White:** I have a weird question... Actually, it's not a weird question; we'll see. This might just be me being naive, but can't people just have time being shown for themselves relative to where they are in the world? Or I guess there's too many use cases for people needing date and time for it to be that simple, huh...?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, the big one is like, when we scheduled this podcast, all three of us were in different timezones, so I can display a time to you that says 3 PM, but somewhere we have to know what those offsets mean in relation to each other in order to block out the same time to this podcast. Otherwise you're gonna be on here by yourself, and then Alex would come on, and then I would come on... \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right. And as I joined, I was actually exiting the Earth at half the speed of light, so time was moving more quickly for me. Slowly... Alright.
+
+**Rachel White:** So what are ways that some other languages handle it better? The one that I can think of off the top of my head was whenever I used to do a lot of Wordpress stuff and you wanted the PHP snippet in your footer, so that people knew what year your arbitrary copyright was... That was too totally easy to do. What are some other ways that other languages handle it that you like, that you know of?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think it's less important to know what other languages do -- sorry, that was maybe a rude way to answer your question... But one of the key differences here is we have to ship this data to the browser a lot of times, so I think a lot of languages like PHP - it's been a while since I've done PHP, but I don't think the natives there are so amazing compared to JavaScript's native stuff.
+
+Maybe you don't get the weird month offset versus date offset thing that we get - that's just our own special joy - but we can't ship every last timezone and translation and everything of every different thing to the browser every time, because you're just gonna have to ship half a megabyte of time-related things with every single web app.
+
+\[32:06\] I think it's very important that these become native, built-in standards that ship with browsers, much like collation, or whatever.
+
+**Rachel White:** That makes sense.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, it's really complicated to load them dynamically, and if you send them all no matter what, then the JavaScript bundle size is gonna be really big and then Alex Russell's gonna cry and he's gonna yell at you on Twitter, so you've gotta keep that down.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Both of those things are just guaranteed gonna happen regardless, so... \[laughter\] Change your behavior, basically... I mean, he's right, but...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] There you go. But other languages, 1) they actually do have better timezones built in, a lot of them do. And even when they don't, it's a backend; you can keep that stuff on disk and not really care.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** ...hit the Linux, yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. In doing the research for this, I was curious if Olson was still maintaining that database by himself or not...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** There was just recently a change... Wasn't there like a copyright issue with that, or something?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, in 2011 he got sued by somebody, an Atlas company, because they claimed that he was using something from their Atlas. The end result is that the EFF got them to drop their lawsuit, but he put it into ICANN after that, so that he wouldn't be personally liable anymore and getting sued.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, donate to the EFF, everybody.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, exactly. \[laughs\] So now it actually isn't a standards body, which is good. Hopefully we can see an easier path to getting it everywhere and in stuff by default.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** This is only a slight tangent, but I really liked the arc of the MomentJS project; I think it's kind of a beautiful arc. Tim R. Wood starts MomentJS as a pretty new JavaScript developer and he's like "Hey, I see the need for this all the time..." and you can even see him get better as a JavaScript developer over time... The first internationalization efforts were all community-sourced in a pretty weird way, and I could verifiably tell you that 20% of them were wrong. Someone Google translated half the languages, or whatever... But it grew and grew, and obviously the size of the project grew because it's a complex, hard problem, but also the codebase became better and better and better, as more people started depending on it, to the point where it became a self-sufficient project without Tim, and had a lot of community support.
+
+Then as more primitives and natives and more specific modules come out, it's seeing less usage and less contributions, and stuff like that. But it also got donated into the jQuery Foundation and now has the long-term support there. So the whole arc of the project is a very good example of people coming together and doing open source, and making the web a better place. It just makes me happy. Yes, Mike.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, MomentJS is fantastic. It's really good for creating human-readable date/times in your application. So everybody out there listening, if you're working with this and you need to display nice text about what's going on, definitely use MomentJS and don't try to write your own thing, please. Please, please, PLEASE don't write your own thing.
+
+**Rachel White:** Please... You'll anger people and then they'll complain about it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it's just one of those problem spaces that is really easy to underestimate, let me put it that way.
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, it's a concept that is ingrained into your being as a human. You would think that you understand it enough to be like, "Oh yeah, I could totally make something", but it's way more complicated than just being able to look at a clock and count.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And like most things, it's the people that make it difficult, right? It's the governments that make it difficult and complicated. With that, I think that we've maybe beaten this horse to death a little bit. We'll probably take a quick break, and when we come back we're gonna talk a little bit about Glitch.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yaay!
+
+**Break:** \[36:18\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, let's jump into it... We've got a new project of the week, Glitch. This is the first project that wasn't just an open source GitHub repo; this is actually like a slightly larger project for learning. Rachel, why don't you tell us a bit about this?
+
+**Rachel White:** Sure. Glitch is this site that is from Fog Creek and it's really, really awesome, especially for pair programming. It's a coding environment that's similar to -- if you've used any web editors like the CodePen or JSFiddle or anything of that sort... Glitch takes that to the next level, that is a super awesome extreme level where you're able to build web applications in Node with a frontend and a backend. All of the structure is totally there, and then you can run that app in the browser.
+
+But wait... There's more. It gets better. You can either use it for live coding to be able to show people what you're working on as you're working on it (in real time) or you can have it be real-time and collaborative. One situation that I could see this being useful for is I'm not very good at backend things, so if I'm working on something and I'm stuck, somebody would be able to jump into my app and I would be able to see what they're doing while they're doing it.
+
+The possibilities are seriously endless for the ways that people are gonna be able to use this to help further people's learning, to help do collaborations on projects... People are gonna be able to work on really cool things without having to be in the same room, or without having to necessarily rely on having GitHub repositories with different branches to work on stuff. But then it gets even cooler, because if I'm trying to learn something, I can go to -- let's see, I'll go right now... Glitch... I spelled Glitch wrong...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] What seems to set this apart is really the focus on education. We've seen a lot of collaborative editors and web editors and all that, but this is really focused on teaching people.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[40:01\] It's super focused, and it's broken down... It's still in the beta right now, so it's not hugely open to the public, while they're still trying to fill out some things, but if you go into the site you'll see that there's different curated collections of apps where you can go to Hello Worlds for certain things, or games, or hardware projects and bots... So you can go in and be like "Oh wow, this is a really cool Slack/commands" like we use for the how much time is left until JS Party is going to start. And if I wanted to make my own, I could click on that, hit "Remix my own" and I'd be able to see a whole entire codebase of it already working, and then I could just tweak it to fulfill the needs that I have. It seems really nice.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** One of my favoritest, favorites, hottest takes on it that I saw on the internet was that it's kind of like a next generation GeoCities or Neopets or whatever you grew up with... members.aol.com/~username where people could very easily get going based on templates, and then there were endless tweakers and copiers and all sorts of stuff. Half the people I know who got started in web development was like trying to style their MySpace page or their Neopets page, or something like that. So I think this has a lot of potential to fulfill some of that stuff, but at a larger level, and I like that take a lot.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah... The other thing that is also really great about it is - I might be biased here, but Jenn Schiffer left Beaucoup to join Fog Creek to head up working with community stuff and working on Glitch to help make it better, and I know that she cares a lot about teaching people and having code be more accessible, and really just getting people to make more stuff. Well, I think we have her, and she's gonna tell us more about Glitch.
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** Hi! Thank you for having me. Rachel described Glitch really well. Thank you, Rachel, and Mikeal and Alex - all of you for having me. I'm not very articulate about stuff because it's been a really busy week here at Fog Creek with launching the rename of Glitch and launching our Glitcher API, which is kind of like a partnership thing, and also just talking to a lot of people about how we're sort of doing things differently than a lot of other end browser IDEs do. That's focusing around the community around the product first, and focusing also on education.
+
+We really wanna make an application that is for everyone - developers and non-developers - who want to have access to becoming a developer alike. So yeah, it's been exciting in the past few days, launching a bunch of stuff... We did a thing with Slack, with a new link ufurl, app unfurl endpoint, so I built something for them, I've been following what people have been building with Glitch, I've been doing some live coding and just seeing the kind of things that people want to make and haven't really been able to so easily because they might not necessarily know how to do DevOps stuff, getting things on the internet.
+
+**Rachel White:** I know that when you all launched this officially on Monday I was super excited, because I could just think of so many times in my professional career when I didn't necessarily understand something that this would have been super helpful for me to brainstorm something and have it work as I code, and have people help me. What's some of the feedback that you've been getting from people that have gotten to mess around with this so far?
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** \[44:02\] Well, I've seen a lot of people who have had ideas... In the Maker Movement there are a lot of people who want to do stuff with code now, but they're not sure where to start. For me, when I was building web apps and consulting, one of the first things I would start is deploying a server and getting everything installed onto it, to set up for whether it's like a Node app, or a PHP app, or stuff like that... And that's really hard. And when I wanna teach people how to code, I can't really start setting them up with AWS and stuff like that, and I'm already getting feedback from educators who are like, "Oh, I can use this to teach my students. I could start up a new project, a new simple web application, have them remix it to add their own stuff to it."
+
+Then we also have multiple user collaboration, and even more really cool, new features that aren't even out yet (they're coming out soon) that I think will make educators really happy, and also users who want to collaborate with their peers really well, so... So far so good. People seem to be enjoying it, and we've been really following tweets about it and talking to people, and we're out there listening and watching what you're all saying, so watch your back, Alex.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So Fog Creek does a lot of cool stuff... What made them wanna get into this educational stuff? It's really cool.
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** The project started out a couple years ago... My teammate Daniel came up with the idea, and he got the opportunity with Pirijan who's a designer/developer also here, to sort of flesh out this in-browser IDE. I guess through time it just organically made sense to not just focus on an editor in the browser, because again, there's lots of those, but focus on how this can stand out and what we can do to not only stand out, but also improve the culture in tech.
+
+So starting out with community as a focus is a really big thing, I think. Usually, community moderation and all that stuff is an afterthought, and we've experienced many times in our industry how making inclusivity an afterthought can lead to disaster, so we're trying to not let that happen. That's sort of what the focus is.
+
+And then it just makes sense, because everyone wants people to have the ability to learn how to code if they want to... I don't know why anybody would think otherwise. So education as a focus is the clear path to making that the case.
+
+**Rachel White:** It also seems like it's a really good environment for people that are curious about wanting to try out more kinds of creative coding but might not necessarily know how to do a lot of things besides just experimenting with a language, and now that they can make an application and see it right in front of them is really cool, too... This is like solving the problem of somebody not open sourcing something, but you would just view the source of their site, so now you don't have to...
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** Yeah... When I was learning how to program, when I was learning how to make websites and stuff, I was viewing the source of everything and I was copying and pasting this language called JavaScript, and things weren't working and I wasn't understanding script source. I was just pasting JavaScript from a library that I hadn't embedded yet, and learning the hard ways I'd go through stuff... But that was a challenge that really got me into programming.
+
+Nowadays it's culture -- a lot of people who are new to development or just are younger don't remember we're a part a of the whole "view source" aspect of building. We're building applications with frameworks that obfuscate... When you look at the source you don't see exactly what's there, so people aren't learning in that way... Which is fine. That's not saying that frameworks are bad, it's just that if you wanna teach people how to program, you really can't give them a React or Ember app and say "Learn how to build your first web page with this as an example."
+
+\[48:19\] Not only that, but if you wanna teach Node, you can't view the source of a Node application, and Glitch allows you to view the code of the application, both the frontend and backend files, and I think that's pretty neat. You'll be able to now in the browser see how the actual guts of the application work, and I think that's really cool.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah. I think it's also cool that you're making it a lot easier for companies that have APIs to be able to say that they want to be a part of this and to encourage more people to try and work with the API. Don't you have the partnership with Slack now where people can more easily and accessibly make Slack bots and stuff like that?
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** Yeah... Slack are good friends of ours, and for their app unfurl launch on Wednesday we worked with them to make sure that we had some cool apps available when the announcement came out. So I made an app unfurl that if you install the app and you post Glitch project links in your slack channel, it will unfurl to have links to view the code, remix and run the application, with a description of what the app is... Just like a richer experience within Slack, if you're into using Glitch.
+
+We wanted to make something that was like "Okay, this exists, this is a new endpoint that's available. If you want this for your company, just take my app and remix it and update the good stuff - the part that comes to the unfurl - with what you want, and then you're good to go." You don't have to worry about rolling your own Slack OAuth and all that other fun stuff that we developers love to do when we have deadlines.
+
+So that's another case where it is, you know our community page we have a lot of building block apps that you can remix off of and build your apps onto it just to save you time. That's another thing I think that we've been taking for granted from the past... One of the tenets of programming and software engineering is code reuse, and this makes it easier to reuse code.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's kind of like copy/pasting code, not really reusing, right? I think in an absolutely necessary way, but...
+
+**Rachel White:** I think it's reused... Even if you're copy/pasting, you're still reusing something that somebody has written before.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, anyways... I was just being a jerk to Jenn, because I'm a jerk. Jenn, it's nice to meet you for the first time. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** Who are you...?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I actually have to go, but I have one question... How much did you guys find inspiration from the BestBuy remix API?
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** The BestBuy remix API? I'm not familiar...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[laughs\] Oh, very surprising... They had actually some of these ideas... But that was also a failed joke, which brings me to the next point: I'm being kicked off the podcast \[unintelligible 00:51:21.10\] the third host... \[laughter\] So I hope you'll have better luck. But I really actually have to run...
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** ...to BestBuy!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** But it was nice talking to you, Jenn.
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** Hey, thanks for having me.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's fine, we'll be making a permanent replacement with Jenn Schiffer now, so goodbye Alex... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Jenn, I hope you have a pick... For our picks, in a minute. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, it is March Madness, so I'm sure she has plenty of picks. But back to Glitch... What is one of the coolest things that you've seen somebody make, that wasn't involved on the original -- somebody that doesn't work for Go Mix, that has jumped in since Monday, and went in and made something. What is your favorite thing that you've seen?
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** \[52:12\] Let's see... Let me think, there's been a lot of stuff. Somebody tweeted at me today this cool pixel art color analyzer... It's like all these visualizations where you add an image and it analyzes all the colors. That was really cool.
+
+People have been sending me example apps with things that they've been working on at work. Marco \[unintelligible 00:52:41.03\] has been sending really cool stuff... I think some of it involves service workers. What else have people been making...? I've seen some cool weather Dark Sky's API apps, and that's like a really cool thing that we've been trying to drive - using this tool as a tool to prototype stuff with APIs, and we've got some cool features coming out in the future about that, especially with different other companies that we're working with, to get them closer to users who wanna use their APIs.
+
+There's been a lot... It's been quite a whirlwind this past week, so I haven't had a chance to sit down and list everything, but that is something that we're doing. As we're finding cool stuff, we're curating them at Glitch.com, our community page... So you can see some of the interesting stuff that we've got there. We've got bots, we've got Learn To Code tutorial stuff, and even more...
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool. So are you wanting places -- I mean, is a future goal to be able to get integration with companies that have APIs that would maybe need a token, or it might cost money, and then be able to have an integration where people can try it out without having to deal with any of that stuff?
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** Yeah, I think that when you have an API that you want users to use, one of the barriers is that the user first has to set up their environment to use it, and Glitch sort of takes that barrier away. So if you're a company and you want developers to use your stuff, we can help you out. We launched our partnership thing, it's called For Your API; if you go to glitch.com/foryourapi, you can learn how we can help you out.
+
+Right now this site's completely free, but in the future we're gonna have some premium features that will get you even closer to developers and helping them out, and really part of my mission is making it easier for anybody to program - whether it's just Hello World stuff, or even more ambitious things.
+
+If you want to be a part of that, I would ask you to reach out to me or tweet at Glitch, and we can help you out with that...
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool.
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** ...whether you're a company or an individual developer.
+
+**Rachel White:** Awesome. Do you have anything else to say, Mikeal? \[pause\] Are you there? \[pause\] Well, Mikeal left, too...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I was muted, I was muted! Ha-ha! \[laughter\] That happens too often. It's Amateur Hour over here. So I think we'll get into picks now... I'll go first, so that Jenn has some time to think of something.
+
+**Rachel White:** Why don't you tell her what a pick is?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** A pick is anything that you wanna talk about... Literally, anything. It doesn't have to be code, although many of them have been code in different projects that we wanna highlight. My pick this week is not code... A lot of people that follow me on Twitter see all of the amazing bread baking that I'm doing, but also I'm just doing other kinds of fermenting all the time, and those don't get posted on Twitter because they look grosser than beautiful, freshly baked bread.
+
+\[56:05\] But my pick is this book called Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Katz. It's one of the best books on fermentation out there. He also wrote this much bigger book called The Art Of Fermentation... But Wild Fermentation is a book that you could just pick up and flip through and see awesome things that you can do at home real quick to ferment different foods. You have to think of it as like another form of cooking, basically. You're completely changing the flavors and everything going on, so that's my pick. Check out Wild Fermentation.
+
+**Rachel White:** Okay... My pick for the week is going to be a repository that is a compilation of a bunch of companies that do not whiteboard you. There is a user on GitHub called Poteto (I hope that's how you pronounce it). It's really great, because I think that a lot of \[siren sound\] -- wow... Oh, it's a siren... I thought that was a yelling child. Hold on one second, the cops are coming, certainly... Okay, so apparently the NYPD has even more serious opinions on whiteboarding than I do... So this is a whole list of companies that don't whiteboard.
+
+It's a bit source of a lot of anxiety, especially for people that are just starting out in their dev career, to be able to have to do all that stuff on the spot. So I just posted the URL... Well, in the wrong channel... It's right there. It's super helpful, and it even goes down to not only just hiring without whiteboards, they link to a site called "They Whiteboarded Me", and it lists companies and it says what kind of whiteboarding test did they do... Like, did they make you do live coding, did they make you do pair coding with somebody as their coding challenge, do you have to do tree things? It gets really intense.
+
+So it's super informative for people that may be looking to switch jobs or are looking for a job for the first time.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. Jenn, you're up!
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** Oh, so I can pick anything?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah.
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** Okay, because I think I have three quick things. One, I discovered Greek yogurt this week - plain Greek yogurt with granola, and that's been a game changer... Great source of protein.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Full fat, or not fat? Full fat's the best.
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** Full fat.
+
+**Rachel White:** Did you have it at the Wing?
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** Yeah, I did.
+
+**Rachel White:** It's so good.
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** Yeah... The Wing is a good pick. The Wing is a women's social club in New York. Rachel and I are members, and it's been a really great space, full of really awesome, ambitious women doing really cool stuff. It's essentially like a co-working space, but it's really nice... People typically think that if you get a group of really successful women together - there's like hundreds of us - that it would be very caddy, but everyone is so nice and welcoming. It's a really great time. I'm like, "How do we make the rest of the world like this?"
+
+\[59:14\] Then another pick is - I'll post this in the Slack channel... There's this tweet by this guy - his name is splenda daddy... He posted a picture of a chameleon that he tried to draw from memory, and the tweet just said "I started crying in class because I tried to draw a chameleon from memory", and the picture of it just makes me cry as well. So I'm posting that on the Slack channel...
+
+Anyway, those are my picks. Please like and subscribe. \[laughs\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** On that yogurt tip, if you wanna make your own yogurt, check out Wild Fermentation...
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh my god...
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** Oh, I used to make my own yogurt all the time. My former partner had ulcerative colitis, and there was a time when he could only eat yogurt and he couldn't have anything storebox that had sugar in, so I would be making yogurt every day. It's a painstaking process. The temperatures have to be just right, and there is a lot of different steps to it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, here's the trick... Sous-vide machine. You just do the sous-vide and then stick it in the bag.
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh, yeah! Everyone, pull out your sous-vide!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It'll be perfect temperature the whole time. It's great.
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** So I'm speaking at conferences again now... I think I'm gonna do a "Making Yogurt Using jQuery", because 3.2.0 goes out... jQuery 3.2.0 was my other pick, and that's it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Okay. Awesome! Those were the best picks so far. So thank you everybody for coming; definitely rate us on iTunes, rate us on everything... Follow us on Twitter, @JSPartyFM, and thank you for coming on!
+
+**Jenn Schiffer:** Thanks for having me!
+
+**Rachel White:** Thank you!

Security on the web, Node asyncawait, AR.js_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,419 @@
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Hey, everybody! Welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript. Alright, let's just dive right into it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I still don't want that to be the slogan. \[laughter\] I want my voice to be heard that I think that's a dumb slogan. Move on...
+
+**Rachel White:** I think it's dumb, but I like making Mikeal say it. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's fair... That's very fair.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's really fair. Alright, I'm Mikeal Rogers...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm Alex Sexton...
+
+**Rachel White:** And I'm Rachel White.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, everybody! Let's get this party started, let's just dive right into the first topic. So Google broke the internet. I don't know why they keep pointing out flaws in the internet's security, but \[whispering\] they broke the internet again!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I thought they helped to disclose it, but wasn't it like some German W, some acronym...? I think it was the Germans, it's all I'm saying.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It was the Germans... Likely story. Anyway, so SHA1 hashing algorithm has been cracked. I guess in 2005 there was a paper written that said theoretically it could be cracked, but nobody had done it yet. Apparently, as of like 2010, the federal government said no government encryption can use any SHA1 algorithms, which is a pretty good indication that foreign governments have been able to crack this for a while.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... The only person I've seen strongly support SHA1 for the last six or seven years is Linus Torvalds in Git.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's so annoying...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And not just kind of... He really was like, "You guys are all super dumb for caring about this."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I know, it's really crazy. He's still downplaying it, actually. So backing up a little bit - let's just get into what is SHA1 and what does it do. Does anybody else wanna take a crack at this, or do you want me to explain it?
+
+**Rachel White:** I only know it from Git related stuff, so that's all...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, that's actually a really good way to explain it though. The way that Git uses SHA1 is kind of indicative of how everybody uses it, which is that you take a bunch of data and you say, "I want a unique identifier for this data", so you hash it. That's what Git does to every change that comes into the Git tree - it gets this hash of the data and it uses that as the identifier.
+
+If you go to GitHub and you go to a project and then you click on Commit To and then you click on one of those Commit links, in the URL bar you'll see this randomly-generated identifier, and that is a unique identifier for that hash. The problem is that if you could forge these - that's a very small amount of data, representing a large amount of data; theoretically, if you could reverse-engineer the algorithm, you could come up with a different set of data that would also hash to that same thing. People have been theoretically able to do this for a while and now they really can...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It still costs like a hundred thousand dollars. It will be cheaper, but right now, with the current algorithm... It's insane how much faster they can do it, but still, with AWS spot instances it costs around a hundred thousand dollars to break a random thing.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But how much do I have to pay Russian hackers that have a botnet? Like one Bitcoin, which is roughly twenty thousand dollars?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I wouldn't necessarily be worried about this... Sorry, I didn't hear that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I was saying I'd probably need to pay one Bitcoin, which is roughly twenty thousand dollars, to get Russian hackers to break it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[04:04\] Oh yeah, for sure. The cost is still prohibitive to the point where no one's gonna troll you with this. Someone really needs to want -- there has to be a reason someone's doing this at this point. But that will only be true for like two months, or something. People will make this better instantly, and then exploit everybody across the board.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, and it's pretty much a given now that governments can do this at will. What that means is that if your integrity checks involve you hashing with this algorithm, now if you're just using those checks, people can just inject malware whenever they want.
+
+**Rachel White:** I have a question. If this has been relatively not super secure for a while, what was the catalyst for people to be like, "Okay, it's finally time to stop using this thing"? Was it something that Google did that you said...?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh yeah, yesterday.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. Well, honestly, I think most people in the security community have felt since 2005 that you should stop using this. There are other algorithms that are just as good that don't have this problem. And in 2010, most reasonable companies said, "Hey, we should stop using this."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Browsers already don't allow -- you'll get a very big red X instead of a green lock if SHA1 is used for web security stuff. It's been well known to be very crackable by someone with a ton of money for a long time.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, but like Alex said, Linus Torvalds has just remained unimpressed by evidence, so it is still in heavy use in Git, in GitHub, and a bunch of other Linux-related stuff.
+
+**Rachel White:** That's fine, because I'm wholly unimpressed by him, so it's okay. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You're only gonna make him stronger.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** To answer your question though, the thing that happened yesterday was that some people from Google and 'zee Germans' came out and just said, "Hey, look, we cracked it. Here's exactly how we cracked it." So it went from theoretical to "Here is an open version of this."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** To be totally clear though, they have to try a ton of things... They were able to reduce the subset that you had to brute force to a small enough amount to be significant. But it still takes a hundred and ten years of computing time, or something like that. You had to put a lot of machines into it. But that number will slowly churn down to seconds, I'm sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. So if you're future-proofing, don't use SHA1.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Or past-proofing. If you're just proofing at all, don't use SHA1. There's SHA256, which is essentially exactly the same, with much higher entropy, so just use that instead.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I've actually become a big fan of multihash. Have you ever heard about this?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, nobody has. Juan Benet has been pushing this really hard for quite a while. He's one of the people behind IPFS, so lots of kind of distributed, peer-to-peer crypto stuff. He has really wanted to future-proof everything that he's been working on, so he started this little open source project called multi-format. What these are is essentially every time that you've gotta sit down and use a codec, or you've gotta use a particular encryption algorithm or a hashing function like this, let's just create a format that allows you to define which format you're using, so that libraries can just optionally support a bunch of different formats. And if in the future you wanna change formats, you don't break all of your clients, essentially.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[08:07\] It's very similar to .mkv or .mov - all the container things for video codecs, I suppose.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. Although containers, oddly, do implement a bunch of features.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** True.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This gets really ugly, actually, in codecs and containers. For multihash, for instance, there's libraries in pretty much every language ever, including a very well maintained JavaScript implementation that works in the browser and in Node. So that's what I've used in a couple of projects recently. But the funny thing is that Linus is actually still just not convinced. He's basically said that the way that Git uses it is still not prone to these attacks, because they have the length of the body, and that makes this harder. We'll see how that ends up.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I mean, it does make it a lot harder, for what it's worth.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It does. It does make the attack a lot harder, but I do feel that rather than future-proofing or moving to just a better algorithm... He's just kind of dangling out this, like "Oh, prove me wrong, computer scientists!" \[laughs\] Which didn't work out that well for his last round of this...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right... It seems silly to be like, "Well, you only half-broke it, so I'm gonna continue..." If you got through a half of my lock, I'm gonna go ahead and just change out the whole thing.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, rather than just like, "No, I'm gonna continue to put these half-locks on things."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This kind of reminds me that the way we think about security on the web tends to be like, "Oh, I put CloudFlare in front of it, so I'm secure now." "I added SSL, or I added TLS, so I'm secure now." But really, security is this really multi-layered thing where when you break off one layer of the onion, you need the other layers around it to still be secure, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I think you almost can't even break off any of the layers of the onion. Security is really, really hard. It needs to be there at every layer, otherwise the other ones have no effect. I think an onion is a poor metaphor. A chain is much better - if you have a single weak link, then it doesn't matter; you can get through.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, if you look at some of the stuff people have been doing with OAuth for a while... OAuth jumps through all these hoops to basically do an extra layer of encryption. Initially, they kind of did that so that you could do OAuth over HTTP without TLS. But even when you added TLS to it, it's really nice to keep all that encryption there, and one of the things that OAuth 2.0 did was it just kind of got rid of that. It was like, "Oh, whatever... We're using TLS." But you can break TLS; we know that certain authorities have been compromised for TLS so people can give out bad certs... That's not a very good way to secure everything.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure. If you operate under the assumption that TLS is broken though, then the entire internet is broken already... The OAuth channel - if you had that extra encryption - would be broken, but then as soon as you got to that website and used it, you'd be screwed anyways if TLS is broken. So I don't think it'd be any more broken than it would already be, I guess. You're screwed, if that's the case, no matter what.
+
+Maybe someone doesn't get your authentication credentials, but hopefully you don't reuse those anywhere else, so...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright. Do we have anything else to say about hashing algorithms? This is a pretty deep topic to start a JavaScript show with...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[11:59\] Yeah, interesting choice.
+
+**Rachel White:** Somebody that doesn't know anything about this kind of stuff, a.k.a. me, or someone else that doesn't necessarily have to deal with the security side of the code that they write, what would be the best resource for somebody that wants to know how to actually authenticate stuff in a secure way that wouldn't anger Linus?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I don't know if I'm answering your question directly, but if you're building a website and you wanna make sure your website is secure, Mozilla Observatory is a really good option. It will scan your website, it will check your TLS certs (some of this is involved there) and then it will check content security policy... A bunch of different things, and it will give you a prioritized list of things to do. I would absolutely recommend putting any website you build through Mozilla Observatory to get that checklist, and score, and things like that.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool, that's awesome. I didn't even know about that site, so that is helpful.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think also maybe we can call out a couple good application layer authentication schemes, as well. One of the problems with updating and getting rid of this is that people take their best practices from their common tools, and not using a secure hashing is not sending a very good message. Alex, you work for a bank - what authentications are you using over there?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** This seems like a broad question. How do we auth our employees?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** How do you auth customers? Do you actually encrypt or hash different pieces of the Stripe thing -- I hope you do... I hope that my credit card number is not just sitting there... \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, so PCI determines all of the algorithms for how you must store credit card numbers and things like that. I have a pretty good guess on what it is, but I'm not even credentialed enough to touch or look at any of that code as an early employee at Stripe. That's another one of the security precautions that PCI mandates. It is mandated by a body, but as far as all of this auth goes, I feel like maybe my security brain is coming out a little bit... The way that your password gets hacked is not hashing algorithm collisions currently.
+
+This one's bad - I don't think too many people are using SHA1. Even if you use HMAC or SHA1 it's fine. There's even ways to make SHA1 fine, but use bcrypt to do passwords... Actually, my number one recommendation is don't implement any security stuff yourself. Use libraries that are well known and well tested. The number one rule at Stripe is don't implement your own crypto; don't invent your own crypto, because you have not thought it through correctly. That's my advice.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Agreed. I tend to rely on modules written by smarter people than me.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right. The wide use of something signals far more security than a smart person, too. Someone can be smart and have a glaring hole that they singularly forgot because there's only one set of eyes on it. You can be pretty sure that the Rails auth stuff works pretty well, because every Saturday night it would be down if it didn't.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[16:00\] Unless Linus Torvalds is maintaining that library, then...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure, sure, sure. \[laughter\] But at least it's well known. No one's being quiet about it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I've actually been using Sodium encryption an signing. I don't know who came up with the standard, but Mathias Buus in the Node community has gotten really into it. There's really good libraries that work both in the browser and in Node, and it's a really good, consistent, easy way to do signing encryption.
+
+**Rachel White:** The stuff that I've seen from previous jobs that I was at where we did a lot of Node stuff was more built into CI tests, so when it would check to make sure all the tests pass, it would also check for known vulnerabilities and maybe certain npm packages, or the way that code was written. Would that be separate to other things that people would want to integrate into their regular behavior? Or is that just another good level of authentication?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's a good practice to -- Snyk has a service that you can plug your open source module into (I believe for free), on your GitHub PRs and stuff like that. It will check if you have any vulnerabilities, and there's obviously a proprietary version as well. That looks through your npm tree and sees if there's any known vulnerabilities, and in fact even offers you ways to patch them and stuff like that, so it's a pretty nice tool.
+
+But that's really just for known vulnerabilities, things we've already seen out in the wild. It doesn't really protect you against bad practices. Also, you run into this problem... Like Alex was saying, if nobody is using the module, then nobody is probably going to take the time to find these vulnerabilities early on. Using well known, well-trafficked modules will really help, as well.
+
+I think we're pretty good there. I think that we're actually coming into the time for a break now.
+
+**Break:** \[18:04\] to \[\\00:18:51.08\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, let's dive into this a little bit. A relatively routine new version of Node came out - 7.6. We do these releases all the time, but this one is a big deal, and people are making a big deal out of it because V8 got updated in the background. They've been doing a lot of work so that we can actually take new versions of V8 in point releases and not break the API for everybody, so that's been great. But in this release, async/await came out from under a flag, so now in a current release of Node you can do async/await.
+
+I'm curious what you all think of this and what your views are on it? Before I get into my views...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I don't have a ton of opinions... I understand the two sides of this, and I feel like... I mean, I think the primary -- at least the thing people are calling their primary concern is performance of this, versus callbacks or Promises or whatever. I think that's silly, because a) it will get faster the next version, and b) it's such a small performance hit that who cares?
+
+\[20:08\] It's primarily sugar; I guess there are the people who dislike sugar and there are people who like sugar. Just use whatever you want, I don't know... I dislike that this is an issue.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You're just trying to make yourself above the controversy.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Rachel White:** Why don't you explain the controversy for us, Mikeal?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Look, there's a long, long argument against Promises. There's just a lot of people that don't like Promises. I actually don't care about Promises, I'm fully in the "do whatever you want, I don't care" camp...
+
+**Rachel White:** I'm telling your wife.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** ...but it does get annoying that people act like this is revolutionary. A lot of the articles that were written about this feature coming into Node are like, "Node finally tackles asynchronous programming." Node 0.0.2 tackled asynchronous programming. Asynchronous programming has been part of Node since day one; it's been the hardest thing for people to get over.
+
+And callbacks... The standard callback interfaces has kind of wrangled that into something usable and really fast. I think Promises landed a while ago in V8; people have been using Promises though since early Promise standards. Bluebird is based on the Promise standard, which is the really fast one, that people really tend to like.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I feel like people used Promises far before it was even STDIN V8, or whatever.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. And before it was a standard, there were all these competing standard for Promises. If you go back far enough, you just could not get two people to agree on the same Promise.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, you couldn't get jQuery to agree with the rest... KrisZyp and Promises A/A+ that was pretty early on, I feel like... Maybe not.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So what Alex is hinting too is this fight in CommonJS over which standard would be the Promise standard. He said A/A+ because there was also Promises/B, C and I believe D, and I don't know how many letters we got up to.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No one used those, though. They were just proposals.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. But anyway, I think that Domenic Denicola did a ton of work just to get Promise people to agree on the same spec, or at least get everybody to stop listening to the people who were detracting. It got like a real STDIN the language, which a lot of people that don't like Promises don't like. I personally prefer not to wrap this kind of state in an object myself... But one thing that you can say about it is that the browser - if you look at all browser standards - there's just no standard way to do I/O handlers. If you look at every DOM API that has to do this, they do something slightly different, and all of them are awful. And even if you don't like Promises, most of what people do in the DOM - they do the same thing, it's just worse than Promises.
+
+So it's nice to have a standard that going forward - if you look at the Fetch API and some of these new browser APIs - you have something unified, which is so good.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** To be clear, Promises made it into the DOM specification, not ECMA, right?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, it's sort of in both. Async/await is a feature in the JS language, and it effectively yields a Promise, and it relies on that standard. You're getting into this annoying territory where we have two standards bodies working on the web platform.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, but the Promise object doesn't have to exist in Node (the native Promise), and it just kind of does because V8 does.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[24:05\] Right, but there's some really low-level hooks. Now we're gonna get into some NodeJS details. There's a lot of tracing and debugging that you can do in NodeJS, especially in production systems to really get at the underlying state that's going on. There's all kinds of different methods to get at this; Node is one of the more inspectable platforms out there; there's different types of tracing that people do, and there's also this thing called AsyncWrap, which is like an async hook into the low-level event system. In order to do that, in Node there is this thing called Make callback in C++ land that wraps the callback that happens; it's just a little function.
+
+But Promises don't have that kind of hook yet - native Promises don't have the hook yet in V8, so there's work that needs to be done to get an equivalent thing happening at the native level, which at that point actually will make it much more valuable to use native Promises, rather than something like Bluebird. But anyway... What it all comes down to is that I think people don't actually like composing Promises into a bunch of things; they get kind of annoying and messy, and then end goal has been this async/await feature, which allows you to yield out a Promise. It's a syntactic sugar on top of what people are doing now. It is one of those more important pieces of syntactic sugar that makes this far more usable than it used to be, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. It doesn't tackle a lot of the core problems people have with Promises, namely error eating, right?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** But I think if you're already using Promises, async/await can be a nice update to your code style. I think for the most part it's fine - you don't have to use it, no one's forcing anyone to use it. You can almost always write a little wrapper around some dependent library that uses it to switch it back to whatever you like to use... Fibers, or whatever.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Nobody uses fibers...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I know, I intentionally said something that no one uses. \[laughter\] But I think it's a silly argument, just because it's sugar -- most of the time, performance on it is not going to matter materially at all, and you can choose to not use it, so... Deal with it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that's a really good recap. \[laughs\] I wanted more controversy. Rachel, come in and tell me how much you love Promises real quick... I'm just kidding!
+
+**Rachel White:** That's the thing - now that I don't write a ton of production code, I can do whatever I want. Nothing makes me angry, because if it does I'll just do it a different way, so I'm pretty much indifferent about arguments in regards to code preferences. As long as it works, I'm happy with it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We're not gonna have very good arguments on this podcast if everybody's above arguing. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** I mean, I'll argue, but not about this... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** The question on our chat in Slack - you can join the Changelog Slack and the JS Party channel... Seth asked "Is there any argument against async/await other than performance and "syntax sugar is bad"? Well, against async/await maybe not, because it's just sugar, but there are plenty more arguments against Promises than just performance, namely error handling - I think is the number one complaint. Whenever you're inside of Promises, often times you're many levels deep inside thens and stuff, and errors can get swallowed in a way that's very, very hard to track them down, and very hard to even get stack traces back out of them when you do catch them.
+
+\[27:59\] You have to be very explicit about every error step along the path, and if you're not, then things just get swallowed and you don't realize that bad things are happening in your code. It may not be the number one design flaw with them, but it's certainly the number one thing people run into whenever they set up a giant Promise-based system.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and I think also the way that it handles errors kind of conflicts with the way that not just Node handles errors, because that wouldn't be accurate - Node doesn't have a way to handle errors, but a lot of the debugging facilities and tracing facilities in Node rely on errors and exceptions kind of bubbling up to the top... So because it's swallowing them, you lose a lot of the state and you can't figure out where you're going.
+
+So a lot of production Node systems have issues with that particular mode. That's being worked on, right? This is all really, really early days. I think that a lot of this is going to get better over time, but people that already have a big production system kind of don't like this.
+
+There's also a style argument or a way that people like to write code argument, and this argument is as old as time. It's just an OOP versus functional programming argument. Essentially, Promises wrap up a bunch of state in this object abstraction that you can then stack and compose, and some people think that that is a bad style of writing code, compared to more functional programming style. So there's that argument out there as well.
+
+People have different brains, and different people's brains like these different ways of writing code.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure. Seth also asked, "Is there a suggestion for avoinding the error stuff and some of these other gotchas?" I don't think there's a great one... There are good, baseline rules for how to not write Promises in a way that accidentally swallow errors, but in practice, with some of the most brilliant people, it still happens almost every time, once or twice, somewhere.
+
+So there are other mechanisms for asynchronous coding - the baseline won't be callbacks, but then you get to what people hate about callbacks, which is 'callback hell', or whatever. I'm sure Mikeal has some things to say about 'callback hell'. I don't think he can deny that callback hell exists for some people...
+
+But then there are other async mechanisms... Async functions are coming in the future, which is a pretty fundamentally different model. And then generators, if you know that model, or another way to yield control in certain sections, and then pop back to those -- not necessarily used in the same exact ways, but generators and async functions are kind of cool because they don't swallow errors in the same way, and they make programming asynchronously look somewhat synchronous, which is pretty cool. They also because of that can be very confusing. It's very hard to stretch your brain to say, "Oh, this one character here, this one keyword caused all this stuff to happen behind the scenes", so they can be somewhat difficult to reason about sometimes. Maybe Michael has more opinions on generators and async functions, though. Or Rachel.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, before we go too deep into this though, I just wanna point out that in the browser there's actually some new features around Promises, and for error tracking and handling, specific to Promises, that I believe actually rely on the native Promises.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** They're for debugging the Promises, though. Your code would still swallow it, but you might be able to see it in your tooling. Does that make sense?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[31:55\] Right, exactly. But honestly, the solution to callback hell is to write code that doesn't have callback hell, the same way that the way to not swallow errors in Promises is to write code in a way that doesn't swallow the errors, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. Not necessarily a good solution, but viable.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I'll also say about coroutines - there's a library called Co, that's the main thing that people use on the Node side to really do a lot of the asynchronous programming using generators. It's not in super wide use generally, but it has this huge following in China. Really big. It's actually really interesting... There's this dude DeadHorse on GitHub, but he took over maintaining some of TJ Holowaychuck's modules when TJ left...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** As we all did...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** He quit for Go, as you do... He took over a lot of the Co stuff, and DeadHorse is actually a really well-known programmer in China. He helps with some of the cNODE and cnpm local stuff. He's actually a great dude, I met him when I went out to China. But because he's such a presence there, I think that he has sort of like by himself propped up the coroutine stuff, and a lot of programmers in China are actually using that. There's not as big of a Promise following there, it's much more around the Co stuff. It's really interesting... It's one of the few divergences in preferences that I know that are actually geographical.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I actually only use the async module.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's kind of not maintained anymore either.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That was not true... But back in the day, that was somewhat revolutionary. I think some of people's love for Promises came out of the bridge between Promises and callbacks that async was. It was like this weird middle ground where you didn't have to count the number of different things that had finished, or introduce multiple layers of callbacks in a row. You could kind of use the async module to flatten some of those things. But it definitely wasn't, by any means, a standard, or even internally consistent in how it worked. It was nice from a community growth standpoint, it was a stepping stone.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think in the server space and in the frontend space, if you get popular enough somebody will make a Promise version of your thing and there will be like a following around that... Like, there's definitely that pull request. I'm actually curious, Rachel, if you see this in the hardware space at all, if there's as much of a Promise following in NodeBots and what not.
+
+**Rachel White:** I honestly couldn't tell you, because I live in such a siloed thing. A lot of the NodeBot stuff is a very single-usage thing, so you'll have like one sensor being controlled by some other input. There's not a lot of need for a ton of Promises or stuff that you would need to have something special. You just don't run into the same kind of problems that you run into when you're writing things for the web, which is probably why I like hardware so much.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** What about sequential actions? Like, you want some servo to do this, then this, then this, then this.
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh, okay... Well, the thing that you run into the most then is when you're trying to run stuff on serial port; when you're getting data from multiple places at once and sometimes this stuff that you're waiting to happen from your sensor over Wi-Fi isn't going to happen as quickly or in sync as the stuff coming over your serial port cord, so... It is sort of an issue, but not that much. I, at least, haven't run into it that often. Plus, whenever I have to deal with a bunch of really intense -- it usually happens whenever you have to rewrite more custom C to handle new kinds of chips, and then have the C work with your Johnny-Five stuff on an Arduino or a Tessel.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[36:21\] It's all like really low-level callback stuff, right? You don't get a lot of high-level proposition at that layer...
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah... I'm trying to think of anything that I've done recently that has been what I would refer to as callback hell, and it probably would be some Node application that I utilized graphics magic with. I'm actually interested in going in and trying out the new Node version with that kind of stuff. I think it might be really helpful for people that do a lot of procedural art-based stuff on the web, actually.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Also, there's these performance arguments right now, and honestly, even though I'm not a huge Promise advocate, I think most of the performance arguments are really dumb. But in hardware, it actually makes sense. The reason why I think that the performance arguments are stupid is that you're talking about 0.02 milliseconds I think is like the largest difference between Bluebird and Promises and native Promises. And if you're talking to the network or the file system, that's really not a thing. Your websocket delay to local host is roughly like a 3 millisecond roundtrip time, so it's just not ever gonna be noticeable.
+
+But with a serial port, you're talking to the hardware there. It is asynchronous, but it is really, really fast, so you could actually see some of the performance stuff stack up there, and you might actually start to care.
+
+**Rachel White:** I don't care about much, but we'll see. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** How fast can I AI this cat photo to blink this LED to...
+
+**Rachel White:** Okay, listen, don't... Don't...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Don't pigeonhole me...
+
+**Rachel White:** Yes, exactly. I like other animals. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I thought you were gonna say, "I do more than just cat images."
+
+**Rachel White:** I wish I did.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Oh, that's awesome.
+
+**Rachel White:** You know, I enjoy pigeons and raccoons and other various other animals that love garbage... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** We should have Isaac on, so you guys could discuss...
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh, I've already discussed raccoons with Isaac...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I know, I just want that to be like a live voice thing.
+
+**Rachel White:** I don't know if I ever want to have that conversation again.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I made a mistake then.
+
+**Rachel White:** For anyone that's wondering, Isaac from npm - if you ever see them, talk to them about how much they love raccoons. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** They don't.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] And on that note, we're about ready for another break. When we come back, we'll talk a little bit about the featured project of the week.
+
+**Break:** \[39:05\] to \[\\00:39:54.22\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And we are back. We're gonna get into the featured project of the week, AR.js. Rachel's particularly stoked about this one, so I'm gonna let you take this over.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's about assault rifles?
+
+**Rachel White:** No, no...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's version 15.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** AR.js v15...
+
+**Rachel White:** Okay, so AR.js is this really awesome library that you can use now that is augmented reality for the web using AR toolkit. It's built of a couple other different technologies. It's using three.js, it's using Mozzila's A-Frame, which is -- if you haven't messed around with A-Frame, what it does is it allows you to do web WebGL, WebVR in the browser, so you can either view things in the browser with a 3D appearance, or if you have a Google Cardboard or any other kind of virtual reality headset that phones go into - it allows you to actually see the 3D object that you have developed in virtual reality, with your phone.
+
+What AR.js does is it blends all of these things together and allows you to use digital markers. They're using hero markers, which are these squares that have...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Little Greek burritos...
+
+**Rachel White:** No! \[laughs\] They're like QR code. Basically, any kind of digital marker is just using image processing with nearest neighbor type of math-y things... I'm great at explaining things technically. Basically, what AR.js does is -- unfortunately, if you have an iOS phone it doesn't work, so I can't even test it, which bums me out... But if you have an Android phone, you can set it up so that you have your 3D environment that you've crafted with A-Frame, and A-Frame is built on top of three.js, because it allows for the 3D objects in the browser.
+
+Then it uses the AR toolkit, which was originally elaborated in C, and they've made it work with JavaScript. It does that nearest neighbor processing of the hero marker, and it assigns your 3D object so that when you use your phone in a WebGL supported browser and you point it at the marker, either on a computer screen or a piece of paper that's printed out, whatever 3D object you've assigned to that marker in your code will appear on the phone or the device that you're viewing it through as a hologram type thing.
+
+It's really cool. A-Frame is really accessible for people that are just starting out in JavaScript. Their documentation is amazing, and pretty much what this AR.js library does is it allows you to take -- they basically took all of the difficult steps out of the equation. Everything is built together for you, the documentation on it is pretty good; it says that it runs at 60 FPS on a Nexus 6, which is pretty impressive, and there's a lot of examples of three.js things that you can do with it, so I'm excited to see what people make with it, because I'm very interested in any kind of augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality situation that we can do with JavaScript. It's super exciting.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** This is only a slight side check... So it runs at 60 FPS, and if you look at the pictures of it, it's like this blob that sits on a piece of paper, and you can look around and the blob stays on the piece of paper, which is pretty nifty. You can move it and animate it and things like that; you can spin it on the piece of paper while you look around. That runs at 60 FPS, and that's pretty verifiable on the phone. But I can't get a div to animate from 200-pixels-high to 500-pixels-high at 60 FPS. I can't get my web page to scroll at 60 FPS by default half the time.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[44:18\] It's because you're not using WebGL! \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I know... I'm just always so amazed that the difference -- everybody is almost hitting 60 FPS, but the place where we're starting out is always so different... It always blows my mind when these things work quickly, that's all I wanted to say.
+
+**Rachel White:** I mean, obviously that just means that the future of web is that it's all gonna be holograms...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'll buy it. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah... I'm into it. I actually would be really interested in finding out -- I know that there's a device called the Leap Motion. It's a USB device that lets you essentially use your hand -- I think it's like two cameras, so it's essentially scanning the space above the Leap Motion, and when you put your hand in front of it, you get a 3D model. It's used a lot with Unity and gaming type stuff like that, but I know that there is a way to use it with WebGL, so now I'm curious if I'm able to use a Leap Motion with this augmented reality application to not only be able view holographic things through a device, but if I could couple it with another thing and try and move things around.
+
+I'm just thinking of all the really weird and awesome stuff that people can build with this. This is the stuff that I get excited about.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yes, and thanks in advance to Leap Motion for sponsoring the JS Party podcast, and also thanks in advance to the next company I'll give free advertising to, the Myo armband I backed on Kickstarter a long time ago. It's not quite positional, so it might not know exactly where your hand is (I feel like you could do that with a marker), but then it essentially can give you data about your exact hand position. It's an armband that goes kind of like next to your elbow, pretty far back, and it just reads the tensions in your different tendons, to know that your hand is doing a motion like a pull or a push or a squeeze or any of those different things...
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I remember seeing that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I've actually given a few talks where you hook up the next slide and previous slide, and it's just like swipes in the air or behind your back, and then you can start animations or different things like that with squeezes... There's a whole set of default things for Keynote and stuff. It's pretty nifty, though I find that sometimes you have false positives and it'd just slide whenever you're gesturing wildly.
+
+You could just put a marker on your hand to know a position; you can get an RFID tattoo -- or not an RFID, a QR code. Rachel, you have the RFID baked into your hand, right?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I have an RFID chip in my hand.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's in solidarity with your pets.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, that's how much I love cats. I'm really dedicated.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** But I think you could do some really cool stuff with not just the position of your hand, but the motion of your fingers and stuff like that, like picking it up versus pushing it, versus all that stuff. Maybe a Leap Motion plus a Myo... You just mix them all together and get a drone in there somehow...
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, every single kind of crowdfunded device - put them all together and see what you can get.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This is a really cool project. This reminds me... When they first used M scripting to compile down Doom and these 3D games, when they were first doing 3D standards in the browser, and those demos that nobody really ever used were what ended up pushing the web's implementation of WebGL forward.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[48:06\] Yeah, I mean... Brendan tore the conference circuit for like three years on those demos.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And he's so bad at playing it, too... It was so funny.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** He eventually - after dying so quickly, so fast, so many times in front of 500 people - hacked the parameters to the game to where he can't die; he plays in god mode now when he does the demo.
+
+**Rachel White:** Are you talking about the Sentry Chicken talk?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... The same version of that talk has different games.
+
+**Rachel White:** Okay.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Actually, one thing mashup I'd love to see with this - just spitballing here - is some sort of like... If you use a piece of paper, and then you're able to kind of draw shapes, and then press some button on your keyboard and then it AR-ifies it to where you can pick up the shape... Does that make sense? It's essentially like the style in the super futuristic movies - I feel like we're almost there, where you can draw something and then manipulate it in 3D space.
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, there is something that exists like that. Not in the JavaScript world, but there is an application called Vuforia, that allows you to create those augmented experiences where you can interact with this. So maybe somebody should do that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I look forward to one of our listeners from this week presenting that on the show next week. It just takes one week, right?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah. \[laughs\] So have you all done any WebGL programming at all, or played around with any of the raw stuff?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I have. I have a bit. I'm learning A-Frame, I'm messing around with a bunch of other various three.js stuff, and I've done some WebGL video game things. This is something that I'm super interested in. Plus, it's happening so fast... People are making cool stuff with this, and I find that the people that are actively developing interactive things for WebGL-based art are not software engineers for their day jobs, they're just multi-faceted technologists and artists that were like, "Oh, this is cool. I wanna make cool stuff for this." That's really awesome.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I haven't done a ton of WebGL stuff. A little bit for some of the Stripe splash page stuff, but I have met Mr.doob, which I feel like it's pretty much the same thing.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, there you go. I've tried to use three.js and I really couldn't get my head into it. It's one of those libraries that's just so massive. I could take a demo and kind of hack it up, but I couldn't really get my head around it.
+
+**Rachel White:** So wait... Let me get this straight. You'll build an oven to bake your own bread, but you didn't wanna do a deep dive into three.js?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well no, it's because to get at the low-level constructs that I actually wanna figure our in order to understand how everything is built, there was too much code in the way. What I eventually ended up finding though is Mikola Lysenko and Substack live on the big island in Hawaii now next to a volcano, and they hack on this thing called Regl.
+
+**Rachel White:** Wait, wait...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You've gotta skip over that kind of thing...
+
+**Rachel White:** Wait, Substack lives on an island in Hawaii now?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, Substack and Mikola and Marino all moved to the big island in Hawaii, because it's cheap and because coconuts have 1,200 calories in them.
+
+**Rachel White:** Okay...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Yeah, it's amazing.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You have to eat the skin in order to get all 1,200.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[51:59\] \[laughs\] No, but they are building this thing called Regl. Essentially, it's various substacks modules philosophy, and Mikola is just this amazing math dude, doing all these kinds of crazy algorithms. It essentially gives you WebGL, but then adds a bunch of features and kind of modules, and you can plug in different algorithms and stuff really easily into it. But the most amazing thing about it is when you get an error in your WebGL code, you actually get line numbers out of the debugger that gives you your line number in your crazy abstract thing from Regl.
+
+It's really well put together, and they've done a really amazing job with the tooling and the debugging side of it. I was actually able to build much cooler, quicker things with Regl than I could with three.js. Even though there's far less big demos and stuff written with it yet, I did find it easier to just kind of pick up and learn.
+
+Anyway, I think we're nearly good. We're gonna do picks now... It's time for picks. I hope you all picked something that you like that you can link to, or you can just pull one of the many things that you've already mentioned in the podcast so far.
+
+I'll go back and I'll just pick Regl, because it's an awesome library; I think they did a great job, and I love those guys. I hope they don't die in a volcano eruption. Oh, and I'll plug bits.coop. Mikola and Substack do consulting for any 3D programming stuff that you need - or really just any programming that you need. They're pretty amazing, and they're available through bits.coop. They're trying to do a cooperative anarco-socialist style thing for a consulting business. Check that out.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** My pick will be Observatory from Mozilla, which is the security checker that I mentioned before. If you have a website and you're interested in finding the security properties of that website and what you might wanna do to increase them, such as get rid of your SHA1 certs, then check out Observatory.mozilla.org.
+
+**Rachel White:** My pick is actually a talk, and it's Mariko Kosaka's talk on How Computers Read Pixels. It's really interesting and has great diagrams if you're ever wondering how image processing works, which is a foundation for a ton of augmented and mixed reality stuff with WebGL. It kind of helps you understand on a more fundamental level what is happening when you're looking at these AR markers.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Mariko's talks are always so good. She really dives into these concepts that everybody takes for granted, and really learns them and explains them in a really amazing way.
+
+**Rachel White:** I know. I've told her that I really appreciate how she doesn't just explain how something's working so that it's accessible to everyone, but she also tells the journey of what lead her to want to even do that in the first place, and the struggles that she had while making it, and then the successes. Those are my favorite kinds of talks. I'm gonna try for the picks maybe every other week, between maybe a library or a project that's cool, and then other talks that I think are really great.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Of course, you can find links to all this stuff in the show notes. That's it for this week... We'll of course be back next week. Rate us on iTunes, because that's the thing that people say at the end of podcasts, so you should probably do that...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Subscribe and rate!
+
+**Rachel White:** And be nice!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Subscribe, be nice... And yeah, check us out at JsParty.fm.

Security on the web, Node async⧸await, AR.js_transcript.txt

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+[0.00 --> 5.22]  Bandwidth for JS Party is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com.
+[8.98 --> 13.04]  Welcome to JS Party, a weekly celebration of JavaScript and the web.
+[13.42 --> 18.36]  Tune in live on Fridays at 3 p.m. U.S. Eastern at changelaw.com slash live.
+[18.70 --> 22.74]  Join the community and Slack with us in real time. Head to changelaw.com slash community.
+[23.26 --> 27.00]  Follow us on Twitter. We're at JS Party FM. And now on to the show.
+[27.00 --> 31.40]  Hey, everybody. Welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript.
+[32.28 --> 34.82]  All right. Let's dive right into it.
+[35.98 --> 40.58]  I want my voice to be heard that I think that's a dumb slogan. Move on.
+[41.44 --> 44.66]  I kind of, I think it's dumb, but I like making Michael say it.
+[45.04 --> 47.32]  Okay, that's fair. That's fair. That's very fair.
+[47.42 --> 48.98]  That's really fair. That's really fair.
+[49.34 --> 50.36]  All right. I'm Michael Rogers.
+[50.74 --> 51.58]  I'm Alex Sexton.
+[52.14 --> 53.34]  And I'm Rachel White.
+[53.72 --> 56.18]  All right, everybody. Let's get this party started.
+[56.18 --> 57.76]  Let's just dive right into the first topic.
+[58.22 --> 59.42]  So Google broke the Internet.
+[60.62 --> 67.48]  I don't know why they keep pointing out flaws in the Internet security, but they broke the Internet again.
+[69.56 --> 75.68]  I thought they helped disclose it, but wasn't it like some German W, some acronym?
+[76.32 --> 77.22]  I think it was the Germans.
+[77.70 --> 78.08]  That's all I'm saying.
+[78.88 --> 79.80]  It was the Germans.
+[80.24 --> 80.40]  Yeah.
+[81.58 --> 82.32]  Likely story.
+[82.32 --> 83.78]  Okay. No, anyway.
+[83.92 --> 87.04]  So SHA-1 hashing algorithm has been cracked.
+[88.30 --> 94.22]  I guess like in 2005, there was a paper written that said theoretically it could be cracked, but nobody had done it yet.
+[95.42 --> 101.66]  And apparently as of like 2010, the federal government said no government encryption can use any SHA-1 algorithms,
+[101.76 --> 106.26]  which is a pretty good indication that foreign governments have been able to crack this for a while.
+[106.26 --> 107.06]  Yeah.
+[107.06 --> 107.12]  Yeah.
+[107.52 --> 118.64]  The only person I've seen strongly support SHA-1 for the last six or seven years is Linus Torvalds and Git.
+[119.30 --> 120.16]  It's so annoying.
+[120.60 --> 122.24]  And not just kind of.
+[122.34 --> 126.32]  He really was like, you guys are all super dumb for caring about this.
+[126.84 --> 127.40]  I know.
+[127.70 --> 128.58]  It's really crazy.
+[128.84 --> 130.28]  He's still downplaying it, actually.
+[130.52 --> 130.72]  Yeah.
+[130.72 --> 136.72]  So backing up a little bit, let's just kind of get into like what is SHA-1 and what does it do?
+[137.22 --> 139.70]  So does anybody else want to take a crack at this or do you want me to explain it?
+[140.26 --> 143.94]  I only know it from like Git related stuff.
+[144.44 --> 145.82]  So that's all.
+[145.82 --> 146.22]  Right, right.
+[146.42 --> 149.00]  Well, that's actually a really good way to explain it though, right?
+[149.14 --> 153.60]  So the way that Git uses SHA-1 is kind of indicative of how everybody uses it,
+[153.60 --> 158.44]  which is that you take a bunch of data and you say, oh, I want a unique identifier for this data.
+[158.44 --> 159.48]  So you hash it, right?
+[159.98 --> 163.86]  And that's what Git does to every change that comes into the Git tree.
+[163.96 --> 166.98]  It gets this hash of the data and it uses that as the identifier.
+[167.32 --> 171.58]  So if you like go to GitHub and you go to a project and then you click on commits
+[171.58 --> 174.02]  and then you click on one of those commit links, in the URL bar,
+[174.10 --> 176.78]  you'll see like this randomly kind of generated identifier.
+[177.12 --> 180.06]  And that is a unique identifier for that hash.
+[181.08 --> 184.84]  The problem is that if you could forge these, if you could, you know,
+[184.84 --> 188.38]  like that's a very small amount of data representing a large amount of data.
+[188.56 --> 190.92]  So theoretically, if you can reverse engineer the algorithm,
+[191.00 --> 195.66]  you could come up with a different set of data that would also hash to that same thing.
+[196.64 --> 200.58]  And people have been theoretically able to do this for a while and now they really can.
+[201.96 --> 204.28]  It still costs like $100,000.
+[206.82 --> 207.22]  Yeah.
+[207.22 --> 212.64]  It'll get cheaper, but right now, like with the current algorithm, the current break,
+[212.68 --> 216.26]  it's insane how much faster they can do it.
+[216.34 --> 225.26]  But still, like with AWS, like spot instances, it costs around $100,000 to just like break a random thing.
+[226.10 --> 229.28]  But how much do I have to pay like a Russian hackers that have a botnet?
+[229.86 --> 230.44]  Oh, sure.
+[230.44 --> 235.52]  Yeah, I mean, it's just like one Bitcoin, which is roughly $20,000.
+[235.86 --> 236.18]  I wouldn't necessarily be worried about this.
+[237.48 --> 238.56]  Sorry, I didn't hear that.
+[238.94 --> 244.68]  I was saying I probably need to pay one Bitcoin, which is roughly $20,000 to get Russian hackers to break it.
+[244.72 --> 245.44]  Oh, yeah, for sure.
+[246.58 --> 253.96]  Yeah, the cost is still prohibitive to the point where no one's going to like troll you with this.
+[253.96 --> 261.54]  Someone really needs to want, like there has to be a reason someone's doing this at this point.
+[261.66 --> 264.40]  But that will only be true for like two months or something, right?
+[264.44 --> 270.20]  Like people will make this better instantly and then exploit everybody across the board.
+[271.10 --> 271.40]  Right.
+[271.54 --> 274.76]  And it's pretty much a given now that governments can do this kind of at will.
+[275.30 --> 275.62]  Oh, yeah.
+[275.62 --> 288.90]  So what that means is that if your integrity checks involve you hashing with this algorithm, then now if you're just using those checks, people can just inject malware, just, you know, whatever they want.
+[289.66 --> 289.74]  Right.
+[289.84 --> 291.16]  So I have a question.
+[291.16 --> 305.26]  If this has been relatively like not super secure for a while, what was the catalyst for people to be like, OK, it's finally time to stop using this thing?
+[305.26 --> 307.52]  Was it was it something that Google did that you said?
+[308.28 --> 308.52]  Oh, yeah.
+[308.68 --> 309.02]  Yesterday.
+[309.90 --> 310.22]  Yeah.
+[310.46 --> 310.68]  Yeah.
+[310.82 --> 317.82]  Well, honestly, I think most people in the security community have felt like since 2005 that you should stop using this.
+[317.90 --> 320.86]  There are other algorithms that are just as good that don't have this problem.
+[321.08 --> 325.26]  And in 2010, I think most reasonable companies said, hey, we should stop using this.
+[325.26 --> 328.42]  Like I said.
+[329.42 --> 336.08]  Browsers already like don't allow like you'll get a very big red X instead of a green lock.
+[336.88 --> 341.10]  If, you know, the shot one is used for for web security stuff.
+[341.50 --> 348.08]  It's been well known to be very crackable by someone with a ton of money for a long time.
+[348.08 --> 348.84]  Yeah.
+[349.02 --> 353.68]  But but like Alex said, Linus Torvald has just remained unimpressed by evidence.
+[354.16 --> 358.72]  And so it is still in heavy use in Git and GitHub and a bunch.
+[358.78 --> 363.36]  I mean, that's that's fine because I'm wholly unimpressed by him.
+[363.64 --> 363.82]  So.
+[366.50 --> 366.98]  Yeah.
+[367.46 --> 369.30]  It's you're only going to make him stronger.
+[369.30 --> 369.38]  Sure.
+[371.08 --> 371.66]  But yeah.
+[371.76 --> 382.22]  So to answer your question, the thing that happened yesterday was that some people from Google and the Germans came out and just said, hey, look, we cracked it.
+[382.30 --> 383.68]  Like, here's exactly how we cracked it.
+[383.68 --> 389.12]  So it went from theoretical to, you know, here is, you know, an open version of this.
+[389.66 --> 395.42]  To be to be totally clear, though, it's it's still like they have to try a ton of things.
+[395.42 --> 403.54]  It's it's like they were able to reduce the subset that you had to brute force to a small enough amount to be significant.
+[403.54 --> 409.84]  But it still takes like one hundred and ten years of computing time or something like that.
+[409.84 --> 412.44]  Like you had to you had to put a lot of machines into it.
+[412.68 --> 417.46]  But that number will slowly turn down to, you know, seconds or whatever, I'm sure.
+[418.56 --> 418.76]  Yeah.
+[419.02 --> 419.20]  Yeah.
+[419.96 --> 423.30]  So, you know, if you're future proofing, you know, don't use shot one.
+[423.30 --> 426.62]  Or or past proof.
+[426.72 --> 429.30]  If you're just proofing at all, don't use shot one.
+[430.04 --> 430.46]  Yeah.
+[430.54 --> 434.84]  There's shot two fifty six, which is essentially exactly the same with much higher entropy.
+[435.48 --> 437.02]  So just use that instead.
+[437.72 --> 437.86]  Yeah.
+[437.94 --> 442.12]  I've actually become a big fan of multi hash.
+[442.48 --> 443.50]  Have you ever heard about this?
+[444.66 --> 444.84]  No.
+[445.14 --> 445.78]  OK, nobody has.
+[445.78 --> 449.64]  So one has been been pushing this really hard for quite a while.
+[450.14 --> 451.84]  He is one of the people behind IPFS.
+[451.84 --> 455.56]  So lots of kind of distributed peer to peer crypto stuff.
+[456.12 --> 460.20]  And he's really wanted to kind of future proof everything that he's been working on.
+[460.30 --> 463.74]  So he started this little open source project called multi formats.
+[463.74 --> 474.24]  And what these are is essentially, you know, every time that you've got to sit down and use a codec or you've got to use like a particular encryption algorithm or a hashing function like this.
+[474.24 --> 484.50]  Let's just create a format that allows you to define which format you're using so that libraries can just, you know, optionally support a bunch of different formats.
+[484.70 --> 487.54]  And if in the future you want to change formats, you don't break all of your clients.
+[487.66 --> 487.96]  Essentially.
+[488.70 --> 496.66]  It's like very similar to MKV or MOV, but all the container things for video codecs, I suppose.
+[496.66 --> 497.06]  Right.
+[498.18 --> 498.32]  Right.
+[498.54 --> 501.96]  Although containers oddly actually do implement a bunch of features.
+[503.00 --> 503.14]  Sure.
+[503.52 --> 506.32]  This gets really ugly, actually, in codecs and containers.
+[507.88 --> 519.78]  But yeah, I mean, so they're like for multi hash, for instance, there's libraries and pretty much every language ever, including a very well maintained JavaScript implementation that works, you know, in the in the browser and in Node.
+[519.78 --> 522.68]  So that's that's what I've used in a couple of projects recently.
+[522.88 --> 527.76]  But Lenis, the funny thing is that Lenis is actually like still just not convinced.
+[528.58 --> 538.66]  So he's basically said that, you know, well, the way that Git uses it is still not prone to these attacks because, you know, they have the length of the body and that makes the this harder.
+[539.78 --> 542.42]  So, you know, we'll see how that ends up.
+[543.20 --> 545.22]  I mean, it does make it a lot harder for what it's worth.
+[545.28 --> 545.66]  It does.
+[545.66 --> 548.44]  It does make that it does make the attack a lot harder.
+[548.62 --> 557.98]  But like I do feel like he rather than future proofing or moving to like just a better algorithm, he's just kind of dangling out this like, oh, prove me wrong.
+[558.24 --> 559.08]  Computer science.
+[559.84 --> 560.02]  Yeah.
+[562.30 --> 567.44]  Which which like didn't work out that well for, you know, his last round of this.
+[567.86 --> 568.08]  Right.
+[568.08 --> 568.16]  Yeah.
+[568.64 --> 568.80]  Yeah.
+[568.86 --> 573.26]  It seems silly to be like, well, you only half broke it.
+[573.32 --> 580.58]  So I'm going to like if you got through a half of my lock, I'm going to go ahead and just change out the whole thing.
+[581.16 --> 581.52]  Yeah.
+[582.00 --> 586.36]  Rather than just like, no, I'm going to start just, you know, continuing to put these half locks on things.
+[586.36 --> 586.76]  Yeah.
+[589.08 --> 589.44]  Yeah.
+[589.56 --> 597.70]  But this kind of reminds me that like the way that we think about security on the web tends to be like, oh, I put Cloud Slayer in front of it.
+[597.80 --> 598.94]  So I'm secure now.
+[599.84 --> 602.64]  You know, like I added SSL or added TLS or something.
+[602.74 --> 603.52]  So I'm secure now.
+[603.52 --> 612.26]  But really, security is like this really multilayered thing where when you when you break off one layer of the onion, you need the other layers around it to still be secure.
+[612.42 --> 612.58]  Right.
+[613.60 --> 613.96]  Yeah.
+[614.08 --> 617.08]  I think you almost can't even break off any of the layers.
+[617.08 --> 620.56]  I mean, yeah, security is really, really hard.
+[620.68 --> 626.14]  It's just it is it needs to be there at every layer.
+[626.64 --> 628.94]  Otherwise, the other ones just have no effect.
+[629.10 --> 630.08]  You know, right.
+[630.52 --> 630.74]  Right.
+[631.14 --> 638.40]  Like you're it's I think an onion is a poor metaphor, I guess I'm saying the chain or whatever is much better.
+[638.52 --> 641.28]  Like if you have a single weak link, then it doesn't matter.
+[641.38 --> 642.44]  You can get you can get through.
+[642.78 --> 643.18]  Yeah.
+[643.38 --> 651.08]  I mean, if you look at like some of the stuff that people have been doing with auth for a while, you know, OAuth jumps through all of these hoops to basically do an extra layer of encryption.
+[652.32 --> 657.02]  And initially they kind of did that so that you could do OAuth over HTTP without TLS.
+[657.02 --> 663.00]  But when but like even when you added TLS to it, it's really nice to keep all that encryption there.
+[663.28 --> 666.04]  And one of the things that OAuth 2 did was it just kind of got rid of that and was like, oh, whatever.
+[666.10 --> 666.84]  We're using TLS.
+[667.62 --> 669.86]  But like, you know, you can break TLS.
+[670.22 --> 675.68]  We know that certain authorities have been compromised for TLS so people can give out bad certs like that.
+[675.86 --> 678.62]  That's not a very good way to secure everything.
+[678.62 --> 679.60]  Well, sure.
+[680.04 --> 686.04]  I mean, if you operate under the assumption that TLS is broken, though, then the entire Internet's broken already.
+[686.44 --> 692.30]  So it's like the auth channel, if you had that extra encryption, would be broken.
+[692.42 --> 696.32]  But then as soon as you got to that website and used it, you'd be screwed anyways if TLS is broken.
+[696.64 --> 700.38]  So I don't think it'd be any more broken than it would already be, I guess.
+[700.38 --> 702.92]  So you're screwed if that if that's the case.
+[703.68 --> 705.00]  No matter what.
+[705.42 --> 710.56]  Maybe someone doesn't get your authentication credentials, but hopefully you haven't reused those anywhere else.
+[710.84 --> 710.86]  So.
+[712.88 --> 713.54]  All right.
+[713.58 --> 716.40]  Well, I mean, do we have anything else to say about hashing algorithms?
+[717.90 --> 721.18]  This is this is a pretty deep topic to start a JavaScript show with.
+[721.30 --> 721.62]  Yeah, sure.
+[721.62 --> 723.60]  You know, interesting choice.
+[723.60 --> 735.92]  So like somebody that doesn't know anything about this kind of stuff, a.k.a. me or someone else that doesn't necessarily have to deal with the security side of the code that they write.
+[736.26 --> 740.22]  What would be like the best thing for them to like?
+[740.22 --> 752.20]  What would be the best resource for somebody that wants to know, like how to actually authenticate stuff in a secure way that I don't know, wouldn't anger Linus or Linus, whoever you say his name?
+[752.20 --> 755.24]  I don't know if I'm answering your question directly.
+[755.62 --> 763.98]  But if you're building a website and you want to make sure your website is secure, Mozilla Observatory is a really good option for like it will scan your website.
+[764.10 --> 767.60]  It'll check your TLS certs, which is some of this is involved there.
+[767.76 --> 774.00]  And then it'll it'll check content security policy, a bunch of different things.
+[774.02 --> 777.90]  It'll kind of give you a prioritized list of things to do.
+[777.90 --> 787.18]  So I would absolutely recommend like putting any website you build through Mozilla Observatory to kind of get that checklist of and score and things like that.
+[787.74 --> 788.38]  Cool. That's awesome.
+[788.48 --> 790.08]  I didn't even know about that site.
+[790.20 --> 790.98]  So that is helpful.
+[790.98 --> 797.92]  I think also like maybe we can call out a couple good like application layer authentication schemes as well.
+[798.88 --> 808.52]  I mean, this is one of the problems with, you know, get not updating and getting rid of this is that, you know, people take their best practices from their common tools and and, you know, not using a secure hashing.
+[808.68 --> 810.52]  It's just not sending a very good message.
+[810.52 --> 814.66]  But I'd like to see, you know, like, Alex, you work for a bank extensively.
+[815.34 --> 817.80]  You know, what authentication scheme are you using over there?
+[817.80 --> 825.36]  But for I guess for which this is a seems like a very broad question.
+[825.80 --> 828.28]  Like what how do we off our employees?
+[828.40 --> 828.94]  How do we off?
+[829.74 --> 830.88]  How do you off like customers?
+[830.88 --> 837.84]  Like, do you do you actually, you know, encrypt or hash different pieces of, you know, the stripe thing?
+[837.92 --> 838.88]  I hope you do.
+[839.66 --> 842.62]  I hope my credit card number is not just like sitting there.
+[842.62 --> 843.14]  Yeah.
+[843.38 --> 850.90]  So PCI determines all of the algorithms for how you must store credit card numbers and things like that.
+[851.00 --> 864.48]  So I would probably I have a pretty good guess on what it is, but I'm not even credentialed enough to touch or look at any of that code as an early employee at Stripe.
+[864.48 --> 869.34]  So I think that's another one of the security precautions that PCI mandates.
+[869.60 --> 872.50]  But yeah, it is.
+[872.56 --> 874.46]  It is mandated by a body.
+[874.76 --> 892.40]  But but as far as just like all of this off goes, I feel like maybe my security brain is coming out a little bit like the way that your password gets hacked is not hashing algorithm collisions currently.
+[892.40 --> 894.16]  Um, this one's bad.
+[894.28 --> 896.20]  I don't think too many people are using SHA-1.
+[896.40 --> 898.70]  Even if you use like HMAC with SHA-1, it's fine.
+[898.78 --> 898.92]  Right.
+[899.00 --> 904.30]  Like, like there's even ways to to make SHA-1 fine.
+[904.42 --> 908.42]  But like use Bcrypt to do passwords.
+[908.84 --> 909.98]  Actually, don't.
+[910.66 --> 916.66]  My number one recommendation is don't implement any security stuff yourself.
+[916.94 --> 919.80]  Use libraries that are well known and well tested.
+[919.80 --> 924.82]  Um, like the number one rule at Stripe is don't implement your own crypto.
+[925.00 --> 928.94]  Don't don't invent your own crypto because you have not thought it through correctly.
+[929.66 --> 932.54]  Um, so that that's my advice.
+[933.56 --> 934.40]  Yeah, agreed.
+[934.64 --> 938.18]  I tend to rely on people, modules written by smarter people than me.
+[938.30 --> 939.72]  Um, right.
+[939.80 --> 948.20]  Like the the wide use of something signals far more security than like a smart person to write.
+[948.20 --> 954.02]  Like someone can be smart and have a glaring hole that they singularly forgot because there's only one set of eyes on it.
+[954.12 --> 962.16]  Uh, but like you can be pretty sure like the rails off stuff works pretty well because every side of the internet would be down if it didn't.
+[962.26 --> 964.32]  Unless Linus Torvalds is maintaining that library.
+[964.72 --> 965.28]  Then sure, sure, sure.
+[965.28 --> 968.54]  But at least it's well known, right?
+[968.62 --> 968.94]  Like that.
+[969.06 --> 972.12]  Like no one's, uh, no one's being quiet about it.
+[972.84 --> 972.98]  Yeah.
+[973.32 --> 973.56]  Yeah.
+[973.88 --> 983.38]  I've, I've actually been using sodium encryption and signing, uh, for quite a while, which is, I don't know who came up with the standard, but, um, Matthias Boos and the node community has gotten really into it.
+[983.42 --> 986.32]  And so there's really good libraries that work both in the browser end and node.
+[986.32 --> 990.68]  Um, and it's a really, you know, good, consistent, easy way to do signing in crypto.
+[991.32 --> 1003.36]  I, I, the stuff that I've seen, um, from previous jobs that I was at where we did a lot of node stuff, um, it was more like built into CI tests.
+[1003.36 --> 1014.36]  So when it would check, uh, to make sure all the tests pass, it would also check for like known vulnerabilities, uh, and maybe like certain NPM packages or the way that like node was written.
+[1014.36 --> 1023.52]  So it, would that be separate to other things that people would want to integrate into their like regular behavior?
+[1023.52 --> 1028.02]  Or is that just another like good level of authentication?
+[1028.02 --> 1038.88]  I mean, it's a good practice to, um, so SNK, S-N-Y-K, um, has a service that you can kind of plug your open source module into, I believe for free.
+[1038.88 --> 1047.38]  And then, you know, on your GitHub PRs and stuff like that, um, it'll check if you have any vulnerabilities and there's obviously like a proprietary version as well.
+[1047.38 --> 1052.04]  But that, you know, looks through your NPM tree and sees if there's any known vulnerabilities.
+[1052.72 --> 1055.72]  Um, and in fact, even offers you ways to patch them and stuff like that.
+[1055.78 --> 1056.94]  So it's, it's a pretty nice tool.
+[1056.94 --> 1063.16]  Um, but that's really just for, for known vulnerabilities, you know, things that we, we've already seen out in the wild.
+[1063.16 --> 1065.48]  It doesn't really protect against, it gets bad practices.
+[1065.84 --> 1075.24]  Um, and also, you know, you run into this problem, like Alex was saying, you know, if, if nobody's using the module, then nobody's probably going to take the time to find these vulnerabilities early on.
+[1075.78 --> 1080.92]  And so, you know, using well, well known, well trafficked modules will really help as well.
+[1081.76 --> 1082.26]  All right.
+[1082.30 --> 1083.90]  I think we're, I think we're pretty good there.
+[1083.90 --> 1086.72]  I think that we're actually coming into a time for a break now.
+[1086.94 --> 1090.90]  First sponsor of the show today is our friends at Rollbar.
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+[1129.14 --> 1130.42]  And now back to the show.
+[1132.90 --> 1133.58]  All right.
+[1134.52 --> 1136.30]  Let's dive into this a little bit.
+[1136.46 --> 1140.58]  So a relatively routine new version of Node came out.
+[1141.28 --> 1142.30]  7.6.
+[1142.46 --> 1144.20]  Like we do these releases all the time.
+[1144.20 --> 1151.18]  But this one is a big deal and people are making a big deal out of it because V8 got updated in the background.
+[1151.44 --> 1158.92]  They've been doing a lot of work so that we can actually take new versions of V8 in point releases and not break the ABI for everybody.
+[1159.04 --> 1159.72]  So that's been great.
+[1160.76 --> 1166.24]  But in this release, async slash await came out from under a flag.
+[1166.68 --> 1171.32]  So now in a current release of Node, you can do async await.
+[1171.32 --> 1178.86]  So I'm curious what y'all think of this and what your views are on it.
+[1179.14 --> 1181.22]  Because before I get into my view.
+[1182.90 --> 1185.70]  I suppose I don't have a ton of opinions.
+[1186.98 --> 1189.56]  I understand the two sides of this.
+[1190.18 --> 1200.68]  And I feel like I think the primary, at least the thing people are calling their primary concern is performance of this versus callbacks or promises or whatever.
+[1201.32 --> 1207.26]  But I think that's silly because A, it'll get faster, the next version.
+[1207.66 --> 1211.30]  And B, it's such a small performance hit that who cares.
+[1212.04 --> 1214.46]  It's primarily sugar.
+[1214.82 --> 1219.16]  So I guess there are the people who dislike sugar and there are people who like sugar.
+[1219.74 --> 1221.40]  And just use whatever you want.
+[1221.84 --> 1222.40]  I don't know.
+[1222.76 --> 1225.44]  I dislike that this is an issue.
+[1225.44 --> 1229.64]  You're just trying to make yourself above the controversy.
+[1230.00 --> 1230.32]  Exactly.
+[1231.88 --> 1235.52]  Why don't you explain the controversy for us, Michael?
+[1236.20 --> 1236.62]  Well, no, no.
+[1236.70 --> 1237.66]  I don't think.
+[1237.84 --> 1242.80]  Look, there's a long, long argument kind of against promises.
+[1243.02 --> 1245.44]  There's just a lot of people that don't like promises.
+[1245.44 --> 1251.62]  And in particular, like I actually don't care about promises.
+[1252.10 --> 1255.44]  I'm fully in the do whatever you want and don't care camp.
+[1255.72 --> 1256.90]  I'm telling your wife.
+[1257.38 --> 1264.18]  But it does get annoying that people act like this is like revolutionary.
+[1265.58 --> 1271.60]  You know, like a lot of the articles that were written about this feature coming into Node are like, Node finally tackles asynchronous programming.
+[1271.60 --> 1276.64]  Like Node 0.02 tackled asynchronous programming.
+[1277.12 --> 1279.58]  Like asynchronous programming has been part of Node since day one.
+[1279.70 --> 1281.66]  It's been like the hardest thing for people to get over.
+[1283.14 --> 1289.38]  And callbacks, for the most part of actually like the standard callback interfaces has kind of wrangled that into something usable and really fast.
+[1291.44 --> 1295.48]  And I think promises landed, you know, a while ago in V8.
+[1296.38 --> 1297.22]  Native promises.
+[1297.22 --> 1301.56]  People have been using promises, though, since, you know, early promise standards.
+[1301.90 --> 1304.08]  You know, Bluebird is based on the promise standard, right?
+[1304.12 --> 1306.38]  Which is the really fast one that people tend to like.
+[1307.00 --> 1313.62]  I feel like people use promises far before it was even standard in V8 or whatever.
+[1314.32 --> 1314.84]  Right, right.
+[1314.90 --> 1318.04]  And before it was a standard, there were all these competing standards for promises.
+[1318.50 --> 1323.22]  So if you go back far enough, you know, you just could not get two people to agree on the same promise.
+[1323.22 --> 1327.52]  Well, you couldn't get jQuery to agree with the rest of it.
+[1327.72 --> 1332.96]  Like Chris Zippin and promises A, A+, like that was pretty early on, I feel like.
+[1333.58 --> 1341.38]  So what Alex is hinting to is this fight in CommonJS over which standard would be the promise standard.
+[1341.64 --> 1347.56]  And he said A slash A+, because there was also promises slash B and C and I believe D.
+[1347.76 --> 1349.40]  And I don't know how many letters we got up to.
+[1349.62 --> 1350.22]  It didn't get into...
+[1350.22 --> 1351.02]  No one used those, though.
+[1351.12 --> 1351.84]  They were just proposals.
+[1351.84 --> 1353.44]  Right, right.
+[1354.00 --> 1360.56]  But anyway, I think that Dominic Nicola did a ton of work just to get promised people to agree on the same spec.
+[1361.38 --> 1365.46]  Or at least get everybody to stop listening to the people that weren't attracting.
+[1366.68 --> 1368.72]  And got like a real standard in the language.
+[1368.72 --> 1373.00]  Which a lot of people that don't like promises don't like.
+[1373.10 --> 1378.90]  I personally prefer not to wrap this kind of state in an object myself.
+[1378.90 --> 1389.46]  But one thing that you can say about it is that the browser, if you look at all browser standards, there's just no standard way to do IO handlers.
+[1390.02 --> 1394.34]  There's, you know, if you look at every DOM API that has to do this, they do something slightly different.
+[1394.34 --> 1395.66]  And all of them are awful.
+[1395.66 --> 1400.64]  And even if you don't like promises, most of what people do in the DOM to do the same thing is just worse than promises.
+[1402.34 --> 1403.76]  So, yeah.
+[1403.88 --> 1405.90]  So it's nice to have a standard.
+[1406.26 --> 1413.26]  And that going forward, you know, if you look at like the fetch API and some of these new browser APIs, you have something unified, which is so good.
+[1413.44 --> 1414.92]  Like, I mean, yeah.
+[1414.92 --> 1420.24]  To be clear, promises made it into the DOM specification, not ECMA, right?
+[1420.84 --> 1423.06]  Well, it's sort of in both, right?
+[1423.20 --> 1426.72]  So async await is a feature in the JS language.
+[1427.16 --> 1429.46]  And it effectively yields a promise, right?
+[1429.84 --> 1430.16]  Right.
+[1430.16 --> 1431.80]  And it relies on that standard.
+[1432.06 --> 1437.12]  So you're getting into like this annoying territory where we have two standards bodies working on the web platform.
+[1437.50 --> 1437.70]  Yeah.
+[1437.70 --> 1438.10]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
+[1438.40 --> 1445.40]  But like the promise object doesn't have to exist in Node, I guess, the native promise.
+[1445.50 --> 1447.16]  It just kind of does because VA does.
+[1448.72 --> 1449.08]  Right.
+[1449.22 --> 1451.62]  But there's some really low level hooks.
+[1451.62 --> 1455.36]  So now we're going to get into some Node.js details.
+[1455.64 --> 1463.22]  But there's a lot of tracing and debugging that you can do in Node.js, especially in production systems, to really get at like the underlying state that's going on.
+[1464.10 --> 1467.44]  And there's all kinds of different methods to get at this.
+[1467.44 --> 1470.30]  Node.js is one of the more inspectable platforms out there.
+[1470.74 --> 1472.82]  So there's different types of tracing that people do.
+[1473.06 --> 1478.82]  And there's also this thing called async wrap, which is like an async hook into the low level event system.
+[1479.46 --> 1486.48]  And in order to do that, in Node, there's this thing called make callback in C++ land that wraps the callback that happens.
+[1486.60 --> 1487.56]  So it's just a little function.
+[1488.44 --> 1491.18]  But promises don't have that kind of hook yet.
+[1491.42 --> 1493.16]  Native promises don't have the hook yet in V8.
+[1493.16 --> 1503.04]  So there's work that needs to be done to get an equivalent thing happening at the native level, which at that point actually will make it much more valuable to use native promises rather than something like Bluebird.
+[1503.04 --> 1511.90]  But anyway, so what it all comes down to is that I think that people don't actually like composing all these promises into a bunch of things.
+[1511.90 --> 1513.44]  They actually get kind of annoying and messy.
+[1513.84 --> 1518.96]  And the end goal has been this async await feature, which essentially allows you to kind of yield out a promise.
+[1518.96 --> 1524.48]  So it's a syntactic sugar on top of what people are doing now.
+[1524.62 --> 1529.98]  But it is one of those more important pieces of syntactic sugar that makes us far more usable than it used to be.
+[1530.16 --> 1530.18]  Right.
+[1530.76 --> 1530.96]  Yeah.
+[1531.00 --> 1537.64]  It doesn't it doesn't tackle a lot of the core problems people have with promises, namely error eating.
+[1538.48 --> 1538.96]  Yeah.
+[1539.10 --> 1539.26]  Right.
+[1539.76 --> 1540.18]  But yeah.
+[1540.18 --> 1547.96]  But I think if you're already using promises, I think await can be a nice update to to your code style.
+[1548.14 --> 1551.90]  I think for the most part, it's it's fine.
+[1552.02 --> 1552.78]  You don't have to use it.
+[1552.80 --> 1554.14]  No one's forcing anyone to use it.
+[1554.14 --> 1562.70]  You can almost always write a little wrapper around some dependent library that uses it to switch it back to whatever you like to use fibers or whatever.
+[1564.92 --> 1566.08]  Nobody uses fibers.
+[1566.34 --> 1566.74]  No, I know.
+[1566.86 --> 1569.36]  I intentionally said something that no one uses.
+[1569.36 --> 1577.52]  But the I think is a silly argument just because it's it's like it's sugar.
+[1577.74 --> 1581.54]  Most of the time performance on it is it's not going to matter material at all.
+[1581.84 --> 1584.00]  And you can choose to not use it.
+[1584.40 --> 1586.04]  So deal with it.
+[1586.68 --> 1588.54]  Yeah, that's that's that's a really good recap.
+[1590.60 --> 1591.84]  I wanted more controversy.
+[1592.26 --> 1595.18]  Come on, Rachel, come in and tell me how much you know promises real quick.
+[1595.26 --> 1596.16]  I can get into it.
+[1596.24 --> 1596.96]  I'm just kidding.
+[1597.60 --> 1598.56]  That's the thing.
+[1598.56 --> 1603.44]  Like now that I don't write a ton of production code, I can do whatever I want.
+[1603.68 --> 1608.22]  So nothing makes me angry because if it does, I'll just do it a different way.
+[1608.34 --> 1615.84]  So I'm pretty much indifferent about, you know, arguments in regards to like code preferences.
+[1615.84 --> 1618.90]  As long as it works, I'm happy with it.
+[1619.60 --> 1623.46]  We're not going to have very good arguments on this podcast if everybody's above arguing.
+[1623.46 --> 1628.52]  I mean, I'll argue, but not about this.
+[1628.52 --> 1629.52]  Yeah.
+[1629.52 --> 1630.36]  Yeah.
+[1630.36 --> 1630.44]  Yeah.
+[1630.44 --> 1630.52]  Yeah.
+[1630.52 --> 1637.96]  Uh, the question on our chat in Slack, you can join the changelog Slack and the JS Party
+[1637.96 --> 1639.06]  channel.
+[1639.06 --> 1644.28]  Uh, Seth Adder asked, is there any argument against a second weight other than performance
+[1644.28 --> 1645.86]  and syntax sugar is bad?
+[1645.86 --> 1651.84]  Um, eating well against a second weight, maybe not because it's just sugar.
+[1651.84 --> 1658.28]  Uh, but there are plenty of more arguments against promises than just, uh, performance,
+[1658.28 --> 1664.72]  namely error handling, uh, I think is, is the number one complaint, uh, that whenever you're
+[1664.72 --> 1672.48]  inside of, um, promises, oftentimes you're many levels deep inside ends and, and, and stuff
+[1672.48 --> 1678.42]  and, uh, errors can get swallowed, uh, you know, in a way that it's very, very hard to
+[1678.42 --> 1679.16]  track them down.
+[1679.16 --> 1683.20]  Um, and very hard to even get stack traces back out of them when you do catch them.
+[1683.20 --> 1688.56]  So you need to be very explicit about every error step along the path.
+[1688.78 --> 1693.00]  And if you're not, then things just get swallowed and you don't realize that bad things are happening in your code.
+[1693.42 --> 1704.06]  So I think that's it may not be the number one like design flaw with them, but it's certainly the number one like thing people run into whenever they set up a giant promise based system.
+[1704.06 --> 1714.02]  Yeah. And I think also like the way that it handles errors kind of conflicts with the way that not just node handles errors, because that wouldn't be accurate.
+[1714.12 --> 1724.00]  Node doesn't have like a way to handle errors, but a lot of the debugging facilities and tracing facilities in node rely on errors and exceptions kind of bubbling up to the top.
+[1724.70 --> 1729.08]  And so because it's swallowing them, you lose a lot of the state and you can't figure out where you're going.
+[1729.08 --> 1733.34]  So a lot of like production node systems have have issues with that particular mode.
+[1733.34 --> 1736.50]  And that's that's being worked on. Right. Like this is all really, really early days.
+[1736.60 --> 1739.40]  So I think that all of this is going to get better over time.
+[1740.30 --> 1744.18]  But people that are, you know, already have a big production system kind of don't like this.
+[1744.26 --> 1751.54]  I think there's also a style argument or a way that people like to to write code argument.
+[1751.54 --> 1757.82]  And it's the argument. This argument is as old as time, which is just a kind of OO versus functional programming argument.
+[1757.82 --> 1765.86]  And essentially promises, you know, wrap up a bunch of state in this object abstraction that you can then stack and compose.
+[1766.44 --> 1771.78]  And some people think that that is a bad style of writing code compared to more functional programming style.
+[1772.22 --> 1774.30]  And so there's that argument out there as well.
+[1774.78 --> 1782.72]  And I think that like people have different brains and different people's brains like these different ways of writing code.
+[1782.72 --> 1792.00]  Sure. So so Seth also asked, is there a suggestion for avoiding like the error stuff and some of these other gotchas?
+[1792.00 --> 1794.18]  And I don't think there's a great one.
+[1794.32 --> 1802.86]  Like there are good like baseline rules for how to not write promises in a way that that accidentally swallow errors.
+[1802.86 --> 1810.14]  But in practice, like with some of the most brilliant people, like it still happens almost every time once or twice somewhere.
+[1811.68 --> 1815.90]  So there are other mechanisms for asynchronous coding.
+[1816.04 --> 1823.18]  So the baseline won't be callbacks, but then you you get to what people hate about callbacks, which is callback hell or whatever.
+[1823.56 --> 1831.10]  I'm sure Michael has some things to say about callback hell, but I don't think he can deny that callback hell exists for some people.
+[1831.10 --> 1841.26]  But then there are other async mechanisms like async functions are coming in the future, which is a pretty fundamentally different model.
+[1841.78 --> 1855.14]  And then generators, if if you know that model or another way to kind of yield control in certain sections and then and then pop back back to those.
+[1855.14 --> 1865.84]  Not necessarily used in the same exact ways, but generators and async functions are kind of cool because they make they don't swallow errors in the same way.
+[1866.10 --> 1873.16]  And they make programming asynchronously look somewhat synchronous, which is which is pretty cool.
+[1873.16 --> 1888.98]  They are also because of that can be very confusing because you don't realize it's very hard to stretch your brain to say like, oh, this one character here, this one keyword caused all this stuff to happen behind the scenes.
+[1889.32 --> 1892.66]  And so they can be somewhat difficult to reason about sometimes.
+[1893.12 --> 1896.14]  Maybe Michael has more opinions on generators and async functions, though.
+[1896.14 --> 1911.74]  Yeah, I mean, I think I think before we go too deep into this, though, I just want to point out that in the browser, there's actually some new features around promises and for error tracking and handling specific promises that I believe actually rely on the native promises.
+[1912.74 --> 1919.74]  So for debugging the promises, though, it wouldn't be like your code would still swallow it, but you might be able to see it in your tooling.
+[1919.74 --> 1920.70]  Does that make sense?
+[1921.08 --> 1921.68]  Right, right, right.
+[1921.74 --> 1922.50]  Exactly, exactly.
+[1922.96 --> 1933.38]  But honestly, I mean, so the solution to callback hell is to write code that doesn't have callback hell the same way that the way to not swallow errors and promises to write code in a way that doesn't swallow the errors.
+[1933.72 --> 1937.58]  Yeah, so it's not necessarily a good solution, but it's viable.
+[1938.42 --> 1938.60]  Yeah.
+[1939.34 --> 1941.06]  I'll also say just about coroutines.
+[1941.26 --> 1948.28]  There's a library called co that is the main thing that people use on the node side to really do a lot of the asynchronous programming using generators.
+[1948.28 --> 1957.52]  And it's not in super wide use generally, but it has this huge following in China, really big.
+[1959.38 --> 1960.68]  It's actually really interesting.
+[1961.00 --> 1972.22]  So there's this dude, Dead Horse, on GitHub, but he took over maintaining some of TJ Holloway Chuck's modules when TJ left.
+[1972.60 --> 1973.38]  As we all did.
+[1973.94 --> 1975.64]  Quit for Go, you know, as you do.
+[1975.64 --> 1983.76]  And but yeah, he took over a lot of the co stuff and Dead Horse is actually like a really well known programmer in China.
+[1983.98 --> 1988.34]  He he helps with some of the CNote and CNPM local stuff.
+[1988.94 --> 1990.74]  He's actually a great dude.
+[1990.84 --> 1991.86]  I met him when I went out to China.
+[1991.86 --> 2000.32]  But because he's such a presence there, I think that he has sort of like, you know, by himself kind of propped up the coroutine stuff.
+[2000.60 --> 2003.76]  And a lot of the people in a lot of programmers in China are actually using that.
+[2003.98 --> 2005.88]  Like there's there's not as big of a promise following there.
+[2005.96 --> 2007.42]  And it's much more around the coast stuff.
+[2007.48 --> 2008.32]  It's a really interesting.
+[2008.80 --> 2014.16]  It's one of the few like divergences in preferences that I know that are actually like geographic.
+[2014.42 --> 2015.08]  Geographically based.
+[2015.08 --> 2015.60]  Yeah.
+[2015.96 --> 2018.38]  I actually only use the async module.
+[2020.64 --> 2022.54]  That's kind of not maintained anymore.
+[2022.84 --> 2025.86]  Oh, that was not not true.
+[2026.00 --> 2028.20]  But back in the day, that was somewhat revolutionary.
+[2028.20 --> 2038.04]  Like, I think some of people's love for promises came out of kind of the bridge between promises and callbacks that async was.
+[2038.10 --> 2049.44]  It was like this weird middle ground where you didn't have to, you know, count the number of different things that had finished or introduce like multiple layers of callbacks in a row.
+[2049.52 --> 2054.38]  You could kind of use the async module to to flatten some of those things.
+[2054.38 --> 2063.36]  But it definitely wasn't by any means like a standard or even internally consistent in how it worked.
+[2063.46 --> 2068.62]  But it was it was nice from a from a community growth standpoint.
+[2068.74 --> 2069.78]  It was a stepping stone.
+[2070.78 --> 2072.18]  So, yeah, yeah.
+[2072.22 --> 2081.28]  I think like in the server space and in the front end space, if you get popular enough, somebody will make a promise version of your thing and there will be like a following around that.
+[2081.28 --> 2082.92]  Like there's definitely a lot for request.
+[2083.40 --> 2083.56]  Yeah.
+[2083.76 --> 2083.92]  Yeah.
+[2084.38 --> 2093.28]  But I'm actually curious, Rachel, if you see this in the hardware space at all, if like there are if there are as much of a problem that's following in node bots and whatnot.
+[2094.38 --> 2101.34]  Um, I honestly couldn't tell you because I live in such a siloed thing.
+[2101.34 --> 2109.76]  And I mean, most of the well, a lot of the node bot stuff is very single usage thing.
+[2109.76 --> 2114.58]  So you'll have like one sensor being controlled by some other input.
+[2114.58 --> 2122.30]  So there's not a lot of need for a ton of promises or stuff that you would need to have something special.
+[2122.42 --> 2130.02]  You don't you just don't run into the same kind of problems that you run into when you're writing things for the web, which is probably why I like hardware so much.
+[2130.02 --> 2132.16]  What about like sequential actions?
+[2132.16 --> 2135.38]  Like you want some servo to do this, then this, then this, then this.
+[2135.68 --> 2135.88]  Yeah.
+[2136.02 --> 2141.72]  So you definitely will you the thing that you run into the most then is when you're like trying to run stuff on serial port.
+[2141.72 --> 2159.90]  So when you're getting data from multiple places at once and sometimes, you know, the stuff that you're waiting to happen from your sensor over Wi-Fi isn't going to happen as quickly or in sync as the stuff coming over your serial port cord.
+[2160.32 --> 2166.28]  So it is sort of an issue, but not that much.
+[2166.34 --> 2168.64]  I at least haven't run into it that often.
+[2168.64 --> 2186.52]  And plus, whenever I have to deal with a bunch of really intense, it usually happens whenever you have to rewrite more custom C to handle new kinds of chips and then have the C work with your own like Johnny five stuff on an Arduino or a TESOL.
+[2187.00 --> 2189.60]  Yeah, that's it's all like really low level callback stuff.
+[2189.66 --> 2189.86]  Right.
+[2189.92 --> 2192.96]  So you don't get a lot of like composition at that layer.
+[2192.96 --> 2198.94]  I'm trying to think of like anything that I've done recently that has been what I would refer to as callback hell.
+[2199.18 --> 2204.68]  And it probably would be like some node application that I utilized graphics magic with.
+[2204.92 --> 2211.50]  So I'm actually interested in going in and trying out the new node version with that kind of stuff.
+[2211.50 --> 2220.34]  It might I think it might be really helpful, helpful for people that do a lot of procedural art based stuff on the Web, actually.
+[2221.68 --> 2225.40]  Yeah, I mean, also, so there's these performance arguments right now.
+[2225.48 --> 2231.22]  And honestly, even though I'm not a huge promise advocate, I think most of the performance arguments are really dumb.
+[2231.22 --> 2235.78]  But in hardware, it actually makes sense.
+[2236.06 --> 2248.36]  So the reason why I think that the performance arguments are stupid is that you're talking about like point zero two milliseconds, I think is like the largest difference between Bluebird and promises and native promises.
+[2248.36 --> 2261.30]  And if you're talking to the network or the file system, that's really not a thing like your WebSocket delayed to local host is roughly like a three millisecond round trip time.
+[2261.76 --> 2264.46]  So like it's just it's just not ever going to be noticeable.
+[2264.46 --> 2267.70]  But with serial port, like you're talking to the hardware there.
+[2267.80 --> 2270.32]  I mean, it is asynchronous, but it is really, really fast.
+[2270.38 --> 2273.50]  And so you could actually see some of the performance stuff like stack up there.
+[2273.84 --> 2275.02]  You might actually like start to care.
+[2275.38 --> 2278.30]  I don't care about much, but we'll see.
+[2278.36 --> 2286.00]  How fast can I AI this cat photo to blink this?
+[2286.00 --> 2290.34]  OK, listen, don't pigeonhole me.
+[2290.70 --> 2291.60]  Yes, exactly.
+[2292.14 --> 2294.72]  I like I like other animals.
+[2296.40 --> 2300.16]  I thought you were going to say I do more than just cat images.
+[2301.78 --> 2303.26]  I wish I did.
+[2305.58 --> 2306.44]  That's awesome.
+[2306.44 --> 2312.16]  You know, I enjoy pigeons and raccoons and other various animals that love garbage.
+[2314.56 --> 2317.30]  We should have Isaac on so you guys could discuss.
+[2317.86 --> 2320.42]  Oh, I've already discussed raccoons with Isaac.
+[2320.76 --> 2321.12]  No, I know.
+[2321.18 --> 2324.06]  I just want that to be like a live voice thing.
+[2324.42 --> 2327.34]  I don't know if I ever want to have that conversation again.
+[2327.34 --> 2329.42]  Yeah, I made the mistake.
+[2329.42 --> 2339.12]  For anyone that's wondering, Isaac from NPM, if you ever see them, talk to them about how much they love raccoons.
+[2340.26 --> 2340.72]  They don't.
+[2340.88 --> 2341.02]  OK.
+[2341.02 --> 2346.64]  Oh, and on that note, we're about ready for another break.
+[2346.74 --> 2350.58]  And when we come back, we'll talk a little bit about the featured project of the week.
+[2350.58 --> 2354.74]  Our friends at Top Tower, longtime supporters of Change Log.
+[2354.90 --> 2358.54]  If you've ever had to quickly scale your team, you know how hard it is.
+[2358.72 --> 2367.68]  You have to go through all this hassle of writing job descriptions, adding them to your website, or maybe you have to hire somebody just to go out there and find the candidates for you.
+[2367.68 --> 2372.32]  That's a lot of work, a ton of work that you don't have to do if you call my friends at Top Tower.
+[2372.70 --> 2375.60]  They do all the work for you to find the right candidates for your positions.
+[2376.14 --> 2384.04]  Plus, because they have a very rigorous screening process to identify the best, you know you're only getting qualified candidates for your open positions.
+[2384.60 --> 2386.42]  Head to TopTile.com to learn more.
+[2386.86 --> 2389.24]  That's T-O-P-T-A-L.com.
+[2389.58 --> 2391.34]  Tell them Adam from the Change Log sent you.
+[2391.76 --> 2396.12]  If you'd like a more personal introduction, email me, Adam at ChangeLog.com.
+[2396.12 --> 2397.48]  And now back to the show.
+[2397.68 --> 2401.62]  And we are back.
+[2402.06 --> 2402.44]  All right.
+[2402.66 --> 2406.60]  We're going to get into Feature Project of the Week, ARJS.
+[2407.02 --> 2410.54]  Rachel's particularly stoked about this one, so I'm going to let you take this over.
+[2410.86 --> 2412.30]  Is it about assault rifles?
+[2413.18 --> 2413.62]  No.
+[2414.66 --> 2415.00]  No.
+[2415.24 --> 2416.30]  That's version 15.
+[2417.62 --> 2418.78]  ARJS V15.
+[2418.88 --> 2419.06]  Okay.
+[2419.06 --> 2429.96]  So ARJS is this really awesome library that you can use now that is augmented reality for the web using ARToolkit.
+[2430.58 --> 2434.04]  It's built of a couple other different technologies.
+[2434.84 --> 2436.70]  It's using 3.js.
+[2436.70 --> 2438.70]  It's using A-Frame from...
+[2438.70 --> 2441.18]  Who made A-Frame?
+[2441.38 --> 2442.12]  This is horrible.
+[2442.30 --> 2443.54]  It's Mozilla's A-Frame.
+[2443.54 --> 2444.88]  Which is...
+[2444.88 --> 2449.54]  If you haven't messed around with A-Frame, what it does is it allows you to do WebGL VR in the browser.
+[2449.54 --> 2464.08]  So you can either view things in the browser with a 3D appearance or if you have, you know, like a Google Cardboard or any other kind of virtual reality headset that phones go into.
+[2464.08 --> 2471.10]  It allows you to actually see the 3D object that you have developed in virtual reality with your phone.
+[2471.60 --> 2478.58]  And what ARJS does is it blends all of these things together and allows you to use digital markers.
+[2479.34 --> 2484.92]  They're using hero markers, which are these squares that have...
+[2484.92 --> 2485.52]  Little Greek burritos.
+[2485.92 --> 2485.94]  Yeah.
+[2486.32 --> 2486.90]  No.
+[2489.18 --> 2491.58]  They're like QR codes.
+[2491.58 --> 2502.72]  Basically, any kind of digital marker is just using image processing with, like, nearest neighbor type of mathy things.
+[2503.24 --> 2505.42]  I'm great at explaining things technically.
+[2506.20 --> 2512.92]  So basically, what ARJS does is, unfortunately, if you have an iOS phone, it doesn't work.
+[2513.00 --> 2515.28]  So I can't even test it, which bums me out.
+[2515.28 --> 2523.94]  But if you have an Android phone, you can set it up so that you have your 3D environment that you've crafted with A-Frame.
+[2524.54 --> 2530.90]  And A-Frame is built on top of 3.js because it allows for the 3D objects in the browser.
+[2531.60 --> 2539.70]  And then it uses the AR toolkit, which was originally a library in C, and they've made it work with JavaScript.
+[2539.70 --> 2544.32]  And it does that nearest neighbor processing of the hero marker.
+[2544.92 --> 2551.84]  And it assigns your 3D objects so that when you use your phone in a WebGL-supported browser,
+[2551.84 --> 2558.46]  and you point it at the marker either on, like, a computer screen or on a piece of paper that's printed out,
+[2558.80 --> 2569.84]  whatever 3D object you've assigned to that marker in your code will appear, like, on the phone or the device that you're viewing it through as a, like, hologram type thing.
+[2570.66 --> 2571.88]  It's really cool.
+[2573.14 --> 2577.26]  A-Frame is really accessible for people that are just starting out in JavaScript.
+[2577.70 --> 2579.34]  Their documentation is amazing.
+[2579.34 --> 2585.34]  And pretty much what this AR.js library does is it allows you to take...
+[2585.96 --> 2592.48]  They basically took all of the difficult part, the difficult steps out of the equation.
+[2592.78 --> 2594.90]  So everything is built together for you.
+[2595.00 --> 2596.84]  The documentation on it is pretty good.
+[2597.52 --> 2603.34]  It says that it runs at 60 frames per second on a Nexus 6, which is pretty impressive.
+[2604.02 --> 2607.88]  And there's a lot of examples of 3.js things that you can do with it.
+[2607.88 --> 2619.72]  So I'm excited to see what people make with it because I'm very, very interested in any kind of augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality situation that we can do with JavaScript.
+[2620.08 --> 2621.10]  It's super exciting.
+[2621.90 --> 2622.88]  I'm only going to...
+[2623.40 --> 2625.40]  This is only a slight side check.
+[2625.54 --> 2627.04]  So it runs at 60 frames a second.
+[2627.04 --> 2636.88]  And if you look at the pictures of it, it's like this blob that sits on a piece of paper and you can look around and the blob stays on the piece of paper, which is pretty nifty.
+[2637.34 --> 2640.18]  And, like, you can move it and animate it and things like that.
+[2640.20 --> 2642.60]  So you can spin it on the piece of paper while you look around.
+[2643.06 --> 2644.80]  And, like, that runs at 60 frames a second.
+[2644.96 --> 2647.30]  And that's pretty verifiable on a phone.
+[2647.30 --> 2658.90]  But, like, I can't get, like, a div to animate from 200 pixels high to 500 pixels high at 60 frames a second.
+[2659.06 --> 2664.32]  I can't get my webpage to scroll at 60 frames a second by default half the time.
+[2664.88 --> 2666.84]  It's because you're not using WebGL, man.
+[2667.56 --> 2667.86]  I know.
+[2668.32 --> 2675.50]  I'm just always so amazed at, like, the difference that, like, everybody is almost hitting 60 frames per second.
+[2675.50 --> 2678.84]  But, like, the place where we're starting out is always so different.
+[2679.76 --> 2682.58]  It always blows my mind when these things work quickly.
+[2682.90 --> 2684.04]  That's all I wanted to say.
+[2684.50 --> 2689.66]  I mean, obviously, that just means that the future of Web is that it's all going to be holograms.
+[2689.66 --> 2690.14]  I'll buy it.
+[2690.18 --> 2690.38]  Yeah.
+[2691.46 --> 2692.40]  I'm into it.
+[2693.12 --> 2696.76]  I actually would be really interested in finding out.
+[2696.86 --> 2699.44]  I know that there's a device called the Leap Motion.
+[2699.44 --> 2707.24]  It's a USB device that lets you essentially use your hand.
+[2707.86 --> 2709.50]  I think it's, like, two cameras.
+[2710.18 --> 2713.14]  And so it's essentially scanning the space above the Leap Motion.
+[2713.64 --> 2717.38]  And when you put your hand in front of it, you get a 3D model.
+[2717.54 --> 2720.96]  It's used a lot with, like, Unity and gaming type stuff like that.
+[2720.96 --> 2724.74]  But I know that there is a way to use it with WebGL.
+[2725.24 --> 2737.24]  So now I'm curious if I'm able to use a Leap Motion with this augmented reality application to not only be able to view holographic things through a device,
+[2737.30 --> 2740.98]  but if I could couple it with another thing and try and move things around.
+[2741.34 --> 2746.40]  I'm just, like, thinking of all the, like, really weird and awesome stuff that people can build with this.
+[2746.80 --> 2748.44]  This is the stuff that I get excited.
+[2748.44 --> 2752.76]  Thanks in advance to Leap Motion for sponsoring the JS Party podcast.
+[2752.98 --> 2761.22]  And also thanks to, in advance to the next company I'll give free advertising to, the Mayo armband.
+[2761.38 --> 2764.42]  I backed on Kickstarter or something like that a long time ago.
+[2764.64 --> 2766.52]  It's not quite positional.
+[2766.84 --> 2771.60]  So it might not know exactly where your hand is, but I feel like you could do that with a marker.
+[2772.06 --> 2776.58]  But then it essentially can give you data about your exact hand position.
+[2776.58 --> 2781.46]  So it's an armband that goes kind of, like, next to your elbow, like, pretty far back.
+[2781.68 --> 2789.52]  And it just reads the tensions in, like, your different tendons to know that your hand is, like, doing, like, a motion,
+[2789.86 --> 2793.24]  like a pull or a push or a squeeze or anything of those different things.
+[2793.80 --> 2795.66]  Yeah, I remember seeing that.
+[2795.66 --> 2805.72]  So I've actually given a few talks where you hook up the, like, the next slide and previous slide as just, like, swipes in the air or, like, behind your back.
+[2805.82 --> 2809.82]  And then you can, like, start animations or different things like that with squeezes.
+[2809.96 --> 2814.30]  And there's a whole set of default things for Keynote and stuff.
+[2814.38 --> 2815.16]  It's pretty nifty.
+[2815.16 --> 2821.38]  Though I find that sometimes you false positives switch a slide whenever you're gesturing wildly.
+[2822.14 --> 2827.46]  But, yeah, that makes it, like, you could just put, like, a marker on your hand to know position.
+[2827.64 --> 2829.98]  You know, you get a RFID tattoo.
+[2831.14 --> 2833.12]  Or not an RFID, a QR code.
+[2833.20 --> 2837.50]  You have the RFID baked into your hand or something, right, Rachel?
+[2837.52 --> 2839.96]  Yeah, I have an RFID chip in my hand.
+[2840.38 --> 2840.62]  Yeah.
+[2840.62 --> 2844.06]  Yeah, that's in solidarity with your pets.
+[2844.92 --> 2846.88]  Yeah, that's how much I love cats.
+[2847.02 --> 2848.04]  I'm really dedicated.
+[2849.14 --> 2851.42]  Yeah, but I think you could do some really cool stuff.
+[2851.62 --> 2856.50]  Not just the position of your hand, but, like, the motion of your fingers and stuff like that, too.
+[2856.56 --> 2859.50]  Like, picking it up versus pushing it versus all that stuff.
+[2859.82 --> 2862.00]  Maybe a leap motion plus a Maya.
+[2862.16 --> 2862.94]  You just mix them all together.
+[2863.02 --> 2864.18]  Get a drone in there somehow.
+[2864.82 --> 2868.34]  Yeah, every single kind of, like, crowdfunded device.
+[2868.56 --> 2868.92]  Exactly.
+[2868.92 --> 2870.60]  Put them all together and see what you can get.
+[2871.48 --> 2872.78]  Yeah, this is a really cool project.
+[2873.08 --> 2881.84]  This reminds me of, like, when they first used Emscripten to compile down, like, you know, Doom and, like, these 3D games.
+[2882.12 --> 2884.10]  And they were first doing, like, 3D standards in the browser.
+[2884.72 --> 2892.96]  And those, like, essentially demos that nobody really ever used were what ended up pushing the web's implementation of WebGL forward and all that.
+[2893.00 --> 2897.42]  Yeah, I mean, Brendan toured the conference circuit for, like, three years on those demos.
+[2897.42 --> 2899.62]  And he's so bad at playing it, too.
+[2899.74 --> 2900.78]  It was so funny.
+[2901.06 --> 2911.12]  He eventually, like, after dying so quickly, so fast, so many times in front of 500 people, hacked the parameters of the game to where he can't.
+[2911.18 --> 2912.76]  He plays in god mode now.
+[2912.76 --> 2916.08]  Are you talking about the Sentry Chicken talk?
+[2916.86 --> 2920.22]  Yeah, I mean, the same version of that talk has different games.
+[2920.50 --> 2920.94]  But, yeah, yeah.
+[2920.94 --> 2944.78]  So, actually, one thing I'd really love to see, one mashup I'd love to see with this, just spitballing here, is some sort of, like, if you use, like, a piece of paper and then you're able to kind of draw shapes and then, you know, press some button on your keyboard and then it, like, AR-ifies it to where you can, like, pick up the shape.
+[2944.78 --> 2946.96]  Does that make sense?
+[2947.16 --> 2957.82]  Like, essentially, like, the style in, like, the super futuristic movies, I feel like we're almost there to where you can draw something and then manipulate it in 3D space.
+[2958.42 --> 2961.12]  Well, there is something that exists like that.
+[2961.20 --> 2970.24]  Not in the JavaScript world, but there is an application called Vuforia that allows you to create those kind of, like, augmented experiences where you can interact with things.
+[2970.24 --> 2973.70]  So, maybe somebody should do that.
+[2974.68 --> 2980.24]  Yeah, I look forward to one of our listeners from this week presenting that on the show next week.
+[2980.92 --> 2982.26]  It just takes one week, right?
+[2982.82 --> 2983.22]  Yeah.
+[2985.46 --> 2991.20]  Yeah, like, so, have y'all done any WebGL programming at all or played around with any of the kind of raw stuff?
+[2991.82 --> 2992.82]  Yeah, I have.
+[2993.82 --> 2995.12]  I have a bit.
+[2995.26 --> 2996.76]  I'm learning A-Frame.
+[2996.76 --> 3004.46]  I'm messing around with a bunch of other various 3JS stuff.
+[3005.04 --> 3009.60]  And I've done some WebGL video game things.
+[3009.96 --> 3013.50]  But this is something that I am super interested in.
+[3013.62 --> 3014.20]  I think people are...
+[3015.02 --> 3016.60]  Plus, it's, like, happening so fast.
+[3016.74 --> 3018.58]  Like, people are making cool stuff with this.
+[3018.58 --> 3030.92]  And I find that the people that are actively developing interactive things for, like, WebGL-based art are not, like, software engineers for their day jobs.
+[3031.02 --> 3037.56]  They're just, like, multi-faceted technologists and artists that were like, oh, this is cool.
+[3037.82 --> 3039.54]  I want to make cool stuff for this.
+[3039.68 --> 3040.98]  And that's really awesome.
+[3040.98 --> 3044.88]  I haven't done a ton of WebGL stuff.
+[3045.70 --> 3049.58]  A little bit for some of the Stripe splash page stuff.
+[3049.76 --> 3053.84]  But I have met Mr. Doob, which I feel like is pretty much the same thing.
+[3054.34 --> 3054.74]  Okay.
+[3054.96 --> 3055.72]  There you go.
+[3057.74 --> 3061.76]  I tried to use 3JS and I really couldn't get my head into it.
+[3061.76 --> 3066.80]  But it's just one of those libraries that's just so massive that, yeah, I just...
+[3066.80 --> 3067.44]  I really couldn't...
+[3067.44 --> 3070.62]  Like, I could take a demo and kind of hack it up, but I couldn't really get my head around it.
+[3071.04 --> 3072.38]  Let me get this straight.
+[3072.58 --> 3079.36]  You'll build an oven to bake your own bread, but you didn't want to do a deep dive into 3JS?
+[3079.96 --> 3080.46]  Well, no.
+[3080.66 --> 3088.88]  It's because, like, to get at the low-level constructs that I actually want to figure out in order to understand how everything is built, it was just too much code in the way.
+[3088.88 --> 3098.28]  So what I eventually ended up finding, though, is Makola Lysenko and Substack live on the Big Island in Hawaii now next to a volcano.
+[3098.66 --> 3100.64]  And they hack on this thing called Regal.
+[3101.12 --> 3101.56]  Wait.
+[3102.58 --> 3104.18]  You kind of skipped over that kind of fact.
+[3104.50 --> 3104.80]  Yeah.
+[3105.16 --> 3105.34]  Wait.
+[3106.24 --> 3108.76]  Substack lives on an island in Hawaii now?
+[3109.34 --> 3109.58]  Yeah.
+[3109.72 --> 3110.16]  Yeah, yeah.
+[3110.22 --> 3118.08]  Substack and Makola and Marina all moved to the Big Island in Hawaii because it's cheap and because coconuts have 1,200 calories in them.
+[3118.88 --> 3119.32]  Okay.
+[3119.90 --> 3120.26]  Yeah.
+[3121.76 --> 3122.68]  It's amazing.
+[3122.86 --> 3125.44]  You have to eat the skin in order to get all 1,200, though.
+[3125.88 --> 3126.62]  I don't know.
+[3127.50 --> 3131.40]  But, no, they're building this thing called Regal, R-E-G-L.
+[3131.40 --> 3137.90]  And essentially, it's various kind of Substack small modules philosophy.
+[3138.68 --> 3143.56]  And Makola is just like this amazing math dude doing all these kinds of crazy algorithms.
+[3143.56 --> 3152.38]  But it essentially gives you WebGL, but then adds a bunch of features and kind of modules, and you can plug in different algorithms and stuff really easily into it.
+[3152.38 --> 3164.18]  But the most amazing thing about it is when you get an error in your WebGL code, you actually get line numbers out of the debugger that gives you your line number in your crazy abstract thing from Regal.
+[3164.18 --> 3170.86]  So, it's really well put together, and they've done a really amazing job with the tooling and the debugging side of it.
+[3171.34 --> 3176.06]  So, I was actually able to build much cooler, kind of quicker things with Regal than I could with 3.js.
+[3176.06 --> 3182.40]  Because even though there's far less big demos and stuff with it yet, I did find it easier to just kind of pick up and learn.
+[3183.38 --> 3187.18]  Anyway, I think we're nearly good.
+[3188.08 --> 3189.30]  We're going to do picks now.
+[3189.56 --> 3190.38]  It's time for picks.
+[3190.84 --> 3198.56]  I hope you all picked something that you like that you can link to, or you can just pull one of the many things that you've already mentioned in the podcast so far.
+[3198.56 --> 3206.78]  I think, yeah, I'll go back and I'll just pick Regal because it's an awesome library.
+[3206.96 --> 3212.14]  I think they did a great job, and I love those guys, and I hope they don't die in a volcano eruption.
+[3214.54 --> 3218.02]  Oh, and I'll plug bits.coop, B-I-T-S.coop.
+[3218.66 --> 3226.88]  Actually, McCullough and Substack do consulting for any kind of 3D programming stuff that you need, or really just any programming that you need.
+[3226.88 --> 3228.18]  They're pretty amazing.
+[3228.56 --> 3230.18]  And they're available through Bits.coop.
+[3230.30 --> 3239.02]  They're trying to do a kind of cooperative, anarcho-socialist style thing for a consulting business.
+[3240.00 --> 3241.40]  So check that out.
+[3242.48 --> 3249.32]  My pick will be Observatory from Mozilla, which is the security checker that I mentioned before.
+[3250.28 --> 3257.84]  So if you have a website and you're interested in finding the security properties of that website and what you might want to do to increase them,
+[3257.84 --> 3266.92]  such as get rid of your SHA-1 certs, then check out observatory.mozilla.org.
+[3267.66 --> 3275.44]  My pick is actually a talk, and it's Marco Kosaka's talk on how computers read pixels.
+[3275.44 --> 3287.68]  It's really, really interesting, and it has great diagrams if you're ever wondering how image processing works, which is a foundation for a ton of augmented and mixed reality stuff with WebGL.
+[3287.68 --> 3295.62]  So it kind of helps you understand on a more fundamental level what is happening when you're looking at these kind of AR markers.
+[3296.30 --> 3296.60]  Oh, man.
+[3296.66 --> 3298.30]  Maria Kosaka's talks are always so good.
+[3298.30 --> 3307.54]  She really dives into these concepts that everybody kind of takes for granted and really learns them and explains them in a really, really amazing way.
+[3307.54 --> 3317.12]  I've told her that I really appreciate how she doesn't just explain how something's working so that it's accessible to everyone,
+[3317.12 --> 3328.64]  but she also tells the journey of what led her to want to even do that in the first place and the struggles that she had while making it and then the successes.
+[3328.64 --> 3330.94]  Those are my favorite kinds of talks.
+[3331.04 --> 3340.86]  I'm going to try for the picks maybe every other week between maybe a library that's cool or a project that's cool and then other talks that I think are really great.
+[3341.88 --> 3344.06]  And, of course, you can find links to all this stuff in the show notes.
+[3344.60 --> 3345.62]  That's it for this week.
+[3345.70 --> 3347.16]  We'll, of course, be back next week.
+[3348.56 --> 3353.26]  Rate us on iTunes because that's a thing that people say at the end of podcasts, so you should probably do that.
+[3353.74 --> 3354.02]  Subscribe.
+[3354.18 --> 3354.52]  Be nice.
+[3355.34 --> 3355.74]  Subscribe.
+[3355.74 --> 3356.82]  Yeah, be nice.
+[3356.82 --> 3360.88]  And, yeah, check us out at jsparty.fm.
+[3362.04 --> 3364.70]  That's it for this episode of JSParty.
+[3364.78 --> 3367.06]  Tune in live on Fridays at 3 p.m.
+[3367.08 --> 3370.28]  U.S. Eastern at changelaw.com slash live.
+[3370.60 --> 3371.50]  Follow us on Twitter.
+[3371.62 --> 3373.56]  We're at jsparty.fm.
+[3373.88 --> 3376.82]  Join the community and Slack with us in real time during the show.
+[3377.08 --> 3378.68]  Head to changelaw.com slash community.
+[3379.12 --> 3382.10]  Special thanks to our sponsors, Rollbar and TopTile.
+[3382.10 --> 3387.68]  Also, thanks to our bandwidth partner, Fastly.com and BrakeMasterCylinder for the awesome beats.
+[3388.08 --> 3388.96]  We'll see you next week.
+[3389.32 --> 3389.98]  Thanks for listening.
+[3389.98 --> 3419.96]  We'll be right back.

Using ES67, create-react-app, and Electron!_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,437 @@
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Hey, everybody! Welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript. We're back! I'm Mikeal Rogers...
+
+**Rachel White:** I'm Rachel White...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And I'm Alan Samson.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Rachel and I are back from a nice little vacation in Europe. If you didn't check out the episode where yayQuery took over, definitely go back and listen to that one. That one was so good that Rachel and I were actually fired... I got a text from Adam Stacoviak while I wasn't here; he just said "You're fired!" and then it turned out that they can't do it, they can't schedule it for another nine months, so we're filling in now for them until they can come back around.
+
+Alright, let's jump into it. We're gonna talk about actually using ES6 and ES7, new language features, with and without compilers, some of the tradeoffs and stuff like that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[unintelligible 00:01:27.09\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that we should just talk about specific features rather than what bucket they land in, because they actually get implemented out of order anyway, so... Rachel what features are you using that you've been enjoying from the new language stuff?
+
+**Rachel White:** I'm not... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You don't write any ES6?
+
+**Rachel White:** No, I mean... The only thing that I've used really -- because since I don't write production code, nobody tells me what to do, so I kind of just do what I've always done... I've worked with some things that have the new variable naming and stuff like that, but that's really all that I've dipped my toes in. And what is the other thing...? "let" is in there? I don't know... Enlighten me.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** "let" has been there forever. The big ones for me have been arrow functions and template literals.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, the arrow functions are super cool and I totally get that it helps with readability so much, but I'm still stuck in that mindset of like forgetting to use it, and I feel like if I'm going to incorporate all of the new type of things, I'm gonna have to enforce it to strict in my code linting... But other than that, I'm not actively going out of my way to use it, because nobody tells me what to do when I write code.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Let me jump in... I think I disagree that it makes code more readable. I often am looking at typed and arrow function JavaScript; so there are types in there and there are arrow functions, and people are using implicit returns and stuff, and I look at it and it does not look recognizable to me. I'm smart enough to figure it out or whatever, but I can no longer scan it the same way... I don't know, it's just a skill that you can do that.
+
+**Rachel White:** I mean, I'm lucky enough that a lot of the stuff that I work on is fairly small, so when it's much smaller scale I think it's readable, but I can totally get if you're looking at larger systems where you would be scanning through a lot of lines; it would be kind of hard to pattern match...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it certainly encourages unnamed functions, for one thing.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, that's true. I don't line anonymous functions. I like to try and name everything if I can.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I don't know... They've gotten so small and so easy to use that I'm able to use them in ways that you wouldn't use functions before, because it would just be too verbose.
+
+\[04:09\] There's a couple libraries that I've written for templatized HTML, and using functions inside of a template literal and stuff like that. That would have just been too verbose beforehand, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I was certainly one of those people -- I mean, you can dig up me saying this, that the problem with arrow functions is that it's just a bunch of extra semantics that you have to keep in your head... Which is true; it is. To your point, Alex, it's certainly not as easily readable as the word "function". It's pretty clear what that is, and this arrow thing could be anything. So it is more semantics that you have to keep in your head, like any other language rule...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sorry to interrupt... The semantics are maybe easier, because it's just like -- we talked about this a little bit while you guys were gone... It is kind of just the literal scope of the variables; there's no bound... It's just the lexical scope of variables, so you can reason about what a variable or what this is much more simply, because it's impossible for it to be anything but lexically bound. So to some degree, you can forget about some things that functions add, and then to another degree it's hard to scan maybe, especially implicit returns.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I was just gonna say... Whatever complexity they take out of the pool by not having this, they probably add it with the implicit return stuff.
+
+I don't know if you saw this or not, but there was a post that somebody did where he was essentially saying that his style guide now is that he no longer uses the function keyword ever. So he doesn't use old style functions anywhere. Everything is arrow functions, and classes have a different, new function syntax for properties. So he uses those when you would have traditionally used functions for any kind of prototypal stuff or referencing this...
+
+**Rachel White:** Is this just for like personal projects, or is this in practice in his job? Or do you not know?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think both. I mean, he is certainly advocating it to other people, which I assume would also be for production use. But I think that the argument that this actually can reduce complexity if you stop using older syntax is one that comes up a lot. People talk about -- eventually, the language does get simpler if we can stop using some of these older forms, and this is certainly somebody advocating for that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So the primary rift I had with a person at my company who felt the same was that I was thinking of functions as the default and arrows as the sugar, and he was thinking of arrows as the default and functions as the sugar. Because arrows are - other than in implicit returns - simpler in the sense that they can't be bound. So it's like "Why would we use the more complex one that can have all these weird binding situations instead of using the default arrow functions which are lexically bound and so you always know...?"
+
+For me, an unbound function is fine, because I'm just not using this inside of it, but for him it's like "Why would you use the thing that could be bound when you could just use a thing that's always lexically bound?"
+
+So it's an interesting perspective of once you kind of switch over, seeing the arrows as a default and the function as this thing that can be different...
+
+\[07:53\] The problem is that... I forget who he said does this, but the class functions, if you just use the syntax inside classes, or you do a class and then you just tab inside the blocks and you do a function name - that is not an arrow function, it's not lexically bound. You have to do "function name = (arrowFunction) function" in order to get a lexically bound function in there. So it's actually like you kind of have to modify some of that syntax.
+
+Then if you decide "Okay, I'm always gonna use that syntax", the constructor inside of there can't be listed like that. You have to do the constructor the old way, so it could be bound, but you can't bind constructors; then a whole bunch of things like that start getting weird.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, in the case of classes though, you often do wanna reference this though... You have a use for that. I think what he was saying was that we can take the function keyword out of it at least, and then we can not have this ambiguity.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No, what I'm saying is that if you use arrow functions, the functions can't be rebound. It's guaranteed to be lexically bound, whereas if you use just the class syntax, it more mimics using the function keyword, and then using this will default to the right thing probably, to what you want. But pulling out, like if you just use an instance, kind of like a static function, this can change very quickly to a window. All those types of problems start to show up again. It's just sugar for prototypal properties on an object.
+
+So there are still gotchas if you use the class syntax. You could still go further and say "I still want to use arrow syntax inside of my classes", if that makes sense.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I guess you could...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And I think if you are going to say "We require arrow functions everywhere they can be used", you should also require them in classes, too. So rather than saying "function name(arguments)" and then brackets with the function, you should say "function name=(fatArrow)" brackets, if that makes sense.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I don't think that the point that any of these people are trying to make though is to be zealots about arrow functions. I think the point that they're making is that we can deprecate the use of the "function" keyword and just rely on these numerals, and then we get out of a lot of ambiguity if we're just using the new rules around classes and arrows.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think I disagree on what those people -- at least the people I've talked to who are doing this aren't necessarily... They're not doing it just because they think it looks better or it's smaller or it's more streamlined or anything like that; they're explicitly doing it because the lexically bound ambiguity problems go away. So you end up with a program that only has lexically bindable functions, so it's important to do it everywhere, even if the syntax is old. If there's some way to use the old function syntax and then just say "Oh, this is a lexically bound function" - they would still be cool with that. It's not about the fat arrow, it's about the semantics of how the function exists and how it can change and what contexts it can run in. It's taking away the footgun of this changing out from under you I think is the goal.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay. Transitioning a little bit... We're talking about all these features, and my assumption is that we're talking about using them without a compiler, and I think that that may not be your assumption. I'm wondering, where do you have to have a compiler done to ES5 to use this stuff right now? Are there IoT devices that have older dates that we have to worry about? Which browsers still don't support this kind of garbage? I mean, we're not supporting IE6 anymore, right? We're done with that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[11:59\] Yeah... IE9 doesn't -- IE10 and IE11 get into some of the territory, but still are missing quite a bit. I think the problem is that -- and Babel is perfectly capable of doing this, it's just somewhat uninteresting to try to solve unless there's a performance problem... But if you think about your application, let's say you're using ten new ES star features, and one of them is object spreads, which is totally gonna get in the language, but isn't in any browsers or Node or anything like that. It's just like an obvious thing that we're gonna do, and it's really useful to be able to -- much like an argument spread or an array spread, you can do the same thing into an object. It kind of like finally solves the jQuery.extend thing. So does Object.assign. But the problem is that you're already compiling with Babel at that point, so you're saying "I want all these features in Babel", and you could just say "Well, I just want object spreads and I know the rest will", but at the point where you pull in a compiler, you're like "Well, I might as well just go down to ES5", and I think that's the common way... It's just "Let me pull in everything that I know I need to compile to, because I want to just work everywhere" and then people don't think about it too much past there because there isn't too much of a hit for many things.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This isn't my thinking at all, though. I don't know if Rachel feels similar to this, but I don't use a compiler, like ever, for down to a different language. I only use browsers that support this, and if it's a feature that isn't widely available, I just don't use that feature.
+
+**Rachel White:** Same. I don't.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think you guys are definitely the minority.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That seems a little nuts to me. I really enjoy line numbers and all the simplicity of not having it...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well all that works...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, yes... Provided that you have all that tooled properly, and it can be kind of a pain. Look, if you're gonna use Babel, then you're already in this -- or sorry, if you're gonna use React, you're already in this, right? So there's enough people using frameworks or other upper-level tools where the compiler is just a part of that toolchain already, but I'm certainly not gonna add Babel to my Node project in order to use object spread. That's not gonna be -- I don't understand that thinking, and I don't think that a lot of people do that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think a lot of people do that. I think it's pretty common these days to just start your project writing in the new thing even if it's compatible with the latest browsers or the latest whatever and still \[unintelligible 00:14:37.13\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** In your pure Node module you're already gonna have a compiler.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think Node is a little bit less this way, because there are different norms there. But I think even in those cases it's somewhat common to see... Yeah, sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I wonder how many IoT projects Rachel has seen where they're compiling things with Babel. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Not many, that's for sure. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I mean... I think IoT projects in the grand scheme of the amount of JavaScript that's being written are a small percentage...
+
+**Rachel White:** True.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That doesn't make them unimportant or anything like that, I'm just saying that I think the average JavaScript developer these days is working in a framework, and those frameworks somewhat already introduce enough compile steps to where it's just a non-issue to add this.
+
+So if you're working in Vue or you're working in React or you're working in Ember or you're working in Angular or you're working in any of these things, you have a Babel-like compiler already in your stack, so adding object spreads is just like a decision you can make or not.
+
+**Rachel White:** I feel like most of the features that I have used and interacted with would have been like things that we touched on already: \[unintelligible 00:15:57.04\] arrow functions, some of the way they're doing class definitions and stuff like that. I guess this is gonna be the same thing that Mikeal was just about to ask - are there any features that you aren't using...? Which ones do you two think are the ones that people aren't really fully embracing or trying out yet?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[16:18\] I guess there's two buckets there... The ones that people aren't trying out yet because they're bad, and the ones that people aren't trying out yet because they aren't' fully aware of them or they aren't fully powerful, or things like that. I guess there's also things that go in both buckets.
+
+A lot of the stuff we use in Babel and the stuff that we're compiling down to is stuff that isn't even finished getting through ECMA and will change. Modules is something that everyone uses and a lot of the semantics of how modules load haven't been known for a very long time and that's kind of the driving force behind the problem with getting proper modules into Node specifically, because we've been doing it slightly wrong for so long, because we kind of just wanted to compile ahead of time. Now there's a clash in the semantics of how it should really work and we're gonna have to kind of work around that problem for a little while.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, without getting into the specifics there, there's actually a particular point where the spec sort of implies but does not define how things are supposed to work, and Babel made a decision about how they work at one point, and we're not gonna be able to support that in Node. In fact, the spec committee said that we should not do that and go that route, because of some of the other tradeoffs that we would have to make.
+
+That one's even out. That one is actually in the spec, we just haven't had enough implementations to know what some of these really nitty-gritty details are.
+
+You're by definition kind of on the bleeding edge if you're using features that aren't even actually in the browser yet.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Modules are now in the browser though.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** In one browser, yeah. \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Pretty cool.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. So what features are you staying away from though? Like, actually staying away from...
+
+**Rachel White:** The ones that I don't need... \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think proxies are a terrible idea and I don't know why we should use them; they're just kind of a performance bottleneck.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Proxies were a really good idea for like a hot second. It seemed like a really solid solution to a thing that everyone was trying to solve at the time, and then we found better ways to solve those userland problems and then proxies became this thing that made a lot less sense... Namely like the "get set" type problems... The way that Ember used to work where you had to do .get and .set... There was a world where proxies in the future could do more .get or .set or .type stuff to where you could just say "myObject.foo=5" and then that would be the same as saying "myObject set foo 5" or whatever... It would need to do that because we need to run functions when things change in order to rerender. But now with virtual DOMs and all that kind of stuff,t the community moved on to different techniques for solving that problem that are a little less magic. So I think proxies kind of fell -- there are certainly use cases, but I think they're pretty small.
+
+Generally, if you're using proxies you're hacking the crap out of a closed library these days...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I remember similar features are in Python metaclasses, and the guidance for metaclasses is "Don't use metaclasses." \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[19:53\] Other things - I'm trying to think... There are definitely proposals that -- I think it's less about... I'll use anything that's kind of in the language; they're pretty conservative, I think, about -- by the time it gets in the language, everyone's already been using it for so long that it's not even that cool. But there are definitely things that are level two in the spec that I don't think are ever gonna make it. Things like you could turn on stuff for immutable types, or even like -- one thing I don't use is decorators; I am skeptical that decorators are gonna go the distance, so I've been avoiding decorators. I don't have any data, I'm just waiting till they're more of a sure thing, I guess, if that makes sense.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I used them when I was a Python programmer, and my general feeling is that they complicate more than they simplify.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. There are some cases where they're really -- I think the authentication case for decorators is so pretty all the time; it's just like "This is an authenticated function" and it just magically makes off something that makes sense on a per-function basis. That's such a cool use case for decorators that it makes you wanna use them a little bit more.
+
+I think they have a place, and I know the Ember community uses them a little bit. There are also people in the React community...
+
+Ember concurrent uses decorators to do some of their stuff and I think it's a decent use case for it. But in general, I haven't seen a huge need for them, even though I'd probably use them once they made it into the language... Once they became more of a first-class supported thing by the libraries I was using.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I don't know, I'm more on the functional programming side of things, so I just don't -- I don't like encouraging people to write more classes.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure. That's a different conversation, but there are kind of two properties -- I'm pretty happy with the React world's... There are function components and some people are very big into that, but if you don't mind the class components. But then all functions that are a part of it are pure functions, and that kind of stuff... Kind of a mix of some of the better parts of each of the patterns to where you don't have crazy side effects and you don't have these different things, but then your Vue layer is a little more readable than just a function that calls a function that sends half of its arguments to another function. I don't know... I think there's a middle ground there that's nice.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I think that we've hit a nice little spot here... I think we can take a short break, and when we come back we're gonna get into create-react-app.
+
+**Break:** \[22:49\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We're gonna get into some new features that just landed in create-react-app. It actually seems like a pretty substantial change.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well it's 1.0.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. We talked about create-react-app on the show before, but Alex, why don't you give us a little bit of that back-story and a little bit about this in less than 12 minutes, how about that? \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's tough... That's an Alex problem. Alright, create-react-app is very similar to Ember CLI, if you've ever used Ember. I think Angular has its own CLI tool as well that I don't know the name of, but pretty much the goal of create-react-app is to manage all of the things that Mikeal's always complaining about for you, that way you don't have to care about them.
+
+If you want to color completely in the lines of the suggested React world set of tools...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And Webpack, for that matter...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's included in the suggested React world set of tools... Then you can use create-react-app. The idea is that you can say "Create create-react-app to do" and then you have a React app for to-do's that automatically compiles your ES6, has a way to do CSS in JavaScript, does error handling and building, and all sorts of the different things that you would normally have to set up manually, one by one... All is this one big package. It's kind of a template to get started with the project.
+
+The history is interesting... It was like a hack weekend project, because React was one of -- a lot of the feedback React got was that there's no kind of baseline of guaranteed, supported tools that work together, and this is kind of like an answer to say like "Well, this stuff all works together." So it's kind of like a hackathon one-day thing, and then it's grown up a lot since then. This is the 1.0 release. It's been in use by a lot of people already, but now it's 1.0.
+
+The idea is you have to stay within their -- so it even configures your ESLint, it configures your Webpack, it configures your CSS, it configures your Babel... All these different things. And that configuration is even hidden from you, because if you change it, then it's harder for them to make the assumptions that they can make. So you can either choose to use create-react-app as this thing that you can constantly update because you're staying within the coloring lines, or you can use create-react-app to generate a thing, and then you can do what they call ejecting. You can eject from create-react-app as soon as you create your app. It will pull all that configuration into your core directory or where it would go if you wrote it yourself, and then you can just edit it and all that stuff. But you can no longer pull updates from create-react-app in order to get automatic updates, if that makes sense.
+
+Does that make sense as kind of a background?
+
+**Rachel White:** Makes sense to me...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool. In general, I found that with the things at work that are difficult to do, if I wanna do a create-react-app, I have to eject pretty fast, because we need to change one ESLint thing in order to work with our build servers, and it's "Ugh, that kind of stinks." And that's like part of the deal... It's like if you can't do it, then you just don't get the updates. And sometimes that is not a problem.
+
+In general, I haven't paid enough attention to create-react-app to get mad when they have an update and my thing can't update with them, but this release would be maybe a good example of something that's like "Well, if you stayed in the coloring lines, this would be a really nifty change." So we can go through the changes in 1.0 if you all want.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Sure, sure. My first question... So it says something on the order of like "Okay, you can use import/export semantics now without actually compiling down to CommonJS", but it's compiling down to something, just to get into the browser. It's not relying on the browser's support yet.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[27:55\] It could... I think you skipped ahead. Webpack 2 is part of create-react-app now; it used to be based on Webpack 1. Most people were on Webpack 1. Webpack 2 is pretty new and it's a larger departure than a lot of 2.0 would be, so it's gonna take some work to get people moved over. But one of the features of Webpack 2 is that it supports imports and exports natively, like at all, as part of its parser.
+
+Before, if you gave Webpack 2 imports and exports ES6 modules and you weren't using Babel, nothing would happen; it would break because it wouldn't understand that. So what the steps would be would be compile with Babel to require statements, and then pass this to Webpack, and then Webpack could understand the require statements.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, okay...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** But there are some features in ES6 modules like static analysis and stuff like that that are more guaranteed in ES6 modules, so they were able to say "Alright, we no longer care if you pass this require or these things, and so may skip the Babel step in order to pass imports and exports rather than first compiling down to Webpack." And then it can use the proper static analysis that is guaranteed as part of the ES6 modules in order to do better things with regards to bundle size and tree shaking and dynamic loading and all that kind of stuff.
+
+So it's more of a "What does Webpack understand?" rather than... You still more than likely at the end will compile it down to require statements from whatever library in order to bundle it all together - it's part of what Webpack does - but it natively understands imports and exports now. And that is now included automatically in create-react-app, which means that if you were coloring in the lines before, all you have to do is update your create-react-app instance, the version, and you were automatically upgraded from Webpack 1 to Webpack 2, which is kind of the amazing thing. It's like, wow, that was a pretty big upgrade from Webpack 1 to 2. A lot of people are gonna spend a lot of time rewriting their Webpack configurations, and it was free because you stayed within the lines. Someone else worked on the hard parts of that... Which is cool. It's nifty. It's a good idea. Does that make sense, Mikeal?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I'm just constantly sort of reframing how to think about Webpack. I think that for the longest time everybody thought of it as this compile tool, but in actuality it's more like a platform onto itself. It has a lot of primitives, like its own module system with more types and things like that than Node does... So yeah, I'm just kind of reframing how to think about that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it is an interesting tool. It kind of crosses over a few different boundaries of old tools that we've had, and so if you think about it as a Grunt type thing, you'll think about it as a Grunt type thing; if you think about it as a Babel type thing, you'll think about it as a Babel type thing. But it kind of is more of a piece of glue, but then it still needs to understand things like ES6 modules natively in order to do tree shaking and things like that. So it's an interesting project...
+
+**Rachel White:** I was going through and reading the whole What's New in the create-react-app article, and a bunch of it made sense to me, but there's some things in here that I never heard of and I have no idea what they are... One of those being Jest 20.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's a React-specific thing, just like the test running framework for React...
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[31:49\] So they've just upgraded Jest I guess two versions. It used to be Jest 18, or something like that. Testing - we should do a whole episode on testing some time in the future, but one of the hardest parts about testing in the past, if you guys have done testing at scale for a web app (which may not be the case), functional tests are so sad... Where you need to pop open a browser with Xvfb and then send web driver commands to it in order to try to click around... They're so slow, they have so many false positives and timeouts and problems, and Chrome automatically updates and breaks all tests, and web driver implementations are shady between the different... But there's so many problems with that that there's this new world of writing unit tests where you can kind of mount components directly into memory, and then kind of write functional style tests as something that doesn't need a browser at all.
+
+**Rachel White:** Nice!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And it's a little different than running jsdom, which is essentially providing a subset of a browser. And you can do a lot of the tests that you used to do very slowly, very non-deterministically with browsers as a unit test, where you say "If a click is applied here, the DOM should then reflect these different things", and you can test all that stuff, on kind of a per-component basis very quickly, without spinning up a whole browser.
+
+So Jest is good at helping you manage those types of things. In general, if you're writing React code, there's a pretty -- Jest would be your default choice, even if it's not. I doubt it has more than 7D% saturation, but that's pretty good. There's still quite a few other options that people use... Ava, and a few different things. Jest I think is coming around and winning the default choice for testing, because Facebook wrote it and supports it and stuff.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah. So it this one just bundled with the new release?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yes. Jest used to be bundled... It's just a new version, so there are new things; the highlights include immersive watch mode, better snapshot format... Snapshots are where you can say like "Once this is rendered with this data, the HTML should look exactly like X." It's kind of like whenever people do screenshots with CSS frameworks and stuff like that, it needs to be pixel perfect - you can do the same thing with the HTML output of your components. You can just Snapshot like "I don't need to write down what it should look like, but I know this is good. Snapshot shouldn't change unless I change that module." So if some dependency accidentally starts changing your HTML, you'll get a test failure. And then just like the output and stuff, the APIs for new stuff in React... You also get automatic coverage reporting, which is good.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool. So it's kind of just like enforcing good practices on you anyway...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, and whenever you do a create-react-app it'll start you up with the test directory, with the test already written and imported and building and all that kind of stuff to where it's like really as soon as you write your thing it's a very fast and easy example on how to start writing tests for your thing without needing to learn about how to configure Jest.
+
+**Rachel White:** That's awesome.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** One tough thing for writing web apps is if you wanna write tests in the same JavaScript that you write your components and stuff in, but if you're using Babel and Webpack and stuff in order to compile everything down, then you're starting to watch and compile your test directory... Which is cool, but then while you're writing your app, you're spending an additional three seconds every time you do a save compiling your thousands of tests that you've written.
+
+So there needs to be good configuration on whether you're kind of in a mode where tests run or get compiled, or whether it's important for them to get recompiled... And most of that's handled to where you're not doing unnecessary work as you're working, and then your tests can still be in new, cool, good ES6-y, Babel-y stuff that you write your other components in. You don't have to switch context to write older-school JavaScript for your tests.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[36:25\] Great.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So moving off of testing, because I think it's boring... \[laughter\] I see that one of the things that it also does is it adds a service worker automatically and has an offline caching strategy, which I think is great that service worker support and PWAs are landing in frameworks like this. I'm terrified at the idea of the framework just implementing a caching strategy that I don't understand...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** ...because I've spent so much time fighting caches, it's just worrisome...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I put a service worker early on the TXJS website in 2015 (I think) and if someone had hit it between 2 AM and 3 AM a week before the conference, then they would have been served that version of the website for the rest of their lives, unless they went in and cleared the service worker. \[laughter\]
+
+So there's definitely some danger to where you can get yourself in a place where you accidentally cache everything and there's no way to break out, and that can be unfortunate.
+
+I haven't dug deep into their service worker implementation, but my gut is if you don't do anything weird it should be fine, and if you do something weird - sorry. My gut is that it's fine for normal stuff, and you'll probably need to turn it off for crazier stuff.
+
+It's probably very baseline, very lazy in the sense that it isn't gonna do too much because it can't assume as much. But if you think about just like a caching strategy of "Have we seen this before?" \[unintelligible 00:38:10.23\] if we've seen it before, return the old one, and always go grab the new one. And if there is a new one that's different from the old one, go ahead and also send up another event for new data." If that's kind of built into the idea of how you render things, which a lot of the React stuff is, as things change, it automatically updates, and it can kind of be a good default strategy.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh yeah, I hadn't really thought about that. React has a lot of understanding about the individual components, so it knows its rerenders need to happen when the backend updates. That's interesting.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, there's some nice synchronicity in some of that stuff, I think. It's not gonna be a silver bullet, but I think it's pretty good. Ember CLI doesn't have service worker, but by default whenever you do Ember serve a CSP (content security policy), which I think is a really cool default to have, just to make that a more widely used thing... Just like by default XSS is harder in Ember apps than it is in other apps because they do CSP.
+
+So I really like these toolkit style CLI helper things doing things like solid generic defaults, that maybe aren't the best version of them, but maybe get people thinking about service workers or get people thinking about CSP. And it'll work in all the simple cases, as well.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Interesting... Very interesting.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You sound skeptical, but \[unintelligible 00:39:52.19\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[39:52\] No, I think just in general -- on the surface this looks like a boilerplate generator, and it's actually very much not just a boilerplate generator.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[unintelligible 00:40:04.27\] It's like a living boilerplate generator, kind of...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. That's intense, though...
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, it's a boilerplate generator but it keeps on helping. It just helps you continue on developing the app; it doesn't just run once and then you don't use it, right? Because it helps you put together all of the tools that you need for it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right, yeah. I mean, it's like all of this stuff feels like it's a great-grandchild of Rails, where Rails would -- there's a word for it... It would generate code; you would just say "Rails New Controller"...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Scaffolding... It was called scaffolding.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's the word. And it definitely feels kind of like scaffolding, and there's a bit of scaffolding in the initial create-react-app, but I think it focuses less on generating code for you and more about providing tools and examples and kind of a baseline for you to build on, and then allowing -- one of the things that scaffolding is it's like once it generates that code, that code is stuck there forever in that format... Whereas more of the strategy with create-react-app is that hopefully it scaffolds little enough to where it can update those things that it has generated on the fly.
+
+I think the last thing that's interesting in the create-react-app 1.0 release is the code-splitting stuff, and that's part of Webpack, as well. But there's a standard that no one uses for dynamic imports... It mixes async/await with import.
+
+I hadn't looked into it much, because it wasn't really a great place to use it, but it's part of the standards track. I don't know where it is in that, but... You're gonna have an async function and then you can import something... You can do "await import" and then that will automatically build into a separate -- all the dependencies of the thing that you're asynchronously importing can be built into a separate bundle.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I think that you're complicating it a little bit. It's a piece of syntax that allows you to with a function do the same thing you do with syntax for import, right? And the nice thing about that is at some point in the future - which is like not part of the initial interpretation phase of the browser - you can say "Import this module." And then what you're saying is that now we can actually use that for code splitting, because you can say, "Well, these little pieces that you don't necessarily need we can now import dynamically using the same module system."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I guess I was complicating it because it would be invalid syntax to just throw an import there. It needs to be supported syntax; it's not just like something you could do before but people didn't know about it. I think awaiting in import is not -- like, it needs to be statically analyzable or at least known to be a part of it that isn't statically analyzable, because it doesn't need to be... Something like that. And that's why I think it's part of the standards track to do asynchronous imports like this.
+
+So create-react-app supports this in order to do bundles, which is a huge part of the PWA community's problem. If you follow Alex Russell, you'll know that your JavaScript that you're serving by default is far too large. So if you can turn on HTTP/2 and then do something like a handful of these asynchronous imports for large portions of your application, I think it could go a long way to loading far less JavaScript on load, which is really nifty. I think this is such a good direction to automatically give to people. I hope they use it in the baseline example that they generate... That way people use it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[44:08\] Following on with your talk about scaffolding, it seems like the big difference between this and what Rails does is, like you said, Rails will generate a lot of boilerplate code. This seems to generate a lot of configuration, right? The joke about Webpack is you only write one Webpack configuration and then you copy/paste it into every project.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I mean, that's a makefile joke, but yeah...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, exactly. \[laughs\] But I think also, like you were saying, one of the things that this does is really standardize what is the proper path for writing a React app with all these different configurations. So this allows you to sort of add features over time to that configuration without trying to get thousands and thousands of developers to update this particular line in their Webpack config.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right. It's a noble cause. And other people are doing it. Ember CLI - they're doing this as well. When you upgrade these new-world configuration CLI tools, you get instant improvements in your applications, which is cool. Everything still works, and now it's 20% faster. Whenever Ember did the Glimmer update, all you did was upgrade Ember CLI and suddenly everything was using Glimmer. It was all supported, unless you were doing something weird, and suddenly your website rendered faster. I think that's a cool world -- I think that's a good goal for these well-used frameworks to go after.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Definitely. One thing I can't wait to see is not compiling down to ES5 anymore, but compiling down to a set of features that are actually mostly supported, because there's a lot of performance benefits, too. Arrow functions are faster than regular functions in V8, and for the most part, people that are working with compilers aren't getting those performance benefits right now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. You can configure that... Not in create-react-app, but in a generic Babel config you can say "This is the target set of features that I want to compile down to." So it's certainly possible, but I don't think many people go that far.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And also there's only one minifier that supports it as well... And it's still under really active development, so that's one of the things that you kind of lose.
+
+Anyway, I think that it's about time for another break. We're gonna take a short little break here and when we come back we're gonna talk about the project of the week.
+
+**Break:** \[46:35\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** The project of the week this week is Electron. There's been so much stuff about Electron; I'm sure that we've talked about Electron apps on here, I know that the Changelog did a whole episode as well...
+
+Just for some quick background, Electron is a way to build desktop applications for Mac, Windows and Linux using Node.js and browser technologies. If you can make a website and use Node.js, you can write an Electron app.
+
+It was originally broken out of the Atom editor that GitHub was doing. it was initially called Atom Shell, and then Jessica Lord and some of the good people at GitHub moved it into its own project and now it's really taken off.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[48:09\] And some of the Electron apps that people might know of is like Hyper and Slack, and something that we talked about recently, which is WebTorrent, and stuff like that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Visual Studio Code, my current editor of choice, as well. Yeah, one of the interesting things that I've seen about it is that I think a lot of people initially viewed it as "Oh, I can take my website and turn it into a desktop app." That's sort of what the Slack app does. Or "I can write desktop apps, but it's a pain to do it across browsers, so I will write them in this instead." But what I've seen lately are applications that I don't think would even exist if it wasn't for having unrestricted access to Node.js, and then just being able to put a browser frontend on that. Just the size of the ecosystem is so amazing.
+
+MongoDB has like a new DB Admin thing that's like a desktop app with Electron. Voltra is like this new music app that is way prettier and nicer than iTunes, and that is just because they knew Node.js really well, they can really dig into the nitty-gritty there. And a lot of the stuff that they're doing with data storage and sync-ing and stuff - they need that performance, that layer; they couldn't just do it as a pure web app. So it's awesome.
+
+**Rachel White:** Have you built anything with Electron?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes. I wrote a little kind of a browser viewer on top of IPFS... Because I wanted to play around with IPFS, so I made a little drag-and-drop thing. I'm about halfway done with a desktop version of Roll Call, that uses Electron as well. And then I pulled down and just worked with a couple projects. I dug into the Brave code at one time, which is also an Electron app -- or was back then; I think now they're on their fork of Electron. And there was another app that I can't remember that I sent a pull request to, so I had to pull it down that way. And all of them have been great. I'm comfortable with Node, so it's a really comfortable place to be to develop in it.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah. I mean, I'm super comfortable with Node too, and Electron has always been something that I have known existed as a thing, but is there anything extra that people that already know how to build web applications with Node would need to know in order to get up and running with Electron? Or does Electron kind of just wrap around all that stuff?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It wraps around all of it, but also... I don't think that we can underestimate how much stuff there is in npm right now, like how many modules. And to make a lot of web apps work, a ton of what you do is that you build these backend services that just talk to something that has less security around it and more of the Node ecosystem, and then you push that to the browser in some way.
+
+I've seen a lot of people just get up and running so quickly on their ideas because they can just store directly on the file system and access every module in npm and then put a web front-end on it and not have to spin up a back-end service, not have to deal with a front-end and a back-end, where they just kind of have it all mashed together in this environment in Electron.
+
+**Rachel White:** Alex...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah?
+
+**Rachel White:** Have you made anything?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[51:43\] In Electron, no? My experience in Electron has been installing the Electron bin for -- actually, we used Electron in order to do screenshots for our CSS library visual diffs, because it was easier to just run Electron cross-browser, render something and then use the stuff to take a screenshot... And then not even reload pages, just inject the new components into the same page, and then you could take a ton of screenshots all in a row, and it ended up being really fast. I think it was an open source library that we have; I can find a link.
+
+So yeah, I used it for a pretty different thing. That may be an interesting use case of it... It's just a cross-browser environment to run HTML in headlessly, which is kind of cool.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah. What was the thing that...? Oh, this is gonna be horrible -- it's gonna showcase my horrible memory. What was the thing that Adobe had that was allowing you to make apps easier? It might have just been like in Max, or something? Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, they had an editor, and then they had... Yeah, the name of this stuff, but it was kind of DreamWeaver 2000, or whatever...
+
+**Rachel White:** Well no, not DreamWeaver... It was one that actually let you get some kind of -- obviously, I guess it's not as notable...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, Adobe AIR?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yes, Adobe AIR.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Thank you, Corvin U. in the channel.
+
+**Rachel White:** Thanks! Okay, cool.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And Flex I think is what it eventually became, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Flex was the framework that you wrote in. AIR was the container that it would run in.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay.
+
+**Rachel White:** Hold on, the cops are coming again. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It was all Flash-based. ActionScript \[unintelligible 00:53:52.00\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** The cops are coming to arrest Rachel for talking about Adobe Flash... \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Okay, cool... So I remember when that came out and I was like, "Oh, this is rad!" I mean, Electron seems like -- I know that people are talking about it a lot, but I feel like people should be talking about it more... I know that's just like a handwavy thing to say, but why aren't people that are making pretty rad apps just not also by default making them in Electron as well? Does anybody know?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Because the web is an important distribution platform, and defaulting to native applications is maybe not the best strategy to reach the most people.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** If you talk to people that have apps that people use daily - any app that you use for business or anything that you open up daily, people prefer desktop applications.
+
+**Rachel White:** True.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** They don't have to...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** They don't have to, but if you talk to Slack, for instance... They have ostensibly the exact same thing on the website as they do on the desktop, and the desktop has a lot more engagement. Getting to people initially, asking them to (before they've seen any value) download this thing is a bit of a stretch for a lot of use cases. But I think that once you have people's attention and you really wanna up their engagement, that's where desktop applications are really useful.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I agree.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We still value the desktop, it looks like. There's been some great articles lately... GitHub actually -- they have these GitHub desktop apps that they've built a while back, and they have not actually moved them to Electron yet, so they wrote up their experiences - some C\# and Objective-C developers that are used to writing native applications for Windows and Mac - what they experience was like moving to Electron and doing Electron stuff. It's pretty interesting, I recommend it.
+
+Alright, moving on to our picks... Everybody got their picks locked and loaded?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[56:12\] Yeah, but mine's a copout.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay... Well, we'll start with your cop-out then, and then we'll go up from there.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's create-react-app 1.0, baby.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, shut up... \[laughs\] You can't pick the project of the week. That's like cheating.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay... Webpack 2.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Tell us about Webpack 2. What's in it?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Tree shaking.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Alright, I'm just gonna go on a little bit of a tangent here and you're gonna get mad about it... But I think that if you need tree shaking, you're dependent on some anti-patterns. I don't think that we should have these grab bag modules with a bunch of other properties in them that you should be shaking out. I think that we should be using modules that do one thing and only export one thing, and then you don't need to tree shake. There you go...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Maybe...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Maybe... That's an amazing rebuttal. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Anyway, my pick of the week -- were you gonna say something else? Go ahead, Alex...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I was gonna say that I agree to an extent that if you write something that has a few too many things, then tree shaking becomes a crutch, but I also think that take a substack or take a set of tools that are only substack and you'll still get some benefit from tree shaking in the end. It won't be massive, but you might as well do it.
+
+I think tree shaking becomes even more cool when it can -- I guess you guys were gone when we made this the project of the week... What was that thing? Code-something came our recently... Facebook -- it was the project of... Anyways, it tries to code unroll and precompute things that are already available to compute at runtime or at compiler time... Things like that are also going to be massive, to where like there's an if statement inside of a substack module and there's no way that's gonna run based on the configuration, and therefore it can be compiled out. That's tree shaking-like, and it should be fine. Use it all. Use everything. Use every minifier at the same time.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Alright. Rachel, what's your pick?
+
+**Rachel White:** My pick of the week is a talk from JSConf EU that just happened that I unfortunately did not get to see in person... It's from Anjana Vakil and it's about immutable data structures for functional JS. She explains it in such a really simplified, easy to understand way for people that don't really understand what immutability or mutability or functional programming looks like, a.k.a. me... She just gives visuals that explains how nodes work and how you can do different things with it, and how you can have the arrays structured in -- well, I guess that's what mutability and immutability is, but she explains it in a way that makes sense and she talks about it in context of David Nolen's mori library, and Facebook's Immutable.js library and shows examples from both, so that you're able to understand the concept and see how different libraries are handling that kind of thing.
+
+So yeah, if anybody else was wondering about that kind of thing, there's a link to it and it's pretty great.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[01:00:10.11\] Earlier in the episode we talked about features that we don't use... My wish is that there was a way to use Immutable.js as the default in the syntax... Like there could be a Babel plugin for immutable versions of things. And there actually is a spec - I think Sebastian Markbåge proposed immutable data structures to ECMA, but I think it's dead and it's not gonna go, and it makes me sad... I really want to use Immutable.js but I really hate changing the syntax for everything. I want native immutable data structures... So that's a good example of something that I don't use that I wish I could.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Cool. Okay, my pick is a book... It's actually a really old book. It came out like in the '80s, I think... '84. Crazy. It's called "Hackers", and it's not...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I've seen the movie...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's not -- there's no rollerblading... \[laughs\] Hackers is about the origins of hacker culture, which eventually kind of became early technology and open source culture. You can skip the third part -- the book is in three parts, and the third one does not hold up. The first one is basically from the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT in the late '50s and early '60s... They started using computers in a very different way, and how their kind of culture evolved and became the AI lab at MIT, which spawned a bunch of other AI labs and all of the early programming culture came out of what was going on there.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** What's that chapter about...?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So hold on... The second chapter is about the Homebrew Computer Club and early Apple and early computing in the Bay Area, and also how a bunch of really crazy counter-culture political figures also informed that culture and what they were doing, and that's super interesting.
+
+The third section is about the gaming industry, about Sierra and all those companies that were in the early '80s. At the time it was like, "Oh, and then this is what people are doing right now", but it really doesn't connect very well to the other parts and it really doesn't hold up as like "this particular section of computing is not nearly as influential as these other ones in hindsight." But also, there's some appendices.
+
+One of the appendices is called "The last hacker", and it's about the last person in the MIT AI lab that is kind of the keeper of the flame for hacker culture. It's about Richard Stallman before he started the GNU project and before there was even such a thing as copyleft licenses or a GPL to argue about. It is fascinating! It explains so much!
+
+I've been trying to read a lot about early hacker culture and how the counter-culture movement played into all this stuff, and this one of the best books to really dig into it. It's by Steven Levy and it's called Hackers. There you go.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** My pick is the movie Sneakers.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, that's a good movie!
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh my god!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's really the only tech movie that holds up, really...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** River Phoenix?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah... Oh man, that's a good one... That's a really good one. Some Robert Redford... Okay, anyway... Great talking with you all. I think that we're just about done now. Rate us on iTunes, check us out at Changelog.com/JSParty, you can get into our Slack, you can catch us live every Friday at noon Pacific time and something in other timezones, and thank you very much. Bye-bye!

Using ES6⧸7, create-react-app, and Electron!_transcript.txt

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+[0.00 --> 5.92]  Bandwidth for JSParty is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com.
+[10.24 --> 14.40]  Welcome to JSParty, a weekly celebration of JavaScript and the web.
+[14.76 --> 19.72]  Tune in live on Fridays at 3 p.m. U.S. Eastern at changelaw.com slash live.
+[19.72 --> 24.12]  Join the community and Slack with us in real time. Head to changelaw.com slash community.
+[24.42 --> 28.34]  Follow us on Twitter. We're at JSPartyFM. And now on to the show.
+[28.34 --> 32.44]  Hey, everybody. Welcome to JSParty. It's a party every week with JavaScript.
+[33.06 --> 34.86]  We're back. I'm Michael Rogers.
+[35.38 --> 36.40]  I'm Rachel White.
+[36.80 --> 38.24]  And I'm Alan Sampson.
+[38.84 --> 44.08]  Yep. And Rachel and I are back from a nice little vacation in Europe.
+[44.98 --> 51.06]  If you didn't, like, check out the episode where YayQuery took over.
+[51.14 --> 52.76]  Definitely go back and listen to that one.
+[52.82 --> 56.16]  That one was so good that Rachel and I were actually fired.
+[56.16 --> 60.62]  I got a text from Adam Stachowiak while I was in Europe, but just said you're fired.
+[61.54 --> 64.56]  And then it turned out that they can't do it.
+[64.70 --> 67.94]  They can't schedule it for another nine months.
+[68.20 --> 73.44]  So we're filling in now for them until they can come back around.
+[74.10 --> 75.00]  All right. Let's jump into it.
+[75.00 --> 84.30]  Okay. So we're going to talk about actually using ES6 and ES7 features, new language features,
+[84.40 --> 87.34]  with and without compilers and some of the trade-offs and stuff like that.
+[88.04 --> 89.34]  Don't look at my years now.
+[89.74 --> 91.32]  Is it ES2015?
+[91.32 --> 97.46]  I think that we should just talk about specific features rather than what bucket they land in,
+[97.54 --> 99.90]  because they actually get implemented sort of out of order anyway.
+[100.16 --> 100.28]  Right.
+[100.62 --> 106.92]  So Rachel, what features are you using that you've been enjoying from the new language stuff?
+[107.62 --> 108.18]  I'm not.
+[109.54 --> 110.10]  You're not.
+[110.10 --> 110.12]  You're not.
+[110.12 --> 110.14]  You're not.
+[110.14 --> 110.20]  You're not.
+[110.20 --> 110.74]  You're not.
+[110.74 --> 110.92]  You're sick.
+[110.92 --> 116.90]  No. I mean, the only thing that I've used really, because since I don't write production code,
+[116.96 --> 118.16]  nobody tells me what to do.
+[118.28 --> 122.78]  So I kind of just do what I've always done.
+[122.98 --> 129.60]  So I've worked with some things that have the new variable naming and stuff like that.
+[129.62 --> 132.84]  But that's really all that I've dipped my toes in.
+[132.94 --> 134.12]  And what is the other thing?
+[134.12 --> 135.64]  Like let is in there?
+[135.78 --> 136.26]  I don't know.
+[136.68 --> 137.28]  Enlighten me.
+[137.96 --> 138.76]  Let's been there forever.
+[138.76 --> 145.78]  I think the big ones for me have been arrow functions and template literals.
+[146.12 --> 147.78]  The arrow functions are super cool.
+[147.96 --> 152.16]  And I totally get that it helps with readability so much.
+[152.74 --> 156.98]  But I'm still stuck in that mindset of forgetting to use it.
+[157.12 --> 160.74]  And I feel like if I'm going to incorporate all of the new type of things,
+[160.74 --> 165.30]  I'm going to have to enforce it to strict in my code linting.
+[165.30 --> 169.76]  But other than that, I'm not actively going out of my way to use it.
+[169.82 --> 172.56]  Because nobody tells me what to do when I write code.
+[174.62 --> 176.46]  So let me jump in.
+[176.94 --> 182.74]  I think I disagree that it makes code more readable.
+[183.08 --> 189.64]  I often am looking at typed and arrow function JavaScript.
+[189.64 --> 192.98]  So there are types in there and then there are arrow functions.
+[193.18 --> 195.08]  And people use implicit returns and stuff.
+[195.50 --> 200.14]  And I look at it and it does not look recognizable to me.
+[200.54 --> 202.88]  I'm smart enough to figure it out or whatever.
+[203.00 --> 205.40]  But I can no longer scan it the same way.
+[205.52 --> 205.88]  I don't know.
+[205.94 --> 207.80]  It's just a skill that you can do.
+[208.26 --> 211.56]  I'm lucky enough that a lot of the stuff that I work on is fairly small.
+[211.78 --> 214.40]  So when it's much smaller scale, I think it's readable.
+[214.40 --> 220.46]  But I could totally get if you're looking at larger systems where you would be scanning through a lot of lines,
+[220.52 --> 222.92]  it would be kind of hard to pattern match.
+[224.24 --> 229.44]  It certainly encourages unnamed functions for one thing.
+[229.98 --> 231.44]  Yeah, that's true.
+[231.80 --> 233.68]  I don't like anonymous functions.
+[233.90 --> 235.92]  I like to try and name everything if I can.
+[236.74 --> 237.18]  I don't know.
+[237.18 --> 249.10]  I mean, they've gotten so small and so kind of easy to use that I'm able to use them in ways that you wouldn't use functions before because it would just be too verbose.
+[249.44 --> 249.54]  Right.
+[250.10 --> 260.96]  There's a couple libraries that I've written for like templatized HTML and using functions inside of a template literal and stuff like that.
+[261.00 --> 263.10]  Like that would have just been too verbose beforehand.
+[263.42 --> 263.56]  Right.
+[264.14 --> 264.42]  Sure.
+[264.42 --> 276.36]  And I think I mean, I was certainly one of those people like I mean, you can dig up me saying this, that like the problem with arrow functions is that it's just a bunch of extra semantics that you have to keep in your head, which is true.
+[276.36 --> 277.42]  Like it is.
+[277.88 --> 283.22]  And like to your point, Alex, it's certainly not as easily readable as the word function.
+[283.38 --> 284.98]  It's pretty clear what that is.
+[285.26 --> 287.14]  This arrow thing could be anything.
+[287.14 --> 287.46]  Right.
+[287.78 --> 292.34]  And so it is more semantics you have to keep in your head like like any other language rule.
+[292.34 --> 295.96]  So, but the net of semantics, the semantics.
+[296.16 --> 297.56]  So just sorry to interrupt.
+[297.72 --> 304.40]  The semantics are are maybe easier because it's just like it's we talked about this a little bit where you're gone.
+[304.40 --> 312.08]  It is kind of just literal scope of the variables.
+[312.14 --> 312.88]  There's no bound.
+[314.00 --> 316.34]  It's just lexical scope of variables.
+[316.34 --> 326.98]  So you can reason about what a variable or what this is much more simply because it's impossible for it to be anything but lexical, lexically bound.
+[326.98 --> 334.16]  So to some degree, like you can forget about some things that functions add.
+[334.54 --> 340.44]  And then to another degree, like it's hard to scan maybe, especially with implicit returns.
+[341.14 --> 341.24]  Yeah.
+[341.34 --> 341.46]  Yeah.
+[341.46 --> 348.78]  I was just going to say whatever sort of complexity they they take take out of the pool by by by not having this.
+[348.78 --> 351.24]  Um, they probably add it with the implicit return stuff.
+[351.34 --> 363.58]  But so I'm I don't know if you saw this or not, but there was a, uh, a post that somebody did where he was essentially saying that his his style guide now is that he no longer uses the function keyword ever.
+[363.58 --> 365.64]  So he doesn't use old style functions anywhere.
+[365.64 --> 373.72]  Um, everything is arrow functions, um, and classes, um, have like a different new function syntax for properties.
+[373.72 --> 380.62]  And so he uses those when when you would have traditionally used, um, functions for any kind of prototypal stuff or or referencing this.
+[380.62 --> 382.12]  Um, and I'm curious.
+[382.78 --> 387.50]  Is this just for like personal projects or is this like in practice in his job?
+[388.18 --> 389.26]  Or you do not know?
+[389.50 --> 390.24]  I think both.
+[390.40 --> 390.92]  I think both.
+[390.92 --> 395.74]  I mean, he's certainly advocating it to other people, which I assume, you know, would also be for production use.
+[395.90 --> 403.86]  But I think that the argument that this actually can reduce complexity if you stop using older syntax is one that comes up a lot.
+[403.92 --> 404.70]  Like people talk about.
+[405.14 --> 405.34]  Yeah.
+[405.52 --> 409.82]  You know, like like eventually the language does get simpler if we can stop using some of these older forms.
+[410.00 --> 413.28]  Um, and this is this is certainly, you know, somebody advocating for that.
+[413.28 --> 423.44]  But so the, the primary rift I had with the person at my company who felt the same was that I was thinking of functions as the default and arrows as the sugar.
+[423.44 --> 435.50]  And he was thinking of arrows as the default and functions as the sugar because arrows are other than in implicit returns are simpler in the sense that they can't be bound.
+[435.70 --> 445.22]  And so he's like, well, why would we use the more complex one that can have all these weird binding situations instead of using the default arrow functions, which are lexically bound.
+[445.22 --> 446.40]  And so you always know.
+[446.94 --> 452.32]  And so like, for me, an unbound function keyword is fine.
+[452.82 --> 456.96]  Like an unbound function is fine because like, I'm just not using this inside of it.
+[457.02 --> 462.94]  But for him, it's like, why would you use the thing that could be bound when you could just use the thing that's always lexically bound.
+[463.34 --> 473.88]  And so it's an interesting like perspective of once you kind of switch over, like seeing the arrows as the default and the function as like this thing that can be different.
+[473.88 --> 490.28]  The problem is that, so even, I forgot who you said does this, but the class functions, if you just use the syntax inside classes where you do, you know, a class and then you just tab inside the blocks and you do function name.
+[491.34 --> 492.92]  That is not an arrow function.
+[493.12 --> 494.16]  It's not lexically bound.
+[494.16 --> 504.88]  And you have to do function name equals open parens arrow function function in order to get a lexically bound function in there.
+[504.94 --> 507.52]  So it's actually like you kind of have to modify some of that syntax.
+[508.06 --> 514.58]  And then like if you decide, okay, I'm always going to use that syntax, like the constructor inside of there can't be listed like that.
+[514.64 --> 516.00]  You have to do the constructor the old way.
+[516.00 --> 524.12]  And so it could be bound, but you can't find constructors and then like a whole bunch of things like that start getting weird.
+[524.80 --> 528.10]  Well, in the case of classes, though, you often do want to reference this, though.
+[528.18 --> 529.24]  Like you have a use for that.
+[529.36 --> 532.92]  I think that what he was saying was that we can take the function keyword out of it at least.
+[533.08 --> 534.54]  And then we can not have this ambiguity.
+[534.80 --> 535.32]  Yeah, no.
+[535.42 --> 540.00]  So what I'm saying is that if you use arrow functions, the functions can't be rebound.
+[540.00 --> 549.62]  It's guaranteed to be lexically bound, whereas if you use just the class syntax, it more mimics using the function keyword.
+[549.98 --> 554.28]  And then using this will default to the right thing probably to what you want.
+[554.28 --> 562.64]  But pulling it out, like if you just use an instance, kind of like a static function, like this can change very quickly to window.
+[563.40 --> 565.52]  Like all those types of problems start to show up again.
+[565.52 --> 571.76]  And it's just sugar for, you know, prototypal properties on an object.
+[572.22 --> 574.90]  So there are still gotchas if you use the class syntax.
+[575.12 --> 581.68]  Like you could still go further and say, I still want to use arrow syntax inside of my classes, if that makes sense.
+[582.86 --> 583.60]  Yeah, yeah.
+[583.66 --> 585.18]  I guess you could take it.
+[585.18 --> 593.38]  And I think if you are going to say we require arrow functions everywhere they can be used, you should also require them in classes.
+[593.38 --> 609.48]  So rather than saying like function name, open paren arguments, and then brackets with the function, you should say function name equals open paren fat arrow brackets, if that kind of makes sense.
+[609.56 --> 609.90]  Yeah, yeah.
+[609.96 --> 615.28]  I don't think that the point that any of these people are trying to make, though, is to be zealots about arrow functions.
+[615.28 --> 621.58]  I think the point that they're making is that we can deprecate the use of the function keyword and just rely on these new rules.
+[621.82 --> 622.28]  Yeah, I disagree.
+[622.64 --> 629.76]  And then we get out of a lot of like ambiguity if we're just using the new rules around classes.
+[630.32 --> 636.40]  I think I disagree on what those people, at least the people I've talked to who are doing this, aren't necessarily.
+[636.40 --> 642.46]  They're not doing it just because they think it looks better or it's smaller or it's more streamlined or anything like that.
+[642.50 --> 649.30]  They're explicitly doing it because of the lexically bound ambiguity like problems go away.
+[649.78 --> 656.42]  And so you end up with a program that only has lexically bindable functions.
+[656.42 --> 667.86]  And so it's important to do it everywhere, even if the syntax is old, like if there's some way to use the old function syntax and then just say, oh, this is a lexically bound function.
+[668.18 --> 669.24]  Like they would still be cool with that.
+[669.32 --> 670.40]  It's not about the fat arrow.
+[670.52 --> 677.14]  It's about the semantics of how the function kind of exists and how it can change and what contexts it can run in.
+[677.34 --> 683.76]  And it's taking away the foot gun of this changing out from under you, I think is the goal.
+[683.76 --> 692.56]  So transitioning a little bit, like we're talking about all these features and I assume that we're talking about using them.
+[693.00 --> 695.76]  Actually, my assumption is that we're talking about using them without a compiler.
+[695.98 --> 698.10]  And I think that may not be your assumption.
+[699.68 --> 705.62]  I'm wondering, like, so where can you where do you have to have a compiler down to ES5 to use this stuff right now?
+[706.00 --> 711.56]  Like where like like are there IoT devices that have older VH that we have to worry about?
+[711.56 --> 717.08]  Are there like which browsers like still don't support this kind of garbage?
+[717.30 --> 719.54]  I mean, we're not supporting IE6 anymore, right?
+[719.64 --> 720.54]  Like we're done with that.
+[720.64 --> 721.56]  That conversation is over.
+[721.56 --> 726.96]  So like IE9 doesn't, IE1011 get into some of the territory, but still are missing quite a bit.
+[727.30 --> 732.92]  I think the problem is that, and Babbel's perfectly capable of doing this.
+[732.92 --> 739.38]  It's just somewhat uninteresting to try to solve unless there's a performance problem.
+[739.76 --> 747.36]  But if you think about your application, there's probably, let's say you're using 10 new ES star features.
+[747.36 --> 758.48]  And one of them is like object spreads, which is like totally going to get in the language, but isn't in any browsers or node or anything like that.
+[758.54 --> 760.82]  It's just like an obvious thing that we're going to do.
+[760.92 --> 767.62]  And it's really useful to be able to, much like an argument spread or an array spread, you can do the same thing into an object.
+[767.84 --> 772.86]  It kind of like finally solves the jQuery extend thing.
+[772.86 --> 779.26]  So does object assign, but the problem is that you're already compiling with Babbel at that point.
+[779.88 --> 782.70]  And so you're saying like, well, I want all these features in Babbel.
+[783.04 --> 787.48]  And you could just say, well, I just want object spreads and I know the rest will.
+[787.80 --> 791.64]  But at the point where you pull in a compiler, you're like, well, I might as well just go down to ES5.
+[791.92 --> 793.28]  And I think that's the common way.
+[793.34 --> 800.70]  It's just let me pull in all of everything that I know I need to compile to because I want to just work everywhere.
+[800.70 --> 807.26]  And then people don't think about it too much past there because there isn't too much of a hit for many things.
+[807.64 --> 809.68]  This isn't my thinking at all, though.
+[809.98 --> 817.42]  And like, I don't know if Rachel feels similar to this, but like I don't use a compiler like ever for like down to a different language.
+[817.62 --> 820.06]  And so like I only use browsers that support this.
+[820.10 --> 823.82]  And like if it's a feature that isn't widely available, like I just don't use that feature.
+[824.00 --> 824.36]  Same.
+[824.64 --> 825.24]  I don't.
+[825.32 --> 825.56]  Yeah.
+[825.94 --> 827.68]  I think you guys are definitely in the minority.
+[827.68 --> 831.34]  I don't think like that seems a little nuts to me.
+[831.48 --> 837.22]  Like I really enjoy like line numbers and like just like a lot of the simplicity of not having it.
+[837.96 --> 839.16]  Well, yes, yes, yes.
+[839.68 --> 841.30]  Provided that you have all that tool properly.
+[841.52 --> 843.00]  And it can be kind of a pain.
+[843.14 --> 846.34]  I mean, like, look, if you're going to use Babel, then you're already in this boat.
+[846.42 --> 848.66]  Or sorry, if you're going to use like React, you're already in this boat.
+[848.98 --> 849.12]  Right.
+[849.42 --> 855.70]  So there's enough people like using frameworks or other upper level tools where the compiler is just part of that tool chain already.
+[855.70 --> 861.40]  But like I'm certainly not going to add Babel to my Node project in order to use object spread.
+[861.56 --> 862.90]  Like that's not going to be that.
+[863.06 --> 864.68]  That's just like I don't understand that thinking.
+[864.82 --> 866.44]  And I don't think that a lot of people do that.
+[866.72 --> 868.56]  I think a lot of people do that.
+[868.74 --> 878.58]  I think it's pretty common these days to just start your project writing in the new thing, even if it's compatible with like the latest browsers or the latest whatever.
+[878.98 --> 880.16]  Your pure Node module?
+[880.34 --> 883.64]  Your pure Node module, you're going to like already have a compiler.
+[883.64 --> 891.72]  I think Node is a little bit less this way because there are different norms there.
+[892.38 --> 897.32]  But I think even in those cases, it's somewhat common to see.
+[897.80 --> 898.18]  Yeah, sure.
+[898.76 --> 903.20]  Like I wonder how many IoT projects Rachel has seen where they're compiling things with Babel.
+[904.58 --> 906.76]  Not many, that's for sure.
+[906.76 --> 917.92]  Yeah, I mean, I think IoT projects in the grand scheme of the amount of JavaScript that's being written are a small percentage.
+[918.40 --> 920.92]  And that doesn't make them unimportant or anything like that.
+[921.00 --> 927.56]  I'm just saying that I think the average JavaScript developer these days is working in a framework.
+[927.56 --> 935.28]  And those frameworks somewhat already introduce enough compile steps to where it's just a non-issue to add this.
+[935.36 --> 946.46]  So if you're working in Vue or you're working in React or you're working in Ember or you're working in Angular or you're working in any of these things, you have a Babel-like compiler already in your stack.
+[946.46 --> 951.28]  And so adding object spreads is just like a decision you can make or not.
+[952.10 --> 958.40]  So I feel like the most of the features that I have used and interacted with would have been like things that we touched on already.
+[958.60 --> 965.52]  You know, cons, let, arrow functions, some of the way that they're doing class definitions and stuff like that.
+[965.84 --> 969.24]  I guess this is about going to be the same thing that Michael was just about to ask.
+[969.30 --> 971.94]  Are there any like features that you aren't using?
+[971.94 --> 979.34]  Like which ones do you two think are the ones that people aren't really like, you know, fully embracing or trying out yet?
+[980.00 --> 982.24]  I mean, I guess there's two buckets there.
+[983.32 --> 993.36]  Ones that people aren't trying out yet because they're bad and ones that people aren't trying out yet because they aren't fully aware of them or they aren't fully powerful or things like that.
+[993.52 --> 996.24]  I guess there's things that go in both buckets.
+[996.24 --> 1005.40]  I mean, a lot of the stuff we use in Babel and the stuff that we're compiling down to is stuff that isn't even finished getting through ECMA and will change.
+[1005.60 --> 1007.48]  Like modules is something that everyone uses.
+[1007.66 --> 1014.46]  And like a lot of the semantics of how modules load like haven't been known for a really long time.
+[1014.46 --> 1033.84]  And that's kind of the driving force behind the problem with getting proper modules into Node specifically because we've been doing it slightly wrong for so long because we kind of just wanted to compile ahead of time that now there's a clash in the semantics of how it should really work.
+[1033.96 --> 1038.12]  And we're going to have to kind of work around that problem for a little while.
+[1038.12 --> 1047.86]  Yeah, I mean, without getting the specifics there, there's actually a particular point where the spec sort of implies but does not define how things are supposed to work.
+[1048.40 --> 1051.12]  And Babel made a decision about how they work at one point.
+[1051.94 --> 1054.48]  And we're not going to be able to support that.
+[1054.58 --> 1061.60]  And noted, in fact, the spec committee said that we should not do that and go that route because of some of the other tradeoffs that it would have to make.
+[1061.60 --> 1068.52]  So, yeah, there's just there's stuff that until they're, you know, that one's even out like that one is actually in the spec.
+[1068.64 --> 1073.98]  We just haven't had enough implementations to know what some of these like really, really nitty gritty details are.
+[1075.44 --> 1076.50]  So, yeah, yeah.
+[1076.56 --> 1082.94]  I mean, like you're you're you're by definition kind of on the bleeding edge if you're using features that aren't even actually in the browser yet.
+[1084.20 --> 1085.52]  Modules are in the browser now, though.
+[1086.68 --> 1087.70]  In one browser.
+[1087.86 --> 1088.02]  Yeah.
+[1090.22 --> 1090.86]  Pretty cool.
+[1091.60 --> 1091.78]  Yeah.
+[1092.00 --> 1094.22]  So what features are you staying away from, though?
+[1094.32 --> 1095.50]  Like actually staying away from?
+[1096.18 --> 1097.32]  The ones that I don't need.
+[1099.56 --> 1102.40]  I think proxies are a terrible idea and that nobody should use them.
+[1102.72 --> 1104.76]  They're just a performance bottleneck.
+[1105.72 --> 1108.94]  Proxies were a really good idea for like a hot second.
+[1108.94 --> 1114.32]  It seemed like a really solid solution to a thing that everyone was trying to solve at the time.
+[1115.00 --> 1120.60]  And then, like, we found different ways to we found better ways to solve those user land problems.
+[1120.60 --> 1125.22]  And then proxies became this thing that made a lot less sense.
+[1126.04 --> 1129.50]  Namely, like the get set type problems.
+[1129.72 --> 1133.80]  Like the way that Ember used to work where you have to do dot get and dot set.
+[1133.80 --> 1145.24]  Like there was a world where proxies in the future could do more getter setter type stuff to where you could just say, you know, like my object dot foo equals five.
+[1145.24 --> 1151.24]  And then that would be the same as saying my object set foo five or whatever.
+[1151.24 --> 1157.28]  It would happen to do like it would need to do that because we need to run functions when things change in order to re-render.
+[1157.28 --> 1169.96]  But now with like virtual doms and all that kind of stuff, like the community moved on to different techniques for solving that problem that are a little less magic.
+[1170.72 --> 1172.52]  So I think proxies kind of fell.
+[1172.96 --> 1177.14]  There are certainly like use cases, but I think they're pretty small.
+[1177.14 --> 1183.22]  So generally, if you're using proxies, you're hacking the crap out of a closed library these days.
+[1183.22 --> 1192.90]  Yeah, I remember similar features are in Python metaclasses and the guidance for metaclasses is don't use metaclasses.
+[1195.68 --> 1197.52]  Other things I'm trying to think.
+[1197.76 --> 1202.54]  There are definitely like proposals that I think it's less about.
+[1202.74 --> 1204.60]  I'll use anything that's kind of in the language.
+[1204.84 --> 1212.98]  Like they're pretty conservative, I think, about by the time it gets in the language, everyone's already been using it for so long that it's not even.
+[1213.22 --> 1214.66]  That cool.
+[1215.54 --> 1222.30]  But there are definitely things that are, you know, level two in the spec that I don't think are ever going to make it.
+[1222.50 --> 1229.74]  Things like you could turn on stuff for like immutable types or even like one thing I don't use is decorators.
+[1230.42 --> 1234.70]  I am skeptical that decorators are going to go the distance.
+[1234.96 --> 1239.06]  And so I've been avoiding decorators.
+[1239.30 --> 1240.60]  I don't have any data.
+[1240.60 --> 1243.46]  I'm just waiting till they're like more of a sure thing, I guess.
+[1244.02 --> 1246.86]  I used them when I was a Python programmer.
+[1247.20 --> 1250.88]  And my general feeling is that they complicate more than they simplify.
+[1251.66 --> 1258.48]  Yeah, there are some cases where they're like, I think the authentication case for decorators is so pretty all the time.
+[1258.48 --> 1267.70]  It's just like this is an authenticated function and just like magically makes off something that makes sense like on a per function basis.
+[1268.00 --> 1272.96]  And so like that's such a cool use case for decorators that it makes you want to use them a little bit more.
+[1273.16 --> 1275.76]  But I think they have a place.
+[1275.90 --> 1278.04]  And I know the Ember community uses them a little bit.
+[1278.22 --> 1279.82]  Like there are also people in the React community.
+[1280.82 --> 1285.76]  Ember concurrent uses decorators to do some of their stuff.
+[1285.76 --> 1288.12]  And I think that it's a decent use case for it.
+[1288.12 --> 1295.44]  But in general, I haven't seen a huge need for them, even though I'd probably use them once they made it into the language.
+[1295.96 --> 1299.78]  Once they became more of a first class supported thing by the libraries I was using.
+[1300.44 --> 1300.70]  I don't know.
+[1300.90 --> 1303.70]  I'm more on the functional programming side of things.
+[1303.88 --> 1307.32]  And so I just don't like encouraging people to write more classes.
+[1307.32 --> 1307.96]  Sure.
+[1308.40 --> 1311.56]  I think, I mean, that's a different conversation.
+[1311.88 --> 1319.64]  But there are kind of two properties that I think the, I'm pretty happy with the React worlds.
+[1320.42 --> 1324.60]  There are function components and some people are very big into that.
+[1324.80 --> 1328.30]  But I actually don't mind the class components.
+[1328.30 --> 1335.82]  But then all functions that are a part of it are like pure functions and like that kind of stuff.
+[1335.92 --> 1344.20]  Kind of a mix of some of the better parts of each of the patterns to where you don't have crazy side effects and you don't have these different things.
+[1345.56 --> 1354.54]  But then your kind of view layer is a little more readable than just, you know, a function that calls a function that sends half of its arguments to another function.
+[1354.54 --> 1356.96]  So, I don't know.
+[1357.04 --> 1358.20]  I think there's middle ground there.
+[1358.32 --> 1358.88]  That's nice.
+[1360.14 --> 1360.42]  Yeah.
+[1360.64 --> 1363.24]  I think that we've hit a nice little spot here.
+[1364.20 --> 1366.32]  I think we can take a short break.
+[1366.92 --> 1370.04]  When we come back, we're going to get into Create React App.
+[1371.74 --> 1377.62]  First sponsor of the show today is our friends at Sentry, helping you to find and fix your errors in your applications.
+[1378.22 --> 1380.54]  You can start tracking your errors today totally free.
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+[1407.48 --> 1410.86]  So, once again, jsparty.fm slash Sentry.
+[1411.04 --> 1412.08]  And now back to the show.
+[1414.18 --> 1418.98]  We're going to get into some new features that just landed in Create React App.
+[1419.40 --> 1421.60]  It actually seems like a pretty substantial change.
+[1422.12 --> 1422.76]  We've talked about Create React.
+[1422.76 --> 1423.24]  1.0.
+[1423.58 --> 1424.12]  Yeah, yeah.
+[1424.18 --> 1427.28]  We've talked about Create React App on the show before.
+[1427.54 --> 1434.54]  But Alex, why don't you give us a little bit of that backstory and a little bit about this in less than 12 minutes.
+[1434.84 --> 1435.28]  How about that?
+[1435.28 --> 1436.40]  In less than 12 minutes.
+[1436.40 --> 1437.14]  That's tough.
+[1437.38 --> 1438.72]  That's an Alex problem.
+[1439.42 --> 1439.64]  All right.
+[1439.86 --> 1443.32]  Create React App is very similar to Ember CLI.
+[1443.44 --> 1450.96]  If you've ever used Ember, I think Angular has its own CLI tool as well that I don't know the name of.
+[1450.96 --> 1461.08]  But pretty much the goal of Create React App is to kind of manage all of the things that Michael's always complaining about for you.
+[1461.26 --> 1462.56]  That way you don't have to care about them.
+[1462.56 --> 1474.02]  So if you want to color completely in the lines of the suggested React world set of tools.
+[1474.48 --> 1475.92]  And Webpack for that matter.
+[1475.92 --> 1477.56]  Well, yeah.
+[1477.56 --> 1482.32]  It's included in the suggested React world set of tools.
+[1483.20 --> 1485.24]  Then you can use Create React App.
+[1485.32 --> 1489.84]  And the idea is that you can say, create React App to do.
+[1489.84 --> 1496.26]  And then you have a React app for to do's that automatically compiles your ES6.
+[1496.26 --> 1509.46]  has a way to do CSS in JavaScript and does error handling and building and all sorts of the different things that you would normally have to set up manually one by one.
+[1509.60 --> 1511.88]  All is this one big kind of package.
+[1511.98 --> 1513.86]  It's kind of a template to get started with a project.
+[1513.86 --> 1517.12]  But one thing that is important.
+[1517.34 --> 1518.30]  And the history is interesting.
+[1518.46 --> 1523.28]  It was like a hack weekend project because React was one of.
+[1523.52 --> 1530.56]  A lot of the feedback React got was that there's no kind of baseline of guaranteed supported tools that work together.
+[1530.96 --> 1534.34]  And this is kind of like an answer to say like, well, this stuff all works together.
+[1536.24 --> 1539.34]  So it was kind of like a hackathon one day thing.
+[1539.42 --> 1543.18]  And then it's grown up a lot since then.
+[1543.18 --> 1545.18]  And this is the 1.0 release.
+[1545.54 --> 1548.84]  So it's been in use by a lot of people already.
+[1549.92 --> 1551.88]  But now it's gone 1.0.
+[1552.18 --> 1556.24]  And so the idea is you have to stay within there.
+[1558.40 --> 1560.44]  So even like it configures your ESLint.
+[1560.52 --> 1561.46]  It configures your Webpack.
+[1561.54 --> 1562.70]  It configures your CSS.
+[1562.96 --> 1564.12]  It configures your Babel.
+[1564.50 --> 1565.42]  All those different things.
+[1565.86 --> 1571.94]  And that configuration is even hidden from you because if you change it, then it's hard for them to make the assumptions that they can make.
+[1571.94 --> 1580.64]  And so you can either choose to use Create React app as this thing that you can constantly update because you're staying within the coloring lines.
+[1580.64 --> 1584.54]  Or you can use Create React app to like generate a thing.
+[1584.54 --> 1587.36]  And then you can do what they call ejecting.
+[1587.56 --> 1590.84]  And so you can eject from Create React app as soon as you create your app.
+[1591.00 --> 1595.98]  It'll pull all that configuration into kind of your core directory or where it would go if you wrote it yourself.
+[1596.26 --> 1598.34]  And then you can just edit it and all that stuff.
+[1598.34 --> 1605.56]  But you can no longer kind of pull updates from Create React app in order to like get automatic updates if that kind of makes sense.
+[1607.58 --> 1609.96]  So does that make sense as kind of a background?
+[1611.38 --> 1612.70]  Makes sense to me.
+[1613.16 --> 1613.38]  Cool.
+[1613.38 --> 1626.38]  So like in general, I found that like with the things at work that are difficult to like do, if I want to do a Create React app, I have to eject pretty fast.
+[1627.84 --> 1632.44]  Because we need to change one ESLint thing in order to work with our build servers.
+[1632.70 --> 1633.62]  And it's like, oh, that kind of stinks.
+[1634.16 --> 1636.06]  And that's like part of the deal.
+[1636.20 --> 1638.48]  It's like if you can't do it, then you just don't get the updates.
+[1638.48 --> 1641.28]  And sometimes that is not a problem.
+[1641.40 --> 1650.30]  In general, like I haven't kind of missed, I haven't like paid enough attention to Create React app to get mad when they have an update and my thing can update with them.
+[1650.64 --> 1657.96]  But this release would be maybe a good example of something that's like, well, if you stayed in the coloring lines, this would be a really nifty change.
+[1658.20 --> 1661.92]  So we can go through the changes in 1.0 if you all want.
+[1662.46 --> 1663.00]  Sure, sure.
+[1663.00 --> 1671.92]  My first question is that it says something on the order of like, okay, you can use import and export semantics now without actually compiling down to CommonJS.
+[1672.14 --> 1673.68]  But it's compiling down to something, right?
+[1673.80 --> 1674.68]  Just to get into the browser.
+[1674.86 --> 1677.12]  It's not relying on the browser's support yet.
+[1677.82 --> 1678.70]  So it could.
+[1679.50 --> 1684.08]  So the idea is, this is, I think you skipped ahead.
+[1684.56 --> 1689.34]  Webpack 2 is a part of Create React app now.
+[1689.48 --> 1691.02]  So it used to be based on Webpack 1.
+[1691.02 --> 1698.08]  When most people are on Webpack 1, Webpack 2 is pretty new and it's a pretty, it's a larger departure than a lot of 2.0s would be.
+[1698.20 --> 1701.70]  And so it's going to take some work to get people moved over.
+[1701.80 --> 1713.06]  But one of the features of Webpack 2 is that it supports imports and exports natively, like at all, as part of its parser.
+[1713.06 --> 1723.24]  And so before, if you gave Webpack 2 imports and exports ES6 modules and you weren't using Babel, nothing would happen.
+[1723.40 --> 1726.42]  Like it would break because it wouldn't understand that.
+[1726.52 --> 1734.80]  So what the steps would be, it would be compile with Babel to, you know, require statements and then pass it to Webpack.
+[1734.80 --> 1735.98]  Oh, okay.
+[1735.98 --> 1738.08]  And then Webpack could understand the require statements.
+[1738.48 --> 1747.82]  But there are some features in ES6 modules like static analysis and stuff like that that are more guaranteed in ES6 modules.
+[1747.94 --> 1754.30]  So they were able to say like, all right, we no longer care if you pass this require or these things.
+[1754.30 --> 1762.26]  And so you may skip the Babel step in order to pass imports and exports rather than first compiling down to Webpack.
+[1762.38 --> 1774.34]  And then it can use like the proper static analysis that is guaranteed as part of ES6 modules in order to do better things with regards to bundle size and tree shaking and dynamic loading and all that kind of stuff.
+[1774.34 --> 1788.40]  And so it's more of a what does Webpack understand rather than you still may or you still more than likely at the end will compile it down to require statements that like from whatever library in order to to bundle it all together.
+[1788.48 --> 1789.98]  It's like part of what Webpack does.
+[1790.18 --> 1792.92]  But it natively understands imports and exports now.
+[1792.92 --> 1822.10]  And that is now included automatically in Create React App, which means that if you were coloring in the lines before, all you have to do is update your Create React App kind of instance, the version, and you were automatically upgraded from Webpack 1 to Webpack 2, which is kind of the amazing thing is that like, whoa, that was a pretty big upgrade from Webpack 1 to 2 that a lot of people are going to spend a lot of time rewriting their Webpack configurations.
+[1822.10 --> 1824.74]  And it was free because you stay within the lines.
+[1824.96 --> 1827.86]  Someone else like worked on the hard parts of that, which is cool.
+[1828.06 --> 1828.42]  It's nifty.
+[1828.74 --> 1829.22]  It's a good idea.
+[1829.96 --> 1830.86]  Does that make sense, Michael?
+[1831.44 --> 1837.28]  Yeah, it's just it's yeah, I'm just constantly sort of reframing how to think about Webpack.
+[1837.42 --> 1843.02]  I think that the longest time I think everybody kind of thought of it as like this compile tool.
+[1843.26 --> 1846.72]  And but in actuality, it's more like a platform onto itself.
+[1846.72 --> 1855.12]  Like it has a lot of primitives like a like its own module system and with with more types and things like that than the node does.
+[1856.20 --> 1859.40]  So, yeah, I'm just kind of reframing how to think about that.
+[1859.94 --> 1861.24]  Yeah, it is an interesting tool.
+[1861.54 --> 1865.96]  Like it kind of crosses over a few different boundaries of old tools that we've had.
+[1866.28 --> 1871.28]  And so if you think about it as a grunt type thing, you'll think about it as a grunt type thing.
+[1871.34 --> 1874.24]  If you think about it as a babble type thing, you'll think about it as a babble type thing.
+[1874.24 --> 1879.10]  But like it kind of is more of a piece of glue.
+[1879.68 --> 1886.58]  But then it still needs to understand things like ES6 modules natively in order to do tree shaking and things like that.
+[1886.98 --> 1889.80]  So it's an interesting project.
+[1890.46 --> 1896.44]  So I was going through and like reading the whole what's new in the React or create React app article.
+[1897.10 --> 1898.40]  And a bunch of it made sense to me.
+[1898.44 --> 1903.18]  But there's some things in here that I've like never heard of and I have no idea what they are.
+[1903.18 --> 1906.18]  So one of those being just 20.
+[1907.50 --> 1909.12]  Yeah, it's a React specific thing.
+[1909.26 --> 1912.14]  Just is the test running framework for React.
+[1912.86 --> 1919.52]  So it's just they've upgraded just, I guess, two versions that used to be just 18 or something like that.
+[1919.88 --> 1921.52]  There are like testing.
+[1921.52 --> 1926.48]  Testing is we should do a whole episode on testing sometime in the future.
+[1926.48 --> 1936.76]  But one of the hardest parts about testing in the past, if you guys have done testing like at scale for a web app, which may not be the case.
+[1936.76 --> 1949.74]  But like functional tests are so sad where you need to like pop open a browser with XVFB and then send web driver commands to it in order to try to click around.
+[1950.14 --> 1951.22]  Like they're so slow.
+[1951.36 --> 1956.36]  They have so many like false positives and timeouts and problems.
+[1956.70 --> 1959.78]  And Chrome automatically updates and breaks all your tests.
+[1959.78 --> 1962.62]  And web driver implementations are shady between the different.
+[1963.04 --> 1973.68]  But like there's so many problems with that that there's this new world of writing like unit tests where you can kind of mount components directly into memory.
+[1973.68 --> 1983.42]  And then like kind of write functional style tests as something that doesn't need a browser at all.
+[1983.98 --> 1990.42]  And it's a little different than running like JSDOM, which is like essentially providing it a subset of a browser.
+[1990.70 --> 2000.52]  And you can do a lot of the tests that you used to do very slowly, very non-deterministically with browsers as a unit test where you say like,
+[2000.52 --> 2007.58]  well, if this function, like if a click is applied here and then this, the DOM should then reflect these different things.
+[2007.80 --> 2013.48]  And you can test all that stuff like on a per component basis very quickly without spinning up a whole browser.
+[2013.90 --> 2020.34]  So JEST is good at helping you manage those types of things.
+[2020.90 --> 2029.24]  In general, if you're writing React code, there's a pretty, JEST would be your default choice, even if it's not.
+[2029.24 --> 2034.76]  I doubt it has like more than 70% saturation, but that's pretty good.
+[2034.84 --> 2039.48]  There's still quite a few other options that people use, Ava and a few different things.
+[2039.90 --> 2047.06]  JEST is, I think, coming around and winning the default choice for testing because Facebook wrote it and supports it and stuff.
+[2047.32 --> 2049.58]  So is this one just bundled with the new release?
+[2050.12 --> 2052.18]  Yeah, so JEST used to be bundled.
+[2052.36 --> 2053.38]  It's just a new version.
+[2053.38 --> 2059.80]  And so there are new things that the highlights include immersive watch mode, better snapshot format.
+[2059.92 --> 2065.62]  So snapshots are where you can say like, once this is rendered with this data, the HTML should look exactly like X.
+[2066.12 --> 2067.26]  And then it can test.
+[2067.36 --> 2071.94]  So it's kind of like whenever people do screenshots with like CSS frameworks and stuff like that.
+[2071.94 --> 2072.72]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
+[2072.74 --> 2073.86]  It needs to be pixel perfect.
+[2073.98 --> 2077.20]  You can do the same thing with the HTML output of your components.
+[2077.20 --> 2082.64]  You can just say snapshot, like I don't need to write down what it should look like, but I know this is good snapshot.
+[2082.84 --> 2085.34]  It shouldn't change unless I change that module.
+[2085.76 --> 2090.54]  And so if some dependency accidentally starts changing your HTML, you'll get a test failure.
+[2092.24 --> 2097.18]  And then just like the output and stuff, APIs for new stuff for React.
+[2097.44 --> 2102.30]  So you also get automatic coverage reporting, which is good.
+[2102.30 --> 2102.78]  Cool.
+[2102.78 --> 2103.10]  Cool.
+[2103.20 --> 2107.24]  So it's kind of just like enforcing good practices on you anyway.
+[2107.72 --> 2107.96]  Yeah.
+[2108.08 --> 2127.80]  And whenever you do a create React app, it'll start you up with a test directory with a test already written and imported and building and all that kind of stuff to where it's like really as soon as you write your thing, it's a very fast and easy example on how to start writing tests for your thing without needing to learn about how to configure JEST.
+[2128.32 --> 2129.04]  That's awesome.
+[2129.82 --> 2130.26]  Yeah.
+[2130.26 --> 2150.82]  One tough thing for writing web apps is if you want to write tests in the same JavaScript that you write your components and stuff in, but if you're using Babel and Webpack and stuff in order to compile everything down, then you start needing to like watch and compile your test directory, which is cool.
+[2150.82 --> 2161.00]  But then like while you're writing your app, you're spending an additional, you know, three seconds every time you do a save compiling your thousands of tests that you've written.
+[2161.68 --> 2170.62]  And so like there needs to be good configuration on whether you're kind of in a mode where tests run or get compiled or whether it's important for them to get recompiled.
+[2170.62 --> 2183.28]  And most of that's handled to where you're not doing unnecessary work as you're working and then your tests can still be in like new, cool, good ES6-y, babbly stuff that you write your other components in.
+[2183.42 --> 2188.40]  You don't have to switch context to write like older school JavaScript for your tests.
+[2189.10 --> 2189.30]  Great.
+[2189.30 --> 2192.42]  So moving off of testing, because I think it's boring.
+[2192.80 --> 2193.72]  No, I'm just kidding.
+[2194.76 --> 2195.20]  Fair.
+[2195.20 --> 2195.24]  Fair.
+[2196.94 --> 2210.78]  So I see that one of the things that it also does is it just it adds a service worker like automatically and has an offline caching strategy, which like I think is great that service worker support and PWAs are like landing in frameworks like this.
+[2211.02 --> 2217.26]  I'm terrified at the idea of the framework just like implementing a caching strategy that I don't understand.
+[2218.48 --> 2218.96]  Sure.
+[2218.96 --> 2221.52]  Because I've spent so much time fighting caches.
+[2221.96 --> 2224.00]  Like, yeah, it's just kind of worrisome.
+[2224.00 --> 2231.86]  So I put a service worker on TXJS early on the TXJS website in 2015, I think.
+[2232.60 --> 2247.18]  And if someone had hit it between like 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. a week before the conference, then they would still have be being served that version of the website for the rest of their lives unless they like went in and cleared the service worker.
+[2247.18 --> 2257.04]  So like there's definitely some danger to where like you can get yourself in a place where you accidentally cache everything and there's no way to break out.
+[2257.18 --> 2258.26]  And that can be unfortunate.
+[2258.26 --> 2262.26]  But I haven't dug deep into their service worker implementation.
+[2263.32 --> 2267.66]  But my gut is that if you don't do anything weird, it should be fine.
+[2267.70 --> 2269.82]  And if you do something weird, sorry.
+[2269.82 --> 2279.16]  Yeah, my gut is that it's fine for normal stuff and you'll probably need to turn it off for crazier stuff.
+[2279.30 --> 2290.50]  Or if you want like something like it's probably very baseline and very lazy in the sense that it isn't going to do too much because it can't assume as much.
+[2290.50 --> 2294.58]  But if you think about just like a caching strategy of like have we seen this before?
+[2295.16 --> 2302.30]  Like if you think about a caching strategy, if we've seen it before, return the old one and then always go grab the new one.
+[2302.62 --> 2309.34]  And if there is a new one that's different than the old one, go ahead and also send up another event for new data.
+[2309.34 --> 2321.32]  And if that's kind of built into the idea of how you render things, which a lot of the React stuff is like as things change, like it automatically updates, then it can kind of be a good default strategy.
+[2322.12 --> 2322.74]  Oh, yeah.
+[2322.80 --> 2323.88]  I hadn't really thought about that.
+[2324.04 --> 2326.94]  Like React has a lot of understanding about the individual components.
+[2326.94 --> 2329.98]  So it knows if re-renders need to happen when the backend updates.
+[2330.10 --> 2331.04]  That's interesting.
+[2331.90 --> 2338.66]  Yeah, there's some nice synchronicity in some of that stuff, I think.
+[2338.66 --> 2342.30]  But yeah, it's not going to be a silver bullet, but I think it's pretty good.
+[2342.62 --> 2352.94]  Something, Ember CLI doesn't have service worker, but they have, by default, they serve, like whenever you do Ember serve, a, what is it?
+[2353.08 --> 2363.40]  A CSP, a content security policy, which I think is a really cool default to have just to like make that a more widely used thing.
+[2363.40 --> 2370.40]  Just like beat by default, XSS is harder in Ember apps than it is in other apps because they do CSP.
+[2371.16 --> 2387.98]  And so I really like these toolkit style CLI helper things, doing things like solid generic defaults that maybe aren't the best version of them, but maybe get people thinking about service workers or get people thinking about CSP.
+[2387.98 --> 2390.44]  And we'll work in all the simple cases as well.
+[2391.56 --> 2392.04]  Interesting.
+[2392.46 --> 2393.32]  Very interesting.
+[2394.46 --> 2396.74]  You sound skeptical, but I know.
+[2396.86 --> 2397.14]  No, no, no.
+[2397.22 --> 2404.28]  I think just in general, like on the surface, this looks like a boilerplate generator.
+[2404.78 --> 2408.34]  It's actually very much not just a boilerplate generator.
+[2408.72 --> 2408.84]  Yeah.
+[2408.84 --> 2409.78]  I mean, it's like that too.
+[2410.54 --> 2410.84]  Yeah.
+[2411.06 --> 2411.58]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
+[2411.68 --> 2412.12]  I mean, obviously.
+[2412.12 --> 2416.06]  Like a living boilerplate generator, kind of.
+[2416.06 --> 2416.18]  Yeah.
+[2416.98 --> 2417.42]  Yeah.
+[2418.16 --> 2418.60]  Yeah.
+[2418.68 --> 2419.84]  That's intense, though.
+[2419.92 --> 2423.92]  Well, it's a boilerplate generator, but it keeps on helping.
+[2424.22 --> 2427.32]  Like it just helps you continue on developing the app.
+[2427.36 --> 2430.74]  It doesn't just like run once and then you like don't use it.
+[2430.76 --> 2431.02]  Right.
+[2431.08 --> 2433.90]  Because it helps you put together all of the tools that you need for it.
+[2434.28 --> 2434.54]  Right.
+[2435.20 --> 2435.60]  Yeah.
+[2435.60 --> 2442.40]  I mean, it's like all of this stuff feels like it's a great grandchild of Rails where
+[2442.40 --> 2446.68]  Rails would, there's a word for it.
+[2447.22 --> 2448.20]  It would generate code.
+[2449.16 --> 2451.80]  Like you would just say Rails new controller.
+[2452.22 --> 2452.66]  Scaffolding.
+[2452.84 --> 2453.56]  Yeah, scaffolding.
+[2453.78 --> 2454.70]  That's the word.
+[2455.14 --> 2457.26]  And it definitely feels kind of like scaffolding.
+[2457.26 --> 2460.88]  And there's a bit of scaffolding like in the initial like create React app.
+[2461.48 --> 2467.00]  But I think it focuses less on generating code for you and more about providing tools
+[2467.00 --> 2470.48]  and examples and kind of a baseline for you to build on.
+[2470.64 --> 2475.92]  And then allowing like the kind of one of the things of scaffolding is like once it generates
+[2475.92 --> 2481.00]  that code, that code is is stuck there forever in that format.
+[2481.00 --> 2487.36]  Whereas I think more of the strategy with create React app is that hopefully it scaffolds little
+[2487.36 --> 2492.76]  enough to where it can update those things that it has generated like on the fly.
+[2493.36 --> 2501.72]  I think the last thing that's interesting in the not Webpack, create React app 1.0 release
+[2501.72 --> 2503.86]  is the code splitting stuff.
+[2504.10 --> 2506.36]  And that's part of Webpack as well.
+[2506.36 --> 2511.26]  But there's a standard that no one uses for dynamic imports.
+[2511.50 --> 2515.10]  It mixes async await with import.
+[2515.72 --> 2520.54]  And I hadn't looked into it much because there wasn't really a great place to use it.
+[2520.58 --> 2522.28]  But it's like it's part of the standards track.
+[2524.06 --> 2526.70]  And like I don't know where it is in that.
+[2526.82 --> 2531.24]  But you can have an async function and then you can import something.
+[2531.48 --> 2532.92]  You can do await import.
+[2532.92 --> 2538.16]  And then that will automatically build into a separate like all the dependencies of the
+[2538.16 --> 2544.12]  thing that you're asynchronously importing can be built into a separate bundle.
+[2544.82 --> 2547.26]  Yeah, I think you're complicating it a little bit.
+[2547.32 --> 2551.92]  Like it's a piece of syntax that allows you to with a function do the same thing you do
+[2551.92 --> 2553.36]  with syntax for import.
+[2553.56 --> 2553.72]  Right.
+[2553.94 --> 2558.52]  So and the nice thing about that is that at some point in the future, which is like not
+[2558.52 --> 2563.98]  part of the initial interpretation phase of the browser, you can say import this module.
+[2564.88 --> 2568.04]  And then what you're saying is that like now we can actually use that for code splitting
+[2568.04 --> 2571.78]  because you can say, oh, well, like these these little pieces that you don't necessarily
+[2571.78 --> 2575.56]  need, we can now import dynamically using the same kind of module system.
+[2575.68 --> 2575.74]  Right.
+[2575.80 --> 2579.60]  I guess I was complicating it because it would be invalid syntax to just throw an import
+[2579.60 --> 2580.86]  there.
+[2580.86 --> 2582.90]  So it needs to be like supported syntax.
+[2583.04 --> 2586.52]  It's not just like something you could do before, but people didn't know about it.
+[2586.52 --> 2592.64]  I think is like awaiting an import is not like it needs to be statically analyzable or or
+[2592.64 --> 2598.68]  at least be known to be a part of it that isn't statically analyzable because it doesn't
+[2598.68 --> 2600.32]  need to be something, you know, something like that.
+[2600.68 --> 2608.16]  And that's why I think it's part of the standards track to do asynchronous imports like like this.
+[2608.16 --> 2614.36]  And so create react app supports this in order to do bundles, which is a huge part of like
+[2614.36 --> 2616.88]  the PWA communities problem.
+[2617.06 --> 2621.24]  Like if you follow Alex Russell or whatever, you'll you'll know that your JavaScript that
+[2621.24 --> 2623.64]  you're serving by default is far too large.
+[2624.64 --> 2630.38]  And so if you can do so, if you can turn on HTTP two and then do something like a handful
+[2630.38 --> 2634.70]  of these asynchronous imports for large portions of your application.
+[2634.70 --> 2640.86]  I think it could go a long way to like loading far less JavaScript on load, which is which
+[2640.86 --> 2641.50]  is really nifty.
+[2641.64 --> 2647.24]  I think this is such a good direction to like automatically for like give to people.
+[2647.40 --> 2651.44]  I hope they use it in the baseline example that they generate, you know, that way people
+[2651.44 --> 2651.86]  use it.
+[2652.88 --> 2652.96]  Yeah.
+[2653.06 --> 2657.42]  Sort of following on with your talk about scaffolding, it seems like the big difference between
+[2657.42 --> 2661.76]  this and what Rails does is like you said, Rails will generate a lot of boilerplate code.
+[2661.76 --> 2664.86]  This seems to generate a lot of configuration, right?
+[2664.92 --> 2670.78]  Like we have like like the joke about Webpack is that like you you only write one Webpack
+[2670.78 --> 2673.46]  configuration and then you copy paste it into every project.
+[2673.68 --> 2675.48]  I mean, that's a make file joke, but yeah.
+[2675.90 --> 2676.22]  Yeah.
+[2676.32 --> 2676.46]  Yeah.
+[2676.62 --> 2677.02]  Exactly.
+[2677.72 --> 2677.92]  Right.
+[2678.72 --> 2683.86]  But I think also like like you were saying, one of the things this does is really standardize,
+[2683.96 --> 2689.02]  you know, what is the the proper path for writing a React app with all these different
+[2689.02 --> 2689.56]  configurations.
+[2689.56 --> 2695.06]  And so this allows you to sort of add features over time to that configuration without trying
+[2695.06 --> 2699.20]  to get, you know, thousands and thousands of developers to update their, you know, this
+[2699.20 --> 2700.88]  particular line in their Webpack config.
+[2701.38 --> 2701.50]  Right.
+[2701.98 --> 2703.34]  It's a noble cause.
+[2703.50 --> 2707.76]  And other people are doing it like Ember CLI and stuff are doing this well as well.
+[2707.84 --> 2716.36]  Like when you upgrade these like new world configuration CLI tools, you get instant improvements in
+[2716.36 --> 2717.72]  your applications, which is cool.
+[2717.72 --> 2722.74]  I really like like everything still works and now it's 20 percent faster.
+[2723.00 --> 2729.94]  It's like whenever Ember did the Glimmer update, all you did was upgrade Ember CLI and suddenly
+[2729.94 --> 2731.02]  everything was using Glimmer.
+[2731.18 --> 2735.78]  It was all supported unless you're doing something weird, you know, and suddenly your website rendered
+[2735.78 --> 2736.12]  faster.
+[2736.22 --> 2738.04]  And I think that's a cool world.
+[2738.04 --> 2745.88]  Like for I think that's a good goal for these well-used frameworks to to to go after.
+[2746.50 --> 2747.26]  Yeah, definitely.
+[2747.46 --> 2752.32]  One thing I can't wait to see is not compiling down to ES5 anymore, but compiling down to,
+[2752.32 --> 2756.16]  you know, a set of features that are actually mostly supported because there's a lot of performance
+[2756.16 --> 2760.10]  benefits to like arrow functions are faster than regular functions and in V8.
+[2760.10 --> 2764.00]  And for the most part, you know, people that are working with compilers aren't getting those
+[2764.00 --> 2765.20]  performance benefits right now.
+[2765.28 --> 2765.34]  Yeah.
+[2765.60 --> 2766.28]  You can choose.
+[2766.40 --> 2771.46]  You can configure that not in create react app, but in a generic Babel config, you can
+[2771.46 --> 2772.64]  say these are the things.
+[2773.10 --> 2776.76]  This is the target set of features that I want to compile down to.
+[2776.88 --> 2777.76]  So it's certainly possible.
+[2777.76 --> 2780.00]  But I don't think many people go that far.
+[2780.00 --> 2783.58]  Well, and also there's only one minifier that supports it as well.
+[2783.74 --> 2787.76]  So and it's still under really active development.
+[2788.00 --> 2790.18]  So that's one of the things that you kind of lose.
+[2790.56 --> 2792.76]  Anyway, I think that we're about time for another break.
+[2793.80 --> 2795.86]  I'm going to take a short little break here.
+[2795.90 --> 2798.08]  And then when we come back, we're going to talk about the project of the week.
+[2799.54 --> 2804.84]  If you're looking for trusted freelance talent, ready to join your team right now.
+[2804.94 --> 2809.98]  I mean, like within the week, call up all my friends at TopTile, T-O-P-T-A-L.com.
+[2810.42 --> 2815.12]  And as a listener of the show, you might actually be one of those developers or designers
+[2815.12 --> 2820.40]  looking for awesome freelance, independent contractor type opportunities where you can
+[2820.40 --> 2821.86]  still be a remote worker.
+[2821.96 --> 2825.18]  You can still have the freedom you have right now, which means you can travel anywhere.
+[2825.30 --> 2827.52]  You can be anywhere and do what you do.
+[2827.96 --> 2828.80]  We love TopTile.
+[2828.86 --> 2830.88]  They've been supporting this show for a very long time.
+[2831.16 --> 2832.58]  They're really good friends of ours.
+[2832.80 --> 2835.54]  If you want a personal introduction, I'd be glad to give that to you.
+[2835.84 --> 2838.48]  Email me, Adam at changelaw.com.
+[2838.48 --> 2840.58]  Otherwise, head to TopTile.com.
+[2840.68 --> 2843.36]  That's T-O-P-T-A-L.com to learn more.
+[2843.70 --> 2845.36]  Tell them Adam from changelaw sent you.
+[2845.68 --> 2846.90]  And now back to the show.
+[2846.90 --> 2852.10]  The project of the week this week is Electron.
+[2852.92 --> 2854.88]  There's been so much stuff about Electron.
+[2854.96 --> 2857.48]  I'm sure that we've talked about Electron apps on here.
+[2858.22 --> 2861.00]  I know that the changelaw did like a whole episode as well.
+[2861.00 --> 2870.80]  Just for some quick background, Electron is a way to build desktop applications for Mac, Windows, and Linux using Node.js and browser technologies.
+[2871.24 --> 2875.84]  So if you can make a website and use Node.js, you can write an Electron app.
+[2875.84 --> 2883.50]  And it was originally broken out of the Atom editor that GitHub was doing.
+[2883.64 --> 2885.78]  It was initially called, I think, Atom Shell.
+[2886.66 --> 2891.98]  And then Jessica Lord and some of the good people at GitHub moved it into its own project.
+[2892.14 --> 2893.16]  And now it's really taken off.
+[2893.16 --> 2904.02]  And some of the Electron apps that people might know of is like Hyper and Slack and something that we talked about recently, which is WebTorrent and stuff like that.
+[2904.42 --> 2908.86]  Visual Studio Code, which is my current editor of choice as well.
+[2910.34 --> 2919.64]  Yeah, it's one of the interesting things that I've seen about it is that I think a lot of people initially viewed it as like, oh, I can take my website and turn it into a desktop app.
+[2919.74 --> 2921.42]  That's sort of what the Slack app does.
+[2921.42 --> 2927.18]  Or, you know, I can write desktop apps, but it's a pain to do them cross-browser.
+[2927.34 --> 2928.98]  So I will write them in this instead.
+[2929.46 --> 2938.00]  But what I've seen lately are applications that I don't think would even exist if it wasn't for, you know, having unrestricted access to Node.js.
+[2939.48 --> 2942.72]  And then just being able to put a browser front end on that.
+[2942.90 --> 2945.10]  Like, just the size of the ecosystem is so amazing.
+[2945.10 --> 2952.74]  You know, MongoDB has like a new DB admin thing that's like a desktop app with Electron.
+[2953.16 --> 2958.28]  Voltra is like this new music app that is like way prettier and nicer than iTunes.
+[2958.28 --> 2963.16]  And that is just, you know, because like they knew Node.js really well.
+[2963.22 --> 2965.58]  They can really dig into the nitty-gritty there.
+[2965.92 --> 2970.20]  And they need like a lot of the stuff that they're doing with data storage and syncing and stuff.
+[2970.28 --> 2971.64]  They need that performance, that layer.
+[2971.74 --> 2973.24]  They couldn't just do it as a pure web app.
+[2974.52 --> 2975.94]  So it's awesome.
+[2976.76 --> 2978.40]  Have you built anything with Electron?
+[2978.40 --> 2981.02]  Yes, yes.
+[2982.24 --> 2991.64]  I mean, I've gone through – I wrote a little kind of browser viewer on top of IPFS because I wanted to play around with IPFS.
+[2991.82 --> 2994.06]  So I made like a little like drag and drop thing.
+[2995.40 --> 3002.82]  I have – I'm about halfway done with like a desktop version of Roll Call that uses Electron as well.
+[3003.24 --> 3006.32]  And then I pulled down and just worked with a couple projects.
+[3006.32 --> 3011.84]  Like I dug into the Brave code at one time, which is also an Electron app.
+[3013.16 --> 3015.22]  And – or it was back then.
+[3015.28 --> 3016.84]  I think now they're on their fork of Electron.
+[3018.12 --> 3021.96]  And there was another app that I can't remember that I sent a pull request to.
+[3022.08 --> 3023.78]  And so I had to pull it down that way.
+[3023.90 --> 3024.96]  And all of them have been great.
+[3025.02 --> 3026.22]  I mean, I'm comfortable with Node.
+[3027.64 --> 3031.44]  So it's a really kind of comfortable place to be to develop in.
+[3031.88 --> 3032.44]  What about you?
+[3032.50 --> 3035.36]  Yeah, I mean, I'm super comfortable with Node too.
+[3035.36 --> 3041.78]  And Electron like has always been something that, you know, I have known existed as a thing.
+[3042.44 --> 3051.66]  But like is there anything extra that people that already know how to build like web applications with Node would need to know in order to get up and running with Electron?
+[3051.78 --> 3054.90]  Or does Electron kind of like just wrap around all that stuff?
+[3054.90 --> 3057.32]  I mean, it wraps around all of it.
+[3057.32 --> 3065.34]  But also, I think – like I don't think that we can underestimate like how much stuff there is in NPM right now.
+[3065.42 --> 3066.40]  Like how many modules.
+[3066.86 --> 3080.12]  And to make like a lot of web apps work, a ton of what you do is that you build these backend services that just, you know, talk to something that is like has less security around it and more of the Node ecosystem.
+[3080.12 --> 3082.24]  And then you push that to the browser in some way.
+[3083.24 --> 3095.54]  And I've seen a lot of people just get up and running so quickly on their ideas because they can just store directly on the file system and access every module in NPM and then put a web frontend on it and not have to spin up a backend service.
+[3095.54 --> 3102.34]  Not have to deal with, you know, a frontend and a backend where they just like kind of have it all mashed together in this environment in Electron.
+[3103.66 --> 3104.06]  Alex?
+[3104.92 --> 3105.28]  Yeah?
+[3105.28 --> 3106.94]  Have you made anything?
+[3107.90 --> 3108.82]  In Atom?
+[3108.90 --> 3109.10]  No.
+[3110.44 --> 3130.34]  I – my experience with Atom or in Electron has been installing the Electron bin for like – actually, we used Electron in order to do screenshots for our CSS library visual diffs.
+[3130.34 --> 3139.40]  Because it was easier to just run Electron cross-browser, render something, and then use the stuff to take a screenshot.
+[3140.02 --> 3145.00]  And then not even reload pages, just inject the new components into the same page.
+[3145.38 --> 3148.96]  And then you could take like a ton of screenshots all in a row and it ended up being really fast.
+[3149.04 --> 3150.64]  I think there's an open source library that we have.
+[3150.78 --> 3151.70]  I can find the leak.
+[3151.70 --> 3155.00]  But yeah, so I used it for a pretty different thing.
+[3155.28 --> 3160.46]  But yeah, like that may be an interesting use case of it.
+[3160.56 --> 3167.62]  It's just like it's a cross-browser environment to run HTML in headlessly, which is kind of cool.
+[3168.50 --> 3168.64]  Yeah.
+[3169.00 --> 3178.86]  What was the thing that – this is going to be a horrible – it's going to showcase my horrible memory.
+[3178.86 --> 3183.78]  What was the thing that Adobe had that was allowing you to make apps easier?
+[3184.72 --> 3187.98]  It might have just been like in Macs or something.
+[3188.10 --> 3189.94]  Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
+[3190.46 --> 3196.22]  Yeah, they had an editor and then they had – yeah, the name of the stuff.
+[3196.34 --> 3199.98]  But it was like kind of Dreamweaver 2000 or whatever.
+[3200.56 --> 3201.00]  Well, no.
+[3201.54 --> 3203.08]  Not Dreamweaver.
+[3203.08 --> 3208.70]  It was one that actually let you get some kind of – obviously, I guess it's not as notable.
+[3208.70 --> 3208.82]  Adobe Air?
+[3209.50 --> 3210.88]  Yes, Adobe Air.
+[3211.34 --> 3213.48]  Thank you, Corbin, you in the panel.
+[3214.44 --> 3214.76]  Thanks.
+[3215.92 --> 3216.84]  Okay, cool.
+[3217.42 --> 3218.04]  Adobe Flex.
+[3218.24 --> 3220.76]  And Flex, I think, is what it eventually became, right?
+[3221.18 --> 3224.96]  Flex was the framework that you wrote in.
+[3225.60 --> 3229.28]  And you wrote that Air was the container that it would run in.
+[3229.82 --> 3230.60]  Okay, okay.
+[3230.60 --> 3232.74]  Hold on, the cops are coming again.
+[3234.86 --> 3236.26]  It was all Flash-based.
+[3236.52 --> 3237.58]  Action script.
+[3238.64 --> 3242.24]  The cops are coming to arrest Rachel for talking about Adobe Flash.
+[3244.44 --> 3245.26]  Excuse me now.
+[3245.28 --> 3246.10]  Oh, okay, cool.
+[3246.26 --> 3249.88]  So, I mean, I remember when that came out and I was like, whoa, this is rad.
+[3249.88 --> 3258.66]  And, I mean, Electron seems like – I know that people are talking about it a lot, but I feel like people should be talking about it more.
+[3258.66 --> 3272.02]  I know that's just like a hand-wavy thing to say, but like, why aren't people that are making like pretty rad apps just not also like by default making them in Electron as well?
+[3272.72 --> 3273.32]  Does anybody know?
+[3273.88 --> 3278.40]  Because the web is important, an important distribution platform.
+[3278.40 --> 3286.68]  And defaulting to native applications is maybe not the best strategy to reach the most people.
+[3287.34 --> 3288.06]  Well, I mean –
+[3288.06 --> 3289.68]  Go ahead.
+[3290.54 --> 3292.40]  Well, like, there's –
+[3293.58 --> 3306.26]  I think, like, if you talk to people that have apps that people use, like, in their – like, daily, like any app that you use for kind of business or anything that you open up daily, people prefer desktop applications.
+[3306.26 --> 3306.66]  True.
+[3307.30 --> 3307.88]  Like, yeah.
+[3308.74 --> 3315.92]  Well, they don't have to, but if you talk to, like, Slack, for instance, right, like, they have ostensibly the exact same thing on their – on the website as they do on the desktop.
+[3316.04 --> 3320.44]  And the desktop has a lot more engagement because – yeah.
+[3320.56 --> 3329.46]  But getting to people initially, asking them to, you know, before they've seen any value, download this thing, it is a bit of a stretch for a lot of use cases.
+[3329.46 --> 3329.90]  Right.
+[3329.90 --> 3336.04]  But I think that once you have people's attention and you really want to up their engagement, that's where desktop applications are really useful.
+[3337.26 --> 3337.88]  I agree.
+[3338.48 --> 3338.80]  There we go.
+[3338.86 --> 3341.56]  Well, we still value the desktop, it looks like.
+[3342.72 --> 3345.96]  But, yeah, there's been some great articles lately.
+[3346.62 --> 3351.80]  So, GitHub, actually, they have these GitHub desktop apps that they built a while back.
+[3351.80 --> 3354.26]  And they had not actually moved them to Electron yet.
+[3354.46 --> 3363.20]  And so, they wrote up their experience of, you know, some C Sharp and Objective-C developers that are used to writing, you know, native applications for Windows and Mac.
+[3363.36 --> 3366.92]  What their experience was like, you know, moving to Electron and doing Electron stuff.
+[3367.10 --> 3368.08]  It's pretty interesting.
+[3368.28 --> 3369.64]  I recommend it.
+[3371.94 --> 3372.38]  Yeah.
+[3372.44 --> 3372.76]  All right.
+[3373.30 --> 3374.16]  Let's move on to our picks.
+[3374.90 --> 3375.50]  All right.
+[3375.56 --> 3377.38]  Everybody got their picks locked and loaded?
+[3378.34 --> 3379.70]  Yeah, but mine's a cop out.
+[3379.70 --> 3380.14]  Okay.
+[3381.14 --> 3382.94]  Well, we'll start with your cop app then.
+[3383.04 --> 3384.26]  And then we'll go up from there.
+[3384.26 --> 3385.56]  It's create React App 1.0, baby.
+[3386.04 --> 3386.98]  Oh, shut up.
+[3387.56 --> 3389.54]  You can't pick the project of the week.
+[3389.64 --> 3390.32]  That's like cheating.
+[3390.96 --> 3391.30]  Okay.
+[3391.56 --> 3392.22]  Webpack 2.
+[3396.32 --> 3397.60]  Tell us about Webpack 2.
+[3397.66 --> 3398.14]  What's in it?
+[3399.18 --> 3399.92]  Tree shaking.
+[3402.48 --> 3408.18]  So, I'm going to go on a little bit of a tangent here.
+[3408.18 --> 3409.72]  And you're going to get mad about it.
+[3410.10 --> 3414.24]  But I think that if you need tree shaking, you're dependent on some anti-patterns.
+[3414.40 --> 3419.98]  I don't think that we should have these grab bag modules with a bunch of other properties in them that you should be shaking out.
+[3420.18 --> 3424.40]  I think that we should be using modules that do one thing and only export one thing.
+[3424.44 --> 3425.84]  And then you don't need to tree shake.
+[3428.02 --> 3428.76]  There you go.
+[3429.40 --> 3429.62]  Maybe.
+[3431.22 --> 3431.58]  Maybe.
+[3431.58 --> 3434.22]  It's an amazing rebuttal.
+[3436.30 --> 3436.74]  Maybe.
+[3439.96 --> 3442.30]  Anyway, my pick of the week.
+[3443.36 --> 3444.56]  Were you going to say something else?
+[3444.64 --> 3445.16]  Go ahead, Ale.
+[3445.16 --> 3458.42]  I was going to say that I agree to an extent that if you write something that is a little bit, does a few too many things, then tree shaking becomes a crutch.
+[3458.96 --> 3462.48]  But I also think that, like, take a substack something.
+[3462.78 --> 3470.20]  Take a set of tools that are only substack and you'll still get some benefit from tree shaking in the end.
+[3470.20 --> 3472.68]  It won't be massive, but might as well do it.
+[3473.80 --> 3483.48]  So I think tree shaking becomes even more cool when it can, the dead code removal, like, types plus.
+[3484.64 --> 3488.56]  So I guess you guys are gone when we made this, the project of the week.
+[3488.72 --> 3490.38]  It was, what was that thing?
+[3490.84 --> 3493.96]  Code something came out recently.
+[3494.16 --> 3494.48]  Facebook.
+[3495.84 --> 3496.88]  It was the project.
+[3496.88 --> 3508.30]  Anyways, it tries to, like, code unroll and, like, pre-compute things that are already, like, available to compute at runtime or at compiler time.
+[3509.12 --> 3515.72]  And so things like that are also going to be massive, like, to where, like, there's an if statement inside of a substack module.
+[3516.22 --> 3519.06]  And there's no way that's going to run based on the configuration.
+[3519.62 --> 3521.46]  And therefore, it can be compiled out.
+[3521.68 --> 3524.48]  And that's tree shaking, like, and it should be fine.
+[3525.60 --> 3526.24]  Use it all.
+[3526.24 --> 3527.24]  Use everything.
+[3527.44 --> 3528.84]  Use every minifier at the same time.
+[3532.98 --> 3533.90]  All right.
+[3534.76 --> 3536.00]  Rachel, what's your pick?
+[3536.96 --> 3544.94]  So my pick of the week is a talk from JS Confu that just happened that I unfortunately did not get to see in person.
+[3545.30 --> 3547.78]  But it's from Anjana Vakil.
+[3547.96 --> 3550.86]  And it's about immutable data structures for functional JS.
+[3550.86 --> 3568.52]  And she just, like, explains it in such a really simplified, easy-to-understand way for people that don't really understand what, you know, immutability or mutability or functional, like, programming looks like.
+[3568.52 --> 3569.52]  Like, AKA me.
+[3569.52 --> 3579.52]  And so, like, she just gives visuals that explains, like, how nodes work and how, like, you can do different things with it.
+[3579.52 --> 3586.78]  And how it, like, you can have the arrays structured in, well, I guess that's what mutability and immutability is.
+[3586.78 --> 3589.06]  But she explains it in a way that makes sense.
+[3589.46 --> 3606.70]  And she talks about it in context of David Nolan's Maury library and Facebook's immutable JS library and shows examples from both so that you're able to, like, one, understand the concept and see how different libraries are handling that kind of thing.
+[3606.70 --> 3612.66]  So, yeah, if anybody else was wondering about that kind of thing, there's a link to it.
+[3612.72 --> 3613.50]  And it's pretty great.
+[3614.46 --> 3614.86]  Awesome.
+[3615.40 --> 3619.06]  Earlier in the episode, we talked about features that we don't use.
+[3619.32 --> 3626.58]  My wish is that there was a way to use immutable JS as, like, the default in the syntax.
+[3627.00 --> 3631.94]  Like, there could be a Babel plugin for just, like, immutable versions of things.
+[3631.94 --> 3642.82]  And there actually is a spec, I think, Seb Markage proposed immutable data structures to ECMA, but I think it's dead and it's not going to go.
+[3643.40 --> 3644.82]  And it makes me sad.
+[3644.96 --> 3650.38]  But I really want to use immutable JS, but I really hate changing the syntax for everything.
+[3650.52 --> 3653.30]  I just want native immutable data structures.
+[3653.54 --> 3656.70]  And so that's a good example of something that I don't use that I wish I could.
+[3657.64 --> 3657.90]  Cool.
+[3659.48 --> 3659.88]  Cool.
+[3660.82 --> 3661.22]  Okay.
+[3661.94 --> 3664.48]  My pick is a book.
+[3665.04 --> 3666.84]  It's actually a really old book.
+[3667.00 --> 3668.82]  It came out, like, in the 80s, I think.
+[3669.38 --> 3669.86]  84.
+[3670.64 --> 3671.04]  Crazy.
+[3671.78 --> 3672.98]  But it's called Hackers.
+[3673.48 --> 3674.60]  It is not...
+[3674.60 --> 3675.22]  I've seen the movie.
+[3675.30 --> 3676.16]  ...for the film Hackers.
+[3676.26 --> 3676.68]  It is not.
+[3677.32 --> 3678.66]  There's no rollerblading.
+[3680.78 --> 3687.80]  No, Hackers is about the kind of origins of hacker culture, which eventually kind of became early technology and open source culture.
+[3687.80 --> 3691.58]  So you can skip the third part.
+[3691.68 --> 3692.70]  The book is in three parts.
+[3692.70 --> 3694.94]  The third one does not hold up.
+[3694.94 --> 3705.20]  But the first one is basically from the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT in the late 50s and early 60s that started using computers in a very different way.
+[3705.20 --> 3719.24]  And how their kind of culture evolved and became the AI lab at MIT, which spawned a bunch of other AI labs and was like all of the early kind of programming culture came out of what was going on there.
+[3719.24 --> 3721.16]  What's the third chapter about?
+[3721.68 --> 3722.30]  So hold on.
+[3722.40 --> 3729.00]  The second chapter is about kind of the homebrew computer club and early Apple and early computing, like, in the Bay Area.
+[3729.32 --> 3737.84]  And also how a bunch of, like, really kind of crazy counterculture political figures, like, also informed that culture and what they were doing.
+[3738.02 --> 3738.96]  And that's super interesting.
+[3738.96 --> 3748.32]  The third section is about the gaming industry in, like, this in Sierra and all those companies that were, like, in the early 80s.
+[3748.54 --> 3752.98]  And it was more of, like, a – at the time it was like, oh, and then this is what people are doing right now.
+[3753.10 --> 3756.18]  But it really doesn't connect very well to the other parts.
+[3756.30 --> 3763.58]  And it really doesn't hold up as, like, this particular section of computing is not nearly as influential as these other ones, like, in hindsight, right?
+[3763.58 --> 3769.06]  But also, I will – there's some appendices.
+[3769.52 --> 3772.58]  One of the appendices is called The Last Hacker.
+[3773.16 --> 3784.10]  And it's about the last person in the MIT media lab – or, sorry, the MIT AI lab – that is kind of the keeper of the flame for hacker culture.
+[3784.90 --> 3792.82]  And it's about Richard Stallman before he started the GNU project and before there was even such thing as copyleft licenses or a GPL to argue about.
+[3793.58 --> 3797.94]  And it is fascinating and explains so much.
+[3799.02 --> 3799.38]  So, yeah.
+[3799.88 --> 3806.46]  I've been reading – I've been trying to read a lot about kind of early hacker culture and how the counterculture movement kind of played into all this stuff.
+[3806.72 --> 3810.70]  And this is, like, one of the best books to really dig into it.
+[3811.08 --> 3812.00]  So it's by Steve Levy.
+[3812.38 --> 3813.46]  It's called Hackers.
+[3814.54 --> 3815.00]  There you go.
+[3815.86 --> 3817.30]  My pick is the movie Sneakers.
+[3818.30 --> 3819.64]  Oh, that's a good movie.
+[3819.98 --> 3821.08]  Oh, my God.
+[3821.08 --> 3823.94]  It's really the only tech movie that holds up.
+[3824.36 --> 3825.38]  River Phoenix?
+[3826.82 --> 3827.42]  Yeah.
+[3827.84 --> 3828.18]  Yeah.
+[3828.86 --> 3829.44]  Oh, man.
+[3829.70 --> 3830.50]  That's a good one.
+[3831.04 --> 3831.94]  That's a really good one.
+[3832.38 --> 3833.66]  Some Robert Redford.
+[3835.12 --> 3835.72]  Okay.
+[3836.36 --> 3836.90]  Anyway.
+[3837.64 --> 3838.08]  Anyway.
+[3839.26 --> 3840.32]  Great talking with y'all.
+[3840.46 --> 3841.96]  I think that we're just about done now.
+[3842.66 --> 3843.68]  Rate us on iTunes.
+[3844.24 --> 3847.38]  Check us out at changelog.com slash jsparty.
+[3847.38 --> 3850.18]  You can get into our Slack.
+[3850.28 --> 3859.58]  You can catch us live every Friday at noon Pacific time and something in other time zones.
+[3859.94 --> 3861.00]  And thank you very much.
+[3861.10 --> 3861.40]  Goodbye.
+[3861.40 --> 3861.48]  Bye.
+[3862.68 --> 3863.72]  All right.
+[3863.76 --> 3866.14]  That wraps up this episode of JSParty.
+[3866.20 --> 3867.06]  Hope you enjoyed it.
+[3867.32 --> 3870.46]  We record this show live every Friday at 3 p.m.
+[3870.48 --> 3870.74]  U.S.
+[3870.82 --> 3871.16]  Eastern.
+[3871.30 --> 3872.96]  So if you want to listen live, you can.
+[3873.08 --> 3874.92]  Head to changelog.com slash community.
+[3875.40 --> 3876.36]  Get in Slack.
+[3876.74 --> 3878.34]  Hang out with us in real time.
+[3878.68 --> 3881.86]  Special thanks to our sponsors, Century and TopTal.
+[3882.22 --> 3884.20]  Also thanks to Fastly, our bandwidth partner.
+[3884.74 --> 3886.30]  Head to fastly.com to learn more.
+[3886.30 --> 3893.74]  This episode was edited by Jonathan Youngblood and the theme music for JSParty is produced by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder.
+[3894.22 --> 3895.16]  We'll see you again next week.
+[3895.50 --> 3896.18]  Thanks for listening.

VM Neutrality in Node (N-API), Learning JavaScript, Mastodon_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,445 @@
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Hey, everybody! Welcome to JS Party, where it's party every week with JavaScript. I'm Mikeal Rogers...
+
+**Rachel White:** I'm Rachel White...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And I'm Alan Samson. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** There we go... Can't even get the right intro without Alex cracking wise. \[laughs\] Alright, we've got a great show today. We're gonna talk a bit about Node.js native modules and VM neutrality, we're gonna talk about Mastodon - the project, not the band... Although we may talk about the band, too. We're gonna talk a little bit about how to get new people into JavaScript. It's gonna be a great show!
+
+We have this new thing coming into Node.js in the version 8 release - it's kind of a big deal - called N-API. People have been calling it Nappy for a while, and then they decide that they are no longer gonna call it Nappy, and it's just N-API now.
+
+Essentially, if you've done anything with Node.js for a long time, you probably at some point had to use a native module, or some module that you used a native module.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Wait, wait, wait... Nappy? \[laughs\] Is that because it means diaper in Europe? That's how you say diaper in Europe.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, really? God...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm pretty sure a nappy is like a diaper...
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, it is a diaper. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's probably why we're not calling it that... It's just for Native API.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay, that makes sense.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] But anyway... So if you've been doing Node.js for really anything, you've had to deal with a native module. Native modules are -- we've been trying to rewrite the whole world in JavaScript, but sometimes you still need to bind to some kind of C or C++ module. Those modules basically get bound pretty much directly to V8, to the ABI (binary API) that V8 exposes.
+
+The modules that you're using that are native are probably actually using this middle layer called NAN (Native Abstractions for Node), but all that does is really just kind of a marshal between an older version of Node and the V8 VM APIs there.
+
+This has been problematic for a number of reasons. One is that this really locks us into V8, but it also means that we break all of those native modules every major release of Node, because we take a new version of V8, and V8 has a new ABI in basically every release.
+
+If you've ever upgraded a major version of Node, you've probably had to recompile some of your projects in order to work. If you're on the frontend, it's probably because of the SaaS library - there's a really popular SaaS library written in C. If you do database stuff, it's probably the level ecosystem, if you do robots it's probably Serial Port; Serial Port is a native module and it needs to get down in the depth there...
+
+There aren't that many native modules in the native ecosystem, but if you crawl through the deep dependencies, the depths of depths of depths, about 30% of the modules in npm are indirectly dependent on some kind of native module. Breaking all of those at a release sucks, nobody wants to do that.
+
+If another feature impacted 30% of the ecosystem, Node.js would do everything that it could to ensure that that never broke between major releases. Nothing that impacts the ecosystem that much, other than native modules, would ever be considered in the core project.
+
+We've been trying for a very long time to get past this, but the main problem has been that people need to support it - Google has to support an API that we can bind to indefinitely, right? They're not gonna guarantee support for any kind of middle layer. So even then, this native refactoring for Node - it went through a big breaking change because of the way that V8 exposed its API or changed so dramatically that it actually couldn't marshal between everything anymore, and it had to do a breaking change.
+
+\[04:16\] So if we create an API and we wanna guarantee that it's gonna last forever, we need Google to support it, and we need any other VM that supports Node to support it.
+
+That brings us basically to io.js. In the io.js days, we started working a lot more with Google. Google was very happy that we were taking newer versions of V8 in io.js, and from that point on, certain members of the V8 team, particularly from the Google Cloud project, have been working really diligently on Node.js and a lot of the integration points.
+
+An effort was lead by Microsoft, because they, for Node Chakra (Node.js bound to Microsoft Chakra VM rather than Google's V8 engine), they had to just emulate the entire API... They really felt the pain of this problem, so they lead an effort along with Microsoft and even some people from Mozilla who were doing SpiderNode, to create a native API...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's still going?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, it was rebooted.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay, got it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I would not say "still going." I think they took like a four-year break.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Got it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, so they got basically rebooted around this whole native API effort. So now for the first time Node 8 (the eighth major version of Node.js), there will be a flag where you can try out this new native API, and people can start binding to it. It's really exciting, because now major versions are not gonna have these giants bricks, and if you write a JavaScript virtual machine - a lot of people are writing new JavaScript VMs - you can expose this API in the future and Node will just work. Questions, comments...?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So back to how we pronounce it... \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Awwgh...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It reminds me -- there was like the NaCl and PNaCl... Some people called it PNaCl \[06:09\], which I always disliked...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I liked calling it Nappy... I was told shortly after the N-API Working Group met that they no longer wanted to call it Nappy, and not a lot of people are referring to it as Nappy, so I've been respecting that... Even though I don't agree; I liked calling it Nappy.
+
+**Rachel White:** I can understand why people wouldn't wanna call it that. It could have a lot of negative connotations not just related to diapers, so... \[laughter\] But you know, diaper -- you don't want us to see your codebase with diapers anyway...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Yeah...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You guys need to speak for yourself. Diaper.js comes out this fall.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Is that a library or a conference? Is that a conference at your house where people are allowed to change your baby for you? \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No comment at this time.
+
+**Rachel White:** So I'm looking at the repository for this... So you mentioned the Node SaaS thing, but what are some other -- are these lists of modules, the LevelDown, NanoMessage, Canvas... Are these ones that already have enabled it, and there's other ones that need to be converted in order to be compatible with it?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So one of the things that this whole project identified early on was "Okay, what are the most used native modules? Let's make sure that we can support those." It's virtually impossible to take everything that the V8 VM or the Chakra VM does and abstract it into an API that can just live in perpetuity, right? Not even NaN does this, which is the thing that everybody's biased to today... But if you can look at the most common modules and the things that they do with NaN or with the V8 API, then you can get a pretty good idea of the minimum viable set of APIs that you need to expose.
+
+\[08:09\] So that's sort of what they've done with that list of modules there, it's the most common native modules. Many of them actually use NaN today, so if you can entirely support NaN and have NaN built on top of this native API, then you know that you can support most of those...
+
+A lot of modules actually use NaN for maybe 90% of what they do, and then they have an extra little bit of code that just talks directly to V8 for some kind of other thing, some operation that has to live outside of the NaN API because it doesn't support it, so they wanna make sure that they support even that last 10% when they go live.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I have a question... The Node GeoIP - is that at all related to this? You were like "That's native something or other..."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Node GeoIP... I don't know if I'm really familiar with that. Is it a module?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it's super popular for building native something or other...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh yeah, here we go... "Native Node.js implementation of MaxMind's GeoIP API." Cool...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I think this is in like half -- I don't know if I've installed Node modules in my life and this wasn't one of the modules that came down...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This module looks like pure JavaScript. This looks like it's not a native module, though.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay... Feels very nativey. Whenever you download it, you have to get the Node headers.tar.gz thing, and that broke this past week whenever npm went down.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, wow.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I guess the CDN went down, or something...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This might depend on a native module, so that's probably what it is.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay. \[pause\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Cool. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So the answer is "no".
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah... Another really annoying bit of this too is if you've done any Electron development, Electron has its own version of Node in it, with its own version of V8. If you have native modules, you need to compile them, not against the command line Node and command line npm that you run on the command line to install the native module, but you actually need to compile them against the V8 and Node that Electron uses and Electron has, so there's all this crazy work that you have to do to swap out the header locations and make all that stuff work as well.
+
+Hopefully this will also make that a lot easier to deal with, because if they're all just bound to the same API, then they can just get compiled and be hunky-dory... Hopefully. We'll see. It's still very early days, but that's the goal - the goal is to make everybody's life easier, and to eventually also have many VMs that support Node.js, so you can run Node.js on all these really tiny microcontrollers and devices, and they can have custom-built engines that work really well for those devices.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I've built guitar pedals, and I'm looking forward to the day when I can on a six-dollar microchip run all my audio transforms in Node.js.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Aren't we almost there though? What does the Tessl 2 cost? The Tessl 2 is pretty close.
+
+**Rachel White:** I think we're definitely almost there. I've been actually thinking about trying to use the Tessl for some kind of like live visual feeding thing, because I do visuals for music stuff, and you usually need a resource with a bunch of clips. It would be easier than having to build a whole entire mini-computer with a Raspberry Pi.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[12:05\] I was wondering, would it still make more sense that since Node.js is just becoming available on these harder for Node.js to run devices - is it actually just an easier way to run Go, or something that you know you can't ever install? If you're really resource-constrained, could you just compile Go via emscripten into JS and then do WASM on the microcontroller for $6?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We just went through four compile layers... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, but I feel like -- not that you can't write JavaScript and it would be good, I'm just thinking in the audio situation I'm constantly resource-constrained, and I'm wondering if just the fact that JavaScript can run there means that I don't have to write in whatever microcontroller bytecode directly...?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, that's the whole point.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** JavaScript doesn't have the memory management to be able to handle it on that resource-constrained device, right? So I guess I'd need to write Rust, not Go if I want a memory-managed language, right? I don't know. Don't listen to anything I say.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I mean... Susan's making a really good point in the chat here - the value of writing things in JavaScript is that there's this huge ecosystem of modules that you can plug into...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, not necessarily for my use case... There are not a lot of guitar pedal modules, currently.
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, I guess you're gonna have to make them.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's like an opportunity.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[unintelligible 00:13:38.24\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But a lot of the underlying... Like, there's a huge bots community that you can tap into to help you build those guitar pedal modules as well, and there's a bunch of people doing different audio stuff and different algorithms for messing around with audio that work on top of web audio that could also easily be used in your module as well. So there are parts of the ecosystem that would be relevant for building guitar pedal modules.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Maybe.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Yeah, and these devices are only getting cheaper and faster. IoT is an area where Moore's law is still in effect at a single processor level, so they're getting faster and cheaper every year... So depending on how long it's gonna take you to write this module, you may just wanna bet on the cost of that thing that's currently $14 coming down to $7 in a year or so.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right. I don't even know Go, so this is purely hypothetical. \[laughter
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, if we're just saying hypothetical languages that you could learn, you could just learn Assembler. \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, that's what I'm saying... You get the benefit of a language that you don't mind writing, which I assume Go is, and then you can still do something -- and I still think Go is actually a bad choice. Rust or something might be a good choice, where you have memory management, it's memory safe, and then you do have to write Assembler.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** My issue with people who talk about managing memory by hand as a feature is that you're living in this crazy world where you wanna do that and you're not gonna mess it up, and very few people live in that world. If that's the only world that you can be in in order to access a particular device, then I don't see a lot of software being written for that environment until they get some \[unintelligible 00:15:27.03\] democratized.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right, but I think that's the environment currently with tiny six-dollar chips for audio pedals, or whatever. That's all.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. Well, you know, some day...
+
+**Rachel White:** When does Node version 8 come out?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Soon... Man, I should really know this. We're working on a lot of the messaging stuff right now, but I believe it's this month; I think it's April. Yeah, April or early May will be the initial release. A lot of people wait another six months though... For six months it will be the current release, and we're a little bit more liberal about adding features and stuff like that while it's the current release so a lot of businesses and enterprises and stuff like that wait until we put it in the LTS, where we have a slightly higher bar for getting code into it.
+
+\[16:16\] But yeah, it will kick over pretty soon. Async 0.8 will also be in there, so that's fun.
+
+**Rachel White:** What else is in there? Unless you shouldn't tell us, because then we can talk about it next week, or something... \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think those are the two main points - the new native API stuff and Async 0.8. Every time I say Async 0.8 -- there's actually a video of this on the internet... Ben Michael, or Mitchell -- I love Ben, he's one of my favorite people, but I always forget how to pronounce his last name... He's an amazing musician, he worked for &yet for a while... He did the full soundtrack for the RealTimeConf and all of that - really impressive stuff.
+
+**Rachel White:** He's really good at karaoke...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I would imagine... He did this song, it was to the tune of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, but he did it at NodeConf and it was all about different modules in Node.js and stuff. The a-weema-weh part was "async-oh-eight, async-oh-eight", so now whenever anybody says Async 0.8 I just think of a-weema-weh, a-weema-weh... \[laughs\] Anyway, that was a random little diatribe there.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. In the jungle...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Shoutout to Ben. The RealTimeConf soundtrack was awesome! I think that we're good with this topic now...
+
+**Rachel White:** Yes.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back we're gonna talk about getting new people into Node.js. Stay tuned!
+
+**Rachel White:** Getting new people into JavaScript!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Sorry...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I was like "Node.js... What?!"
+
+**Break:** \[18:02\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And we're back! We're gonna talk a little bit about getting new people into JavaScript. Why don't you take it away, Rachel?
+
+**Rachel White:** Alright, so this is something that people will come up and ask me a lot about at conferences that aren't necessarily JavaScript-focused... They just basically don't know where to start, especially with how we spoke about JavaScript fatigue and a bunch of other things...
+
+There's just so many places to start from, and where should someone start? Should they use React, should they learn React before they learn anything else? Should they pay attention to j.Query at all? Should they learn Ember or Angular, or whatever?
+
+I guess that's what we're gonna talk about, and I'm gonna say "No" to all of that... Learn vanilla... \[laughs\] Only because I wish that's what I would have done... Which I kind of did, but I kind of just learned pieces of everything, and then mashed it all together.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But how far do you take this? I literally learned Assembler and then C and then Perl... You can go way, way down the stack, so what is vanilla--
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I actually learned hardware logic gates, and then I learned Assembler, or then I learned binary...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Oh, god...
+
+**Rachel White:** I guess that depends on what your goal is.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[20:06\] I know, so how far do you go...? Like, even in vanilla JavaScript, what does vanilla JavaScript mean? Do you learn only raw DOM calls, or are you allowed to use j.Query when you're learning JavaScript?
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, I guess that depends on -- I mean, I've had jobs where they've gotten mad if we used j.Query, and then I've had jobs where it was like "Use j.Query if you would like to use j.Query." I guess it depends on if you wanna focus on frontend, if you wanna focus on backend, if you wanna do full stack, if you wanna do JavaScript robotics, if you wanna do creative coding... It all depends on what your focus is going to be where I think you should start.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And where does some of the tooling fit in though, right? Babel is not vanilla JavaScript, you are compiling it down... But you're also technically kinda using a newer version of the language, so does that count as extra stuff that you're learning and not vanilla?
+
+**Rachel White:** You mean like somebody going in and understanding ES6 syntax, and stuff like that?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Like, should they start there, or should they start without that tooling, in your opinion?
+
+**Rachel White:** I don't know... That's a hard question. I can only speak from what I struggle with as somebody that definitely still does not understand algorithms or anything like that... I'm pretty much just solely good with DOM manipulation stuff, frontend strictly, and obviously Node and Node robotics... But I'm a weirdo. My method was totally different, and I wish that when I started there was resources available to me that there are available to people today.
+
+I think the JavaScript 30 course that Wes Bos just came out with is pretty decent... It gives you a small exercise every day, and you are slowly building up the -- I guess it wouldn't be muscle memory, but the repetition of common things that you would use in JavaScript, like for loops and stuff like that to understand it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think that the question is a little bit loaded, because it's like "Should you start with libraries or should you start vanilla?", but I look at it a lot like music, or something like that. There are people who when they're four start taking lessons and then they learn all the fundamentals and they practice scales, they learn theory, and then they become musicians and are very good and have that type of knowledge. Then there are people who pick up a guitar when they're 15 to impress other people, and then they become musicians as well.
+
+It's actually much more important that you're just doing it in a way that you know you'll keep staying motivated than it is the actual path that you take. I disagree that if I showed you a book of algorithms before you got into NodeBots that you'd be like "Oh, that's something I'm interested in." It's the fact that you got into NodeBots and that you now understand that algorithms can help you that you're interested in learning those algorithms. You have to kind of learn that that direction, instead of the other one.
+
+**Rachel White:** True. And I think that this conversation is unique to people that don't necessarily come from a CS background, too... Well, from my perspective, at least. I'm speaking of self-taught, self-driven people that don't have that fundamental basis of "What is computing?" If you're coming from that background, it would be totally different, because you're gonna understand a lot of the concepts of how the language is structured anyway.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[23:58\] Right. And just like in music, people who aren't classically trained always have these weird, interesting -- like, if you master the fundamentals enough, you can do weird, interesting things because you understand why they're weird and interesting... But also, the people who are self-taught, or weirder musicians are often more creating and interesting and do more fun things, whereas the people who are taught via rote stay in the box more often, because that's how they were taught.
+
+It's totally possible to break out of those two molds, but I think that that follows somewhat pretty closely into development, just like any creative endeavor.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, definitely.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** A while back I got thrown into a couple situations where it was like, "Oh, get these teenagers interested in programming", and the thing that we figured out to do was not try to show them code or anything like that... It was like pull up their Facebook page - this is how long ago this was; kids still use Facebook... But you pull up a website that they go to all the time, and then Right-Click on an element and inspect it, and then start manipulating the text in it, and they're like "Oh my god, this is not just readable, it's actually writeable!" and then you go from there to like "Copy out that element, put it on a page that you have, but there's no style, so you've gotta move over the style and manipulate it..." So you literally work directly backwards from something that they're already interested in.
+
+They're not gonna learn entirely to program that way, but it is something that will capture their interest long enough for them to go "Oh, now I should really dive into this" or "I still don't care." Some of them still aren't gonna care.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I totally agree with that. I don't think that people should just be explicitly exposed to chunks of code and be like "This is programming!" If there's a project that you have an attainable goal in -- and I think this applies to anything, not just programming... If you have a tangible - or intangible, if it's on the internet; I guess you could touch your screen, whatever - end goal of an end project and you know what you're working towards, then you're able to break that up into parts. It's a lot easier to see the big picture and understand the smaller parts, and I think that it's better to keep people's interest that way, too.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. The resource that I keep pointing people at that are new to programming is Free Code Camp, because it is sort of broken out into these structured lessons that you can go through. You basically get a certificate, and the way that they test you out of the certificate is that you actually work on a part of a real web application for a non-profit; so the other side of Free Code Camp is not just like finding people who wanna learn how to program, but also non-profits that need web works to be done, and they also have people that wanna learn how to do project management.
+
+These people break it all up in the project management side, so that all these people learning how to program can bite off pieces of it and get certified. It's really cool, it's a nice mix of good course material and some real world practice, as well.
+
+**Rachel White:** I have also heard pretty good things that seem like along the same lines of Free Code Camp, about Codecademy's intro to JavaScript course. I haven't taken it myself, but I've seen that it gives you those incremental steps of working on different concepts as you go through. I also really like Mozilla's Developer Network site for JavaScript basics, because it tells you a story as it's telling you the elements, and I end up using it as a reference a lot when I'm working on personal projects. I should post that as a link. \[honking sound in the background\] Why do -- stop honking, geez!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, so I think that the best way to get into JavaScript is to continuously do things that interest you, and the rest kind of follows. If you go about it the other way... I think once you get old enough and disappointed enough -- age is only barely related to this, but I find that now that I'm older, I've learned enough things to know that if I just sit down and slog through the fundamentals for long enough, it will really end up helping me, and I have that lesson embedded in me. So if you're that type of person, it's not necessarily better - it's probably worse even... But if you're that type of person, then sure, go learn the fundamentals as long as you can delay that reward of actually being able to create things.
+
+\[28:34\] But I think the most important thing you can do is make sure that you're not gonna lose interest, because that's the biggest barrier, I think, to learning programming - there are plenty of people who want to, and certainly it's difficult and we can make things easier in tooling and documentation and all that stuff, but I think the number one thing whenever I've worked with people, or I know people who are like "I wanna learn programming but I don't have enough time" or "I started that and I never finished it", or "I read that book, but I still don't know how to do anything yet"... I think it's just a matter of -- they haven't found the thing that grabs them enough to stick with it, and that's a tough thing; it's just like working out or losing weight, or learning an instrument, anything like that.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's a really good comparison actually, like diets... A lot of people try diets and don't stick with them indefinitely.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right.
+
+**Rachel White:** Are you sub-tweeting me? \[laughter\] There's one other resource that I love to recommend to people... Rebecca Murphy has this really awesome repository -- this is like, once you've got all the basics down and you are more involved in understanding JavaScript, it's a whole entire repository that's built around testing, and the tests are broken and you have to figure out what you need to do in order to fix the tests, and I think that it's really good for people that are actually wanting to get into having a career for JavaScript, and it's always really great for people that are starting out. I'm gonna paste that link, too... Because then it also gives people the fundamentals of understanding how testing works, so it will help in the real world, ideally...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's a little dated at this point, right? It's like five years old...
+
+**Rachel White:** It was updated within the past year, but that might have been...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's like, links to the Mocha project was switched to the new URL to Mocha... It's actually pretty good, but just know that if you just into like a React codebase, they're not gonna use any of these specific tools, but all the ideas are gonna be roughly the same, and a lot of it is just like the syntax has gotten nicer, the environment has gotten faster, easier to call... People still use Mocha.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We sort of skimmed over this, but I think the motivation that people have for learning programming is really big. We tend to always talk about this in terms of like getting a job, and that one of the reasons why we wanna teach programming to a bunch of people is so they can get better jobs, which is a fine motivator, but I think a lot of the reason why people stick with something is because they actually enjoy it, and a lot of people come to programming because -- Susan was saying, customizing their MySpace pages was how they first got into it, and then they stuck with it because they enjoyed it and they enjoyed that kind of thing... And I think all of us that came up in the early web were like, "Oh my god, View Source... Holy crap! I can view the source and then do something with that!"
+
+Now a lot of the result of some of these tools is that View Source isn't a good onboard into programming anymore... So what are the places that there is still this level of customization that you can do and this level of playing around that you can do?
+
+One of the things I love about NodeBots is that it's still just so basic. You sit down and you just wire up a few things together and it's really simple; you can see how it works, and you can see a result immediately. But what else is like that out there?
+
+**Rachel White:** I would say the places that have popped up in order for you to do code exploration, like CodePen, now Glitch, JSFiddle, those kinds of things... In the past I've used CodePen to be like -- you can type in a keyword, so I'll be like "I'll type in Glitch", (no relation to the other site that we were talking about) because I wanna see what kind of really cool effects people are doing with glitchy stuff, and then I'll be able to go in and see all these pens that people have tagged with this certain aesthetic that I'm looking for, and I could view the code and then play around with it myself...
+
+That's probably the closest that I've found that feels the same way viewing source would be, because I definitely used to do that a lot, too.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[32:44\] Yeah... My only issue with those things is that they're still one step between a Normy and that. In order to get to CodePen to search for something, you have to know CodePen exists and you have to know that you want to look for those things in order to learn how to program them, whereas the web in the early days felt more like "I was using this already, and now I can discover how it's built automatically", if that makes sense. And it's not a huge jump, but I think it's not insignificant.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that MySpace customizations were kind of like that too, right? You were just customizing your page and then it was like, "Oh, what's this thing?"
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... Customizing your page is one thing, but you used MySpace not just for customization; you went to your friend's page and you're like "How the heck do they have a gradient background with rounded corners?" and then you had to learn... Or "Does this button resize AND have rounded corners? Are they using Sliding Doors?" and then you'd have to learn Sliding Doors.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That said, the reason why we probably don't use MySpace today is because the visual damage that that did to people and the site in general.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I mean, that's why MySpace was fun, right? I said it in the chat, but I've actually found that since MySpace died a while ago, the generation of programmers that are coming into jobs and open source projects that I have often are talking about customizing their NeoPets page. I think they actually end up accidentally being these probably more niche sites - I mean, NeoPets probably was big as well, but not as big as MySpace - where this type of thing is still possible, and then these little communities of people who accidently learn how to program pop up, which is cool
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** WordPress is what Adam's saying in the chat... Which I could see. There are one-click WordPress installs and then you get into themes and then you wanna update... I actually think that maybe the fact that a lot of people listen to podcasts and SquareSpace sponsors every single podcast in the entire existence, or whatever, so you hear about that and then you do SquareSpace and it's like these slightly modifiable things... Some of that... Just the ubiquity of the web replaces the need for a single product that makes this happen; the ubiquity of apps and the coolness of the tech culture among Western society - those are all drivers towards people wanting to build an app or get rich, or whatever... That pushes people in that direction.
+
+**Rachel White:** I think a lot of the older natural code exploration that people did with MySpace and NeoPets wasn't out of necessarily a desire to learn how to code; it was pretty much more of a necessity for wanting to make something look cooler, and then that just ended up having to also be code... I don't know what that would be now.
+
+I've never messed around with SquareSpace, so I don't know how specific you can get. I don't know, that's a weird thing.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think just the act of saying, "I have a website" - not a Facebook profile, not a Twitter profile, not something in a social network, but literally like "This is my domain name" is really far down the path of like "Oh, you're basically gonna start programming pretty soon", just because of where the world is now.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[36:33\] There's not really that need of necessity to do it yourself anymore, because so many places have come along to just do it for you.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think that's a more fun way to learn. If instead of MySpace there was like "Here's a hosting platform where you can host a profile that connects with other people's friends" - that's GeoCities WebRings, or whatever, and that was successful, but not as successful as MySpace, right? I think going at it from that angle, giving someone something that they want in order to immediately get the gratification, and then telling them "Now you can customize this in order to become cooler among your community" I think is a really powerful mechanism for learning.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, but I don't think there's that many places that do it anymore. I don't remember seeing any sites recently... You used to be able to just totally customize your own CSS in and drop it into some places. You can't really do that anymore, but I guess -- Erik's saying Tumblr... Tumblr's definitely, I would say, a really modern equivalent of MySpace. They have their own custom templating agent that people are having to use in order to figure out how to display certain things on their profile... I think it's pretty similar to Mustache templates, with curly braces and stuff...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it's fine...
+
+**Rachel White:** And a lot of custom Tumblr pages actually evoke those early-mid-2000s design aesthetics, too.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure.
+
+**Rachel White:** Maybe I'm just old, but they're also very small type, and the cute little animations and stuff, so it's kind of like how it was however long ago that is now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. Alright, I think we're about to take a break now. When we come back, we'll talk a little bit about Mastodon.
+
+**Break:** \[38:26\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And we're back! Time to talk a little bit about Mastodon, the GNU social-compatible microblogging server. What the hell does that mean?
+
+**Rachel White:** Servers! Servers! I will tell you what it means.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Federated.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, so Mastodon is a social network, and it is compatible with GNU social, but what it's doing is if you look at it, I think that the UI is very similar to how TweetDeck used to be, so it is definitely trying to be an alternative to Twitter. The cool thing about it and the reason that everybody is super excited about it is because it's decentralized. What that means is anybody can take the source code and spin up their own flavor of Mastodon on what is called their own Mastodon instance, and then they're able to participate in the whole entire social network.
+
+\[40:13\] There are certain quirks to that. The main one is mastodon.social. This is the original one that has been in development for a bit. There's also mastodon.xyz. We'll talk about those two first.
+
+What they are is separate servers, but they're also separate federations, and the way that I like to compare these federations as a concept is how Star Trek has federations. Basically, there's a greater code of conduct, a greater agreement across the whole entire Mastodon network as a whole. That agreement is pretty much like, you know, no racism, no sexism, no ableism, no isms, essentially... "Be nice to people, tag your content warnings, trigger warnings", stuff like that.
+
+The main Mastodon social code of conduct actually explicitly says "No nazis" and "No Holocaust denial", no stuff that is against certain laws in Europe, which is "Hey, what place has a ton of nazis and we don't wanna hang out with them? Twitter!"
+
+So a ton of people have made the jump over to Mastodon this week. The other really great thing is it's open source. It's primarily written in Ruby, the frontend's in JavaScript... There's a ton of different instances now -- there's a Witches team, which is a French base instance that's for people that identify with queer, feminism and social justice issues... Nolan Lawson made one that is toot.cafe, which is for JavaScript people, and he's looking for JavaScript people to join that one and play around with the frontend.
+
+The way that the federations work too is you have an account on one federation - I am mastodon.social/oho, but I have a friend on Witches team, and her name is Kelsey; she's witches.team/@kelsey, and I can talk to Kelsey because both of our federations have agreed that "Yes, we have similar values and they're good, so we're gonna be able to allow cross-instance communications." So you're able to talks to these other places that have common interests, but different usernames because of the way that Mastodon is set up as a social network.
+
+That being said, Mastodon is young, it is new (kind of a pun)... People are still trying to struggle with moderation, so there are some people that are coming in and are being shitty, as they do on the internet... But one thing that I noticed is everybody is pretty much super nice. Everybody is nice, really encouraging... I had mentioned briefly that "Oh, this is giving me a reason to really wanna learn Ruby...", and so many people messaged me and gave me suggestions, and they were like "You can do it!" It was just like a really positive experience, but that's because the community is so young. Does anyone have any questions?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Via the prediction I'd say that it seems like it will gain some steam, and it may even rule the countryside for a few thousand years, but it will eventually go extinct. \[police siren sound in the background\]
+
+**Rachel White:** \[43:58\] Oh, these cops are coming for you. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That was the fun police. Okay... So the UI looks a lot like TweetDeck, it's very similar to TweetDeck. It seems kind of optimized for power users at this point...
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah... There's also though some really great mobile applications for it. I downloaded one for my phone and it works great. That's for iOS... If you go to the main Mastodon repository, there's a whole entire list of apps already. Let's see - there's already apps for Android, and then there's stuff for iOS... Somebody has already ported Twit, which is the Node Twitter streaming API, to allow you to make bots; so there's a Mastodon version of Twit, and I know that the bot ally community has embraced Mastodon... There's a botsin.space federation instance that you can join, for making bots on it.
+
+People are already making tools... Darius (@TinySubversions) made one for helping with OAuth with Mastodon... People are really excited about being able to have their hands in something that they're using as a community, and not have it being controlled by companies. The cost to run a federation is the same cost as it would be to run any kind of server... There is a server instance, you're just spinning it up and running it on your own thing. That depends on how many people you wanna be on your instance.
+
+Right now, I think that they're still trying to figure out the best way to have the main federations, which is .social and .xyz, get other people's instances added into those... It's a whole process, but the issues page of Mastodon has a ton of stuff that you can find; if you're interested in contributing, you don't necessarily need to know Ruby.
+
+They even tag stuff that's fit for newbies, which I think is really great. I don't know, I hope it succeeds...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It looks interesting. There's been a lot of attempts at doing a federated social thing, every time people get upset at Twitter, or whatever.
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, I think that the thing is this has been being developed for a while, though. I don't know how long the GNU social has been working -- I guess I could google it, or bing it...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's also built on a lot of APIs that they've been trying to do forever, like the Open Social APIs, the PubSubHubbub stuff, all of which people have been developing for some of these coming on ten years now... And a lot of the products that originally -- those were being used and didn't really take off. But you could argue that's not necessarily because of the protocol; it might be because of the actual application, or dealing with Twitter...
+
+One of the annoying things about federation though is just... I wanna subscribe to Nolan Lawson, I don't wanna subscribe to NolanLawson @ whatever random instance that he happened to do. And how do I know that that's the right Nolan Lawson and it's not the Nolan Lawson at some other of those that is trying to be with the same avatar, or whatever...
+
+**Rachel White:** True.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, you know because he's verified, his GPG private key, against other online assets.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So you just lost like 99% if all users of the internet... \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... So it's called -- what is the... Web of Trust? Circle of Trust? Web of Trust.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Web of Trust...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I honestly think Web of Trust stuff is GNU's GPG's favorite term to throw around, but I think that works a lot in the favor of one of these federated networks, and it works for the nine people who use GPG key servers as well.
+
+\[47:59\] If you've used Keybase, that's a good example of knowing that Nolan Lawson is really -- if you could verify yourself on Keybase, along with on Mastodon... Maybe they should implement that. Then you could know that this was verifiably, provably via math the correct Nolan Lawson. Does that make sense?
+
+**Rachel White:** Sort of...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, enough.
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, one thing that I do wanna point out that I think is important is if -- I don't think that Mastodon is trying to be a Twitter replacement. I think that Mastodon is filling a void that a lot of people need. They don't want to interact with people that think trolling is fun. The explicit, very strict code of conducts and specific federated instances that have their rules are extremely friendly to people that are queer and transgender, very interested in communism and socialism and anarchy and that kind of stuff... And Mastodon has come out of that to kind of give them a place where they feel safe talking about this thing, and they don't have to think that every single anime avatar is gonna be somebody that's gonna tell them to go fuck themselves.
+
+I don't know, I've seen a lot of tweets lately that have been like "Hey, Mastodon users, if you see people with anime avatars, they're probably just like artists and geeks, and LGBTQ folks, instead of nazis..." Actually, Nolan said this. So it's like a bit of a culture shock.
+
+Then I saw a post the other day that was very nice and interesting, and it was essentially "Oh my god, Mastodon is a way to be nice, but in a chill way, to strangers on the internet. This is all I've ever wanted in life, to make some mother-- feel good" - censor that if you need to. "I came here to be nice to people and chew bubblegum, and I'm all out of peppermint, but no worries! I totally have other flavors, so here, have some gum."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That was the most millennial thing I've ever heard in my life. That was amazing. It sounded like an ad for Gryzzl from Parks and Rec, or something... \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh my god... I think it's really nice. And it feels nice to go on and be in a timeline where people are not being jerks, and they're just wanting to be helpful.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So how are they enforcing that in the federated model? I understand how you can enforce that in an instance and have a code of conduct for that instance, but because they're federated and they're connecting to each other, how are they filtering the content out of the federation network?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, I'm gonna make an educated guess based on how a lot of the other stuff works. The federations can choose based on who you follow and who the people in the federation follow, what other instances to share content with or not share content with. So both the beauty and the pain of this is that it's perfectly possible, if not unlikely for other social reasons, that the nazis set up their own Mastodon instances and then all federate with each other.
+
+**Rachel White:** Totally!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** But then the crossover of those two federations is actually very small...
+
+**Rachel White:** Basically, they would be isolated. Other federations would opt out into seeing that stuff, so if people do try and join and abuse the service, they're going to be isolated into those silos that they've created for themselves.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right. So essentially, in three years you have the Facebook timeline problem where you only are looking at people who are confirming biases - not that I think nazis should have a platform for anything, but also there's a chance for hyper federation -- not federation; hyper-something, where it'd actually be better to open up a little more, in my opinion.
+
+\[52:20\] I try to follow people who I disagree with currently on Twitter, in order to just understand perspective in those types of things. In no way do I mean nazis or misogynists, or anything like that... I mean fiscally-conservative people, or whatever.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I actually really hope that they do create their own instances and have their own federation network, because then you're gonna see them fracture and get mad at each other... The people there are crazier and crazier; it's gonna be great. \[laughs\]
+
+It's like the 4chan/Achan problem...
+
+**Rachel White:** I mean... Yeah. It's just subsections of horribleness.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's a really good example.
+
+**Rachel White:** But I have to go now. \[laughs\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay. Well, share your pick with us before you go, and then me and Alex are giving our picks.
+
+**Rachel White:** I didn't pick one, because I thought I was able to go early. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Your pick is undefined.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** What's your favorite hot sauce? That'll be your pick.
+
+\[phone ringtone in the background\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, gosh...
+
+**Rachel White:** Well, I can tell you my favorite ringtone... It's not that one. I'm gonna actually say that my pick of the week is going to be Nolan Lawson's branch of Mastodon, because I'm a moderator on it! Come be nice with me and let's make cute things on Mastodon!
+
+Okay, I'm going now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, Mikeal just got dropped... The episode is falling apart live. You heard it here first. He's back...
+
+**Rachel White:** He's back? Okay, I'm leaving now. Have a good weekend!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Bye Rachel.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, for some reason when my phone rang, Apple decided that anything else should just be cut off, so... \[laughs\] So picks - Alex, what's your pick?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** My pick this week is GPG Tools. Actually, that was a little bit of a joke... My pick is Keybase. I think all of the -- so, GPG is GNU Privacy Guard, which is an OSS version of PGP, which used to stand for Pretty Good Privacy (maybe it still does). It's all encryption/privacy type stuff, so if you have public key/private key, all that kind of stuff to where you can kind of verify your identity with big, long things. I'm trying to explain it in a way that makes sense, but nothing I do -- that's the whole problem.
+
+Have you ever seen an email come through and it says "Begin PGP encryption"? That's what this is. The thing that I'm actually suggesting that you use though is Keybase.io.
+
+\[55:07\] You generate yourself a private key and a public key, you keep the private key to yourself, you push the public key up to Keybase as well as other key servers, and then you can tweet out from your Twitter account that says "I'm this person on Keybase", and based on that, it verifies that you are really that person. So it ties your social identities to your encrypted identities. Then, if you need to verify that someone is someone, you can use those identities, or send them encrypted mail, if they know how to do that. So that's my pick this week, Keybase.io.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's kind of like a user interface for being able to do encryption and privacy and all that kind of stuff in an easier way than it used to be.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Basically it's an identity authority, essentially...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, but federated, in the sense that... Well, it's not federated. But it uses other services in order to do those certifications. But it also doesn't need -- so it can be a web page or your email or something like that as well.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Cool. Awesome. So I picked this before and I talked about it a ton... WebTorrents is just one of the coolest projects on the internet... There's a whole Changelog episode about it, there's a great desktop client for using WebTorrent; if you don't know it, it's an implementation of BitTorrent on top of WebRTC and all the peer-to-peer protocols that we have on the web now. But what I specifically wanna plug actually is just pulling WebTorrent in as a library, like you would anything else that you run through Browsersify, and using it in some of your applications.
+
+So start playing with the idea of just dragging and dropping files into the browser and sharing them out like that, and think about ways that you could integrate this completely alternate mode of content delivery and usage. The Changelog podcast on WebTorrent will be in the show notes. It's already been posted in the chat, so that looks good.
+
+That's the show for today. Thanks everybody for showing up, it's been a great show. Thank you to all of our sponsors. Rate us on iTunes. Go to github.com/thechangelog/jsparty and suggest any new topics for us to cover. Also, we record live every Friday at noon Pacific. That's it for this show.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[beatboxing\] That's the outro. \[laughter\]

Web Assembly, Higher Education with JavaScript, JS Standards_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,390 @@
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Hey, everybody! Welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript. God, I love that intro music! I was just banging my head like Night at the Roxbury. It was great. So I'm here with Alex Sexton, say hello...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Hi, everybody. It's me.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And Rachel White, say hello...
+
+**Rachel White:** Hello!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome! Today we're gonna talk about some cool stuff that's going on with JavaScript. We're gonna dig into WebAssembly, we're gonna talk a bit about Stanford and the changing university landscape for learning programming languages and how JavaScript fits in. We're gonna get into some lesser known JS Standards. Cool, everybody! Let's dig into it.
+
+WebAssembly... Alex, tell me what this is.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** WebAssembly is kind of a grandchild of the ASM stuff that was coming out a while ago, so for a while everyone was like, "Hey, you can only write JavaScript in the browser." That was cool, people would do things like write CoffeeScript that compiled to JavaScript, or things like that, and then there's this moment in time - once we got a few more primitives - that M-scripting came out and was able to compile pretty much anything that had LLVM type bindings down to JavaScript, into this really weird-looking bad JavaScript that could run like C programs, manage memory and do all that stuff, all within the JavaScript stack. If you've ever seen one of Brendan Eich's demos where he plays video games like killing chickens or anything like that, that was M-scripting compiling down some game engine, which at 60 FPS was unheard of prior to then.
+
+So WebAssembly is people saying, "Hey, that's cool", and we all agree that that was cool, but that's a little silly at this point that it's JavaScript. We could kill some of the unnecessary parts that people enjoy writing, since it's just Assembly, and we can add in a lot more primitives that are nice to have, but still keep much of the core fundamental parts of the web, like sandboxing and all sorts of things.
+
+So as an approximation of the old JavaScript Assembly stuff, asm.js and stuff, but now with its own actual subset of instructions and things like that (or superset of instructions). It's not in browsers and it may not take off etc., but it seems to have pretty good traction compared to any other project that was similar to it. It could be really good for things like encryption or very high performance, or even some binding type stuff. It should be interesting, because people will finally be able to write in languages that aren't JavaScript and compile them down to WebAssembly rather than running in JavaScript.
+
+**Rachel White:** If this all really happens and people start adopting it, what kind of developer would it affect the most for adoption?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[03:47\] Definitely game developers will probably switch over to this. If you think about how Canvas works, or WebGL or something like that, it's like the DOM and JavaScript and all that kind of stuff provides this web API that is very good for making websites, but once you break out of that, you can go to Canvas and you start literally just printing pixels in a grid, and you're totally outside of accessibility and selectors and all that kind of stuff. You've kind of just exited from the stack already.
+
+People who are already exiting the stack to do things may find that they can write in a language or in a platform that can compile to Assembly, rather than in a JavaScript environment; there may already be great tooling around doing those things. So the nice thing is that you can have parts of your code that are WebAssembly, and run them in a worker or something like that, and then still build out your majority of your website and your interface and things like that, in regular web. Everything. So you don't necessarily have to go all in WebAssembly or all that. So if you wanted to build a graphics editor or something like that, you can have the tough parts written in WebAssembly, and then still do the interface in normal human JavaScript, or whatever.
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh, that's pretty rad. I like that it's giving people more options to create more things. I saw that one of the other things that we have to talk about is getting started with WebAssembly in Node.js... I guess we could just talk about that next. Aside from getting started with it in Node.js, are there any other options that either of you know of for somebody that wanted to take a deeper dive into this and try it out?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, even in Node it's actually behind the flag right now. The first thing in this article about getting started it's like, "Run Node with this crazy flag that exposes WebAssembly." I think it's still a bit of a moving target in terms of the implementations that exist right now... Alex, do you know if Chrome and Firefox are doing it from under a flag, or if you have to run them in a special mode to play with it, or what?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I don't actually know... I've never run any WebAssembly; maybe that makes me a bad spokesperson for it, but...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** My guess is that you have to run it with a flag. Usually, Chrome doesn't turn on non-default features in V8.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Correct.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** ...so you probably have to run it with some kind of flag to really play with it today. One of the announcements that they've just put out on their list is that they feel that the current spec is ready for all the browsers to implement and actually expose. So that' like a sign from the spec community that they think that it's stable enough and now we need people to start exposing it to the world. But that means that it's probably not there quite for people to play with.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. It's a pretty weird thing... Google has tried this on its own before with NaCl and PNaCl and all that stuff, just like sandboxing C code, or whatever. This is different than that because there is a compile target and stuff like that, but kind of the platforms that currently use things like this are pretty different than the web, so a lot of the challenges that were around, like browsers don't all run the same version - they're versionless, essentially; the web just updates as it goes, so everything old has to continue to work for a very long time, and then you can only add new stuff, and the APIs need to be open, everyone needs to be able to implement them and they need to work cross-platform... So there are a lot of challenges.
+
+I'd be very interested to see the benefit over -- I'm sure they have some benchmarks, I haven't seen... But just like "Here's an asm compiled thing... WebAssembly vs Assembly.js" - how much do the primitives and stuff that are added to this stack help? And I don't know what the fallback story is... Do you compile to asm and asm.js? And then if you don't have WebAssembly, it kind of falls back to asm.js? Does that make sense?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[08:23\] Yeah, I think that we should back up a little bit and explain asm.js a little bit more.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** There's some other history here, too... I think that we can also explain this in the context of Brendan Eich's concerns with WebAssembly. He's a WebAssembly fan, but he has some concerns about it. For a long time, people have tried to put other VMs in the browser, and for a long time people thought that Java was gonna win and Java would be the language of the web. Microsoft tried to put it in .NET... All of the efforts to basically have a separate runtime in the browser have failed, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that JavaScript is the dominant language of the web, and it sits there with the DOM interface in the same memory space, essentially.
+So you run into this problem when you add another VM where it's like "How do you garbage collect these things that might be touching the same DOM between these different languages? How do you effectively share memory or share objects between them and count them properly?"
+
+A lot of the NaCl stuff that you were talking about and some of the other kind of native sandboxing work that's happened has been, "Here's a separate interpreter, and we'll try to run it beside JavaScript." They also tried with Dart, which was a colossal failure.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Essentially, all of that has never really worked because you just can't really share them effectively. So what asm.js really was... A group of people - primarily people at Mozilla - trying to prove that "You know what, if we take a subset of JavaScript, valid JavaScript that we'll interpret, but we say just a subset of it, and we put a comment in it similar to "use strict" and we say this is asm.js land, it will interpret and fall back on all these other browsers and it will work as normal JavaScript. But because we have that little comment in there and because it's using a strict subset, we can write some stuff inside of the JIT, instead of the regular JavaScript interpreter that makes this really fast."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right. But there are a lot of V8 people that disagree with that pretty heavily.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, so there are V8 people that disagree with that approach, but what they essentially did was that they made their interpreter really fast for all of the use cases, including that very small subset.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right, they just didn't need the comment; they were just like, "Why don't we just always make those fast and detect them?"
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, yeah. That was why you started to see asm.js benchmarks from V8, even though V8 wasn't "supporting" asm.js, because asm.js is just a subset of JavaScript. So WebAssembly is trying to go a little bit farther. It's saying "There was a limit to what we could do with asm.js, so why don't we come up with a very small language that can be a target for compilers, but it can work inside of the same JavaScript VM. We're still only gonna ship one VM, but we have this other language that is a lower-level compile target that people can push stuff into."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right. I did some digging just now while you were talking, and the suggestion is that you can ship asm implementation and then also ship asm.js fallback. So if your browser doesn't support WebAssembly, then you can fall back to asm.js. And if your browser doesn't support asm.js, it will just fall back to running that as JavaScript.
+
+Then also I dug up the flag... It's only in Chrome Canary, not the other things, and flags enable WebAssembly in Firefox Nightly - it's in the About/Config - and then there are only preview versions of Microsoft Edge, and Safari has their "We think we'll support it in the future" type status page, but no one's ever seen it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[12:04\] Right. Coming back to Brendan's concerns... He's pulling a lot on the history of JavaScript here and on the history of people trying to compete with JavaScript. There have been many groups and different browser vendors and VM implementers that have decided at some point that they just don't like JavaScript anymore. This happened in the main V8 team, and this is why they eventually went off and did Dart. They just decided "Bleah, JavaScript!"
+
+There are a million reasons to get mad at JavaScript and table flip, but at the end of the day it is the language of the web, and we need to continue to make sure that it's fast and that it is the reference point for the web.
+
+His concern with WebAssembly is that if it gets entrenched enough, he worries that vendors will start to view JavaScript as just another language that compiles to run in the WebAssembly VM, and that is a recipe for basically degradation in performance.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. If every major website isn't using JavaScript, then it will be deprioritized as something that people improve and make better, or whatever... For sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We are so far away from that, though...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think this also opens up the possibility of a lot of people creating a lot of different languages that compile down to WebAssembly that then run in the browser. That is all true, but the performance of those languages is not going to be as good as JavaScript. A lot of what the JavaScript VM does is optimize specifically for that language, and WebAssembly is giving you these really low-level primitive tools... But once you work on this higher-order language and you need some of these higher-order optimizations - like we do for JavaScript - it's gonna be very difficult to do those just on top of WebAssembly, without WebAssembly-specific optimizations for your language, which are probably not gonna happen.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, for a hot second.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. Well, I mean... Yeah, I struggle to even see a future where that's viable for an alternative... Like if you want to run Ruby on top of WebAssembly. I definitely see it for, like you were saying, WebGL and Canvas, and people who want these lower-level abstractions for, say, doing math. They're probably gonna get a lot out of the optimizations, because they can work at that really low level and they don't need a lot of higher-order dynamic optimized.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I guess as a counterpoint, rather than what I mean, is you can run any language on your server, and lots of people still choose to run Node. So even if other languages are good choices for parts of things, I don't think it's a JavaScript killer just because now you have the choice of your language, if it compiles to WebAssembly. Does that make sense?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** People already choose JavaScript on purpose, \[laughter\] so unless some language can compete with that -- and obviously, there are languages that are good for different things, but until that fact goes away, I don't think we're really in danger of losing JavaScript as a primary language on the web.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yay! \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, people love to hypothesize that JavaScript will go away, but I think honestly those people are too smart for their own good; they're not thinking about accessible and easy JavaScript is to use as a language, and that's why it continues to get picked for all of this stuff.
+
+**Rachel White:** They're just jealous.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I think that in the future - and this will sound contradictory - we'll see both more languages being used and more JavaScript being used. By that I mean there will continue to be these niches that are much better suited for a different language where people will use them, but the predominant, default language will continue to grow as JavaScript.
+
+**Rachel White:** While you two were going super in-depth as to what is going on, I was reading more of Lin Clark's awesome cartoon intro to what makes WebAssembly WebAssembly, and what is it... If anybody else doesn't know what the hell it is - like me - you should go read it, because it's really good. And it also makes comparisons in a really easy to understand way. I think that diagrams are great, and Lin explains it very accessibly.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[16:22\] Yeah. I haven't had a chance to really dive into it yet, but there's a module spec in WebAssembly as well, so I'm gonna have to dive into that and see what that means.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think what that refers to is trying to cook into the JavaScript module system to where you can just import... Just like you would JavaScript, you would just do import blah from WebAssembly file. Maybe I'm thinking of something different, but that is a primary goal. But since none of that is actually fully spec-ed out even for the web with regular JavaScript, it's kind of just like a placeholder right now.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a lot simpler than the ES6 module spec. But because it's so much simpler, I actually have a harder time figuring out how it fits into the spec.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I mean... What I'm saying though is that you can use WebAssembly as if it was a JavaScript file, as long as you provide an external API... So it fits inside the JavaScript one, or at least it's a goal.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. There's an export and import system, and stuff like that. Cool, okay... We're probably ready to move on to the next topic pretty soon, and when we come back we'll talk a bit about JavaScript in higher education.
+
+**Break:** \[17:44\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, so what we're gonna get into now is a bit about JavaScript and how we teach computer science in higher education, like universities. Stanford announced that their CS106 course, which I don't know the significance of that, but apparently it is significant...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It sounds very early on in the... It sounds like the first course you take at Stanford for programming language.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So basically when you first sit down and learn programming, they are getting off of Java and onto JavaScript? So that's great... So now instead of learning about crazy Java interfaces, they can learn about prototypal inheritance, and then never use prototypal inheritance when they get jobs.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, I'm kidding... Anyway, it will work really well for all those terrible interview questions about how prototypal inheritance works. But this is a bigger deal than I originally glanced... It's been like a decade that they've been teaching Java, and there's some really good quotes in here from this professor Roberts, who's kind of running this whole transition.
+He says, "Java came out in 1995 and it's really stabilized, but they thought that it was gonna be the language of the internet", and that was definitely how Java was sold, especially in the late '90s, early 2000s. This was the language of the internet, it was gonna replace JavaScript on the web, it was gonna run on a mobile device...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It runs everywhere.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[19:54\] Yeah, it runs everywhere - that was literally the slogan. But that didn't happen. This is not the language of the internet actually, and JavaScript kind of won that, so they're working to transition their 106 stuff over to JavaScript.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's great. I can tell you as someone who has a computer science degree, who did Java in his first two classes, that I spent 50% of my time understanding Java - which is fine... If you're learning Java, you should try to understand their primitives, and all that stuff... And then the other 50% of the time trying to run Java and set up my environment to the point where I could run Java.
+
+The ease of getting started with JavaScript... Like, if you just wanna write JavaScript, compiling to anything or whatever, you're just doing programs for schools, and like they say, "It just must run in the latest Chrome", or something like that... Instantly everybody already has the environment to run that, and that's just beautiful to me, because it would have saved most of my headaches. And none of those headaches had anything to do with me actually learning how to program. It was all just "Go see the TA to see if you can get your idea instance running against the correct Java C compiler in your Windows." Of course, I had an Alienware laptop, probably... \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** So I'm actually wondering if this is going to help the students be able to debug things better? Because I do run a lot of hackathons -- well, not run... I work a lot of hackathons and have to help the students whenever they run into issues. And they're always using Python or Java, and they just don't know how to fix errors. I'm wondering if them being able to do JavaScript and having it be a little bit easier to stack trace stuff, if they're gonna teach that even... I don't know.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I mean, the tooling we were given in my class had some of this built into the editor we were supposed to use, but the ease of use of dev tools isn't amazing. There's still plenty of people I see just like "alert()" debugging but the ease of use of dev tools is certainly easier than running a strace against some native program. The tooling has accidentally become much accessible, so I think you're absolutely right that debugging could be a skill that accidentally benefits from this.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And even to get to debugging, you have to render a program. And running your program in Java -- ugh! It's like 20 minutes to get the VM spun up etc. It's not really made for that quick turnaround time. I think between Node.js and Python there's not a huge difference. I mean, there is a big difference in start time if we're talking about microservices, but for development and workflow, they both run relatively quickly compared to Java. And this is why Java developers have these giant IDEs that are sort of like trying to run their code while they're writing it, so that they don't have to try to run it on a command line and see if it failed or not.
+
+So it's just a completely different and much faster and quicker to get to an error debugging mode for JavaScript in Python. In terms of the hackathons, when you get an error, you can google it and get a pretty good answer and understand what's going on with both JavaScript and Python... Whereas Java depending on the framework they're using or whatever IDE -- there's a lot of code that ends up in the tracebacks that make it kind of hard to find what the actual error is and google around for it. The debugging by googling for Java is just a lot more difficult than other languages.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Back when I was in school, I'd have a problem that I hit a bug, and you'd search for the bug - this was true of PHP back then too, but you know, I'm an old man now... But you'd search for the bug and you wouldn't find someone solving it, you'd find a web page that's their contact form returns that error as the page, or whatever... \[laughter\] It had been indexed, but it was actually just an instance of the error occurring, not a solution to your problem. \[laughter\]
+
+\[24:19\] Unrelated to that, one thing I'd be interested in is how much it matters that people start with a dynamic, non-typed language. I feel like I'm in no way a purist when it comes to functional programming or typed languages... I pretty much thing that you can JIT your way out of all of those problems a lot of the times, and that typing is often overhead that I don't want or need. But the fact that I was forced to do types means that I had that option, if I come across a use case for it... So I wonder if they should do TypeScript or Flow, at least for some of their projects, like "Alright, run flow on this one and type all of your different things."
+
+I almost see it as a feature that because of Flow and TypeScript, JavaScript is at this point almost optionally type. So I think it would be really good, and I don't know if they're up on their JavaScript enough to know this, but it may be really solid of them to say "Alright, do this one functionally... JavaScript is flexible, so do this one purely functionally. Now do this one type, now do this one however you want..." Those types of things kind of excite me if I was writing the curriculum, but something tells me it's not gonna be quite that intense... But I like it. It's both scary from that standpoint if they don't cover that stuff, but also cool if they do.
+
+**Rachel White:** I'm actually reading deeper into this, and they're revising multiple of their CS courses. One of the that they offer is Computer Science and Social Good, which is kind of rad... They let the students see practical applications of what they'll be making, so they can get a better insight into what they'll experience once they leave school and actually start a development career, which is really great.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's California. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Oh, come on...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I mean, I'm not hugely surprised of this move just because I've heard of... Feross Aboukhadijeh who does WebTorrent - he went to Stanford and he's been back to do random stuff with students there. I know that Guillermo Rausch who created Socket.io has done additional summer courses there, helped them with teaching and stuff like that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. They're not even the first major university to teach JavaScript as a core language. There are some very big ones that already do this, but I think the Stanford name, especially in the Valley, sticks out as interesting.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. To come back to your typing point, though... \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Uh-oh...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So now we can have like a proper argument... No, no, I just want to say... I come from a background -- I learned lower-level languages before I learned higher-level languages, and the people that I know that come from that background are not the people that are asking for types in JavaScript. It's mainly the people that turn into type advocates are people that learn dynamic programming and then they see typing as some kind of solution to some problem.
+
+I don't know anybody who used to write Assembly and C who's writing JavaScript now going "You know what I really miss? I miss type errors. Type errors were rad." I just don't know those people... I've never met them.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[27:41\] I know a lot of people. I think people kind of avoid you sometimes, so... \[laughter\] I know plenty of people who feel very strongly about types, and have their good reasons. I don't necessarily agree with them, but I think it's silly to write off types as a thing that people don't need to learn. If you're getting a CS degree, only a certain percentage of those people are gonna end up writing JavaScript. Some large percentage are gonna end up working in typed languages, so I feel like the experience that I had in school when I did -- I mean, we used Haskell and Scheme and Java and C++ in a bunch of stuff, but I feel like the fact that I got that experience in a typed language means that when my company decides "Hey, we're gonna use flow", like, that's fine, I understand types; or whenever the web dies in two years again - I think we're due for the web being dead - then I can go write Elm, or whatever, in a native iOS platform, or whatever, and have types.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, when you learn a dynamic language, you learn about types... You just don't learn about static typing. You know what a string is, you know what an array is, you know that they're different, and then you also have to learn these coercion semantics, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, but you don't learn about function overloading or pattern matching on arguments... There's a whole world around types that I think is worthwhile to learn, even if you don't agree that you want to be doing that for your types of programs. I think types catch a lot of errors that I don't have, or that bubble up anyways. If I send the wrong type to most of my functions, they will throw an error; they'll just do it in runtime. And as long as you test them, most of the times you can catch those if you have good coverage, so types have dubious value there.
+
+At Stripe we use flow against a huge portion of our React codebases, and we get very free, good documentation out of that. "Here's a component, here are all the props, here are the types of the props, here's a little generated component builder", to where it will give you the dropdown text boxes to fill in the props and then you can preview exactly what things will look like that are running in the code.
+
+I think types enable some very beautiful things outside of just build time checking of enforcement uptypes. So whatever... People should learn types if they're getting a CS degree, regardless of whether they...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] I think that you should kind of explain a little bit more about flow type in particular, but also the differences with typescript and traditional typing because it is a very new approach to typing. I don't think that I've seen the flow type thing in any other language or any other toolchain before. I actually really like this approach to both learning how types work and where they can be used, and also this very kind of iterative/additive value mode, rather than kind of an all-in or all-out mode.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure, I agree. So Flow type and TypeScript are both supersets of JavaScript that you can write code in. You write almost exactly regular JavaScript, but then you might add a little typed definitions in the code. Flow and TypeScript are functionally equivalent. They have differences and different tradeoffs and things like that, but they're essentially an optionally-typed edition to JavaScript.
+
+One major difference is that TypeScript allows you to fully -- actually I think Flow allows that, as well... They both allow you to fully externally type things, so you can actually just reference code from a separate type file, and say like "This function over there is this", so you actually don't even have to markup your code any differently. But there are compilers where if you wanna say, "Here's a function, and the first argument is list of people, and that is the type array where the elements are an array of strings", and then the next element is a boolean, whether you want them to do something.
+
+\[32:04\] So you can have these little type definitions inside your code, and then whenever you call a function somewhere else in your code and you send a string to the place where it expects a boolean, before you ever run your code, these little checkers can npm-run Flow and it'll check to make sure that everywhere that you're using an API, you're sticking to the types...
+
+The coolest thing about it is that you can optionally enforce it. You can say "This little section of our code is really important that people use it correctly, and this section isn't. We have Flow here, we don't have Flow here." You could technically run like TypeScript and Flow in the same project, because it's all compiled down to JavaScript, much like WebAssembly, or ES.next, or any of these things that we talk about.
+
+The fundamental property of the web, that everything can run on current browsers and anyone kind of agrees to that, we end up in a situation where a lot of things are optional and could be done to parts of code bases... So different teams at Stripe use Flow to different degrees and to different levels of requiredness.
+
+One thing that Flow and TypeScript add to your experience though is generally better editor/IDE environments - TypeScript especially, because Microsoft makes TypeScript, Facebook mostly makes Flow... So the TypeScript bindings into their Visual Studio Code editor are very strong, because Microsoft has had years and years of experience writing strongly-typed editor things to where you can refactor every location of a call to some API, or jump to different areas or automatically generate things and get code hints and all sorts of things, because of the types; the Flow bindings in Atom are pretty good as well, but probably not as polished as the TypeScript ones.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, if you look through Visual Studio Code, you basically come to these typed definitions for not just all of Node Core, but for most common npm modules, like Request or Express, and stuff like that. They define the whole API there, so that you can get all kinds of crazy, nice editor stuff.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, there's an open source project - Flow-typed, or something like that... There's ones for each of the things. So there are open source libraries that don't use the typed languages, but whenever you integrate a third-party library, you want the types for that. So all they do is they maintain a third-party type definitions for popular libraries. Some the actual team does, the Node bindings and some of the most popular modules, but there's actually an open source thing where you can submit the types for a library that you don't run and just say, "Hey, these might be helpful to someone."
+At Stripe, since we use Flow and we use some third-party things, we can also pull in someone else's third party type definitions of that, and then whenever we use that library, we get all of the niceties from it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** There was a lot of arguments for a long time about adding types to the language, and we've pretty much given up on that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I think that's dead because of these.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, when ES4 died, those died.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I mean, it has come up several times since then, but since these have come out, people are like "This is good enough." Everyone thinks that even with TypeScript, you can actually compile down to faster than JavaScript stuff with asm.js, because sometimes you have types that you can do better than the regular JIT with...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[35:55\] Yeah, so one of the arguments that VM implementers like to have about types is that they can make the VMs much faster if they know what the types are. But now we're seeing this case where actually tools are better at optimizing this kind of stuff than people are. So if you have things like Flow type and TypeScript, we can actually write tools that then turn into even better JavaScript code that can hit all the hot code paths depending on the types.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I personally like types much better for documentation and people-related benefits, like IDEs and stuff like that, much more than I like it for safety and speed. It seems like everytime we think something about safety and speed is true with types, someone on the V8 team shows us that we're wrong. If what I just said is incorrect, please don't send me hate mail, but...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] It's true, except sometimes it's the Firefox team; sometimes it's also the SpiderMonkey people. Okay, I think we're about ready to have another break now. Right after the break, when we come back, we're gonna get into the featured project of the week and some of our picks. We'll be right back.
+
+**Break:** \[37:06\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, so let's get into the featured projects. I actually cheated and I threw in two featured projects for this, because I really wanna talk about some of the lesser know - for lack of a better term - JS Standards. These aren't Standards in Standards bodies, but these are standard APIs that inside of the JavaScript ecosystem for both Node and the browser we have these little APIs that act as glue between a bunch of higher-level stuff and a bunch of lower-level stuff.
+
+Today I have two projects; one is called Abstract Blob Store, I believe... I lost my notes. \[laughs\] Yeah, Abstract Chunk Store. These are by Max Ogden and Mathias Buus, and they're building out a bunch of stuff...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Wait...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You're talking about storage, and you lost the information?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Yes, exactly.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Just double-checking...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's eventually consistent, okay?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Hm...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] I can throw database jokes all day. So the idea here is that --
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Let's catch that idea for now.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright... \[laughs\] Okay. Anyway, you're just way throwing me off today... I should have known not to go toe-to-toe with puns with Alex, but that was a huge mistake. Anyway, so we have these two libraries, Abstract Blob Store and Abstract Chunk Store by Mathias Buus and Max Ogden. They work on the Dat Project, so they're doing a lot of open science, open data stuff, and they're storing a lot of stuff all the time.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** They're in the Dat Project?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, they both work on the Dat Project.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Explain that to me...?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Dat is a small tool -- I mean, I guess it's kind of growing in terms of ecosystem, but it's a toolchain for open scientists to share data, and to manipulate data and then share those manipulations. You can think of it like Git, but for data and for open science. To be honest, Max has been working on a way to get people to share data and their manipulations of data since 2008-2009, and continued to try to build stuff that was higher-level, and eventually I think figured out that what was really missing -- you know, he wanted GitHub for data, but you need Git first before you can have GitHub, so Dat is basically Git for data.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[40:16\] Yeah, it wants to make people collaborate with sharing data more, too. I think they have a Knight Foundation grant too, so they do a bunch of cool stuff.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** They actually have a bunch of grants, yeah. You can go to the RFC podcast on the Changelog network and there's a podcast on Request For Commits with Max where he talks about the grants and how to get them and how to grant-fund open source.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Wow, that's awesome. Max actually was clean-shaven when he started on the Dat Project and he said once people finally adopted it he would shave, and look where we are.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** He's not shaved.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yes, he's got a big beard. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Anyway, so to come back to these lesser-known Node Standards... These are really cool, really powerful stuff that developers can work with, because if you just wanna store chunks of data somewhere, you could just pick up a library for S3 for the exact kind of storage mechanism that you want, but if you wanna future-proof your code a little bit or if you wanna expose a module to do something (to do this behavior) and you don't want them to necessarily require it to run in something like S3, you can use Abstract Blob Store - or Abstract Chunk Store, depending on your kind of use case. Then the actual underlying storage mechanism is completely abstract and people can throw in their own.
+
+This is a really good way to build out an ecosystem of good modules that are storing data without locking them into a particular vendor or a local file system, even.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** How does it compare to something we already have, like IndexDB, or something like that? The primitives are different?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's a little bit lower level than IndexDB... Although I don't think that's the right term. It's doing a lot less than IndexDB, because it's not doing any kind of sorting, it's not actually indexing anything.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Is it persistent?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes. Well, yeah, you assume that Abstract Blob Store is persistent. But there is a set and a get, and when you set something, you assume that you'll be able to get it later.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** How async is it?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Some of these are actually in memory as well, so they don't persist indefinitely. Some of them don't.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But I think that there actually is a good corollary here with IndexDB. In the Node.js ecosystem and also now in the browser with stuff like PouchDB, these tools aren't built to IndexDB, they're actually built to what's called abstract LevelDOWN or LevelUP. So the whole LevelDB ecosystem built these kinds of abstract standards really early on, so that if you relied on level-up for your set get and for all the stuff that you do with IndexDB or with LevelDB - if you relied on LevelUP, you could actually swap out the underlying level up implementation.
+
+So people wrote some in the memory, and people wrote them to work in the browser, and people wrote them to work on top of local storage, and SQLite... So eventually, PouchDB actually moved over to LevelUP...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I was gonna ask...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, so they could take advantage of all those underlying data stores. Cool stuff!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Have there been any cool demos, or anything like that? Or is it just mostly early days...?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think these standards end up getting buried in the things that people are actually building, right? There's some really cool IPFS demos, and IPFS uses Abstract Blob Store internally, and Abstract stuff. In fact, there's an IPFS Abstract Blob Store that they expose to everybody else too, so you can use that as an upper-level storage mechanism. But even the underlying storage mechanisms where they store their internals also uses this abstract store. So those are some good examples.
+
+\[44:11\] I think that the biggest demo of all this stuff is probably the Dat Project and the stuff that they're building.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool. I think they'd get more traction if they didn't name it Abstract Blob Store.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Probably true.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm thinking like UltraStore... That's pretty good. \[laughter\] Honestly...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... The thing that really gets traction is the thing that's built right on top of this. LevelUP got a ton of traction, and because of that traction, a lot of people implemented abstract LevelDOWN stores, even though it was called Abstract LevelDOWN.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Abstract LevelDOWN...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, LevelDOWN in itself is actually a pretty clever name, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Anyway... That was quick.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, sure.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That was good. Now we can really spend I think a lot of time on our individual picks, so why don't we get into our individual picks for the week?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'll start, since I think Rachel might be having some connectivity issues. Mine isn't super long, since I've already kind of talked about it... Mine's gonna be the flow-typed - it's a repo that lets people commit to, and it has the Flow type definitions for maybe a-hundred-something open source projects: Backbone, Bluebird promises, Request, Chalk, Chi... All these different things that you probably use.
+
+This allows you to immediately jump into Flow in your code, even though you might not have done any of it on your own. So you can literally just pull in Flow, not type anything of yours, and then use an editor that can handle this stuff - Atom Plus... There's some Flow integrations in Atom that are pretty good. And then instantly, once you start typing stuff around the express bindings that you pulled in or the request bindings, you'll start getting function argument completion and all that stuff, without you doing anything.
+
+This project alone could get you better editor experience for things that you know the least, because, like, there's something you didn't write, and then maybe it'll save you some time, like looking up documentation. I assume Lodash is in here; let me check to make sure... Yeah, Lodash 3.x-4 is in here. So if you, like me, can't ever remember all the different things in Lodash, it'll be a really great thing to just add this one thing and then instantly you have type definitions for every single Lodash function everytime you try to write one. I think that's super nifty.
+
+Also, a fun fact that I forgot to mention earlier is that Flow, the actual thing that runs to check your code and find the different types and find the bugs in your type is written in OCaml, which is my vote for what Stanford should use as their default language that they teach. \[laughter\]
+
+One of the guys on my team found a bug in the invitation of Flow, and he wanted to fix it, so he had to learn how to run OCaml and get an environment set up and submit a patch that way, and I just thought it was very funny, because I didn't know people liked OCaml until very recently.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Rarely people that are really into typing. I'm looking at the Request definition in here, and it's really funny because so many of the Request functions take dynamic arguments... They'll take different types and then do different \[unintelligible 00:48:04.24\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[48:06\] Massively overloaded...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, so there's all of these "declare any", "declare any" types... It's pretty funny.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** At least you would still get the name in your autocomplete stuff. So even though it wouldn't give you like, "This must be an array", but it'll still give you useful things, even just with any-s, so it's not the end of the world.
+
+**Rachel White:** I'm here. You go first, though...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, I'm gonna bring up Offline Camp, actually. There's this great little community; it's called Offline First, but they're really handling a lot more than just offline web use cases. It's a lot of the people from the Hoodie community, and PouchDB and stuff like that... But they're really digging into not just offline, but also with Fuzzy internet and what you need to deal with peer-to-peer web... There's a lot of overlap in all these use cases.
+
+There's this new community; the organizers of the community have just been phenomenal. They've been doing a great, great job organizing, and documentation, and getting people involved, and that's included these offline camp events which are really small, really intimate, and you kind of go off and stay in some house or mansion that they rented somewhere... Because of that, it's a really limited number of people. This one that's happening in Berlin in late-April, early-May is only 30 people, but I highly recommend it. I think there's an application process because there's so few spots, but I greatly encourage anybody who's getting into offline or peer-to-peer or anything like that to apply and get involved in the community.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Does that bump up against any of the JSConf EU stuff? I don't know when those dates.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, it's right before JSConf EU.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay. Do it all.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, not right before... It's like the weekend before.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** But Berlin is pretty fun.
+
+**Rachel White:** Also during Eurovision... Oh, but you'll all be offline, so you won't be able to know who wins...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, I mean, there is internet at the camp. \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** If you need something to do in that week in Berlin, there's this really good Vietnamese noodle place called Monsieur Vuong that I would suggest you go to. That's my actual project of the week.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** They throw star anise in their pho, and it's really good. That's a good spot. There's also an amazing dumpling place that has this dish called Stripes of Beef, which are just these thin slices of beef with -- I don't know what they're doing with some kind of... It's like Sichuan pepper and a few other things, and some chili oil. But it's one of the best dishes you'll ever have.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... I actually think that's a translation error; it's actually tripes of beef, and those are intestines. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think they meant strips of beef, and they put an 'e' in there because they actually did mess up the translation a little bit...
+
+**Rachel White:** I actually don't remember anything special that I ate when I was in Berlin last time, so I'll have to listen to your advice this time.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Eat Döner Kebab at four in the morning.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I guess you didn't hang out with me enough if you didn't have any amazing food, because that's pretty much all I do there.
+
+**Rachel White:** I've never been in Berlin while you were there, so...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right... There we go. Are all three of us gonna be at JSConf EU, actually?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I'll be there.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Did you say yes or no, Alex?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I have a human child to take care of now... It might be another year before I get out there.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, so you're bringing the child with you, is what you're saying.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's the plan.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, awesome. Also, JSConf EU I guess is a good pick; it's a great conference. Awesome kind of tent pole event. Rachel?
+
+**Rachel White:** \[51:53\] Yes. Okay, I do have a pick. If you're interested in data vizualization with D3 and other really cool stuff, there's two women... One lives in San Francisco, the other lives in Amsterdam, and they have this project called Data Sketches, where each month they are taking different topics and experimenting with data viz through exploration of how to show information based off of each of those topics. I saw one of them speak in January - Shirley Woo is one of them, and the other woman is Nadia Bremer (I hope I'm saying those names right).
+
+It's just really interesting to see all the different ways that you can take data and have it be informational. They have seven months so far, and they each have the same topic for each month, except they take it in totally different directions. One month they picked books, and what one of the women did versus what the other woman did is completely different, and it's super cool to see the differences of how they made stuff. I'll post the link in the chat.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. There have been so many good sketches and drawings of rad stuff lately. Mariko killed that again with some sketches about SHA1; those were great.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I'm a fan of this trend.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's definitely positive.
+
+**Rachel White:** There's so many people that are more like visual learners, so I think it's... It's more interesting than just looking at a pie chart, or a bar graph, especially when you are utilizing D3 and you're able to make that information interactive so you can see data sets changing over time, or how certain information is relational towards other things that you have in your set. It's really awesome.
+
+I think OpenVis Conf is coming up too, and they just exclusively deal with this kind of stuff.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Also CSV Conf is coming up. We were talking about Dat and visualizations, and that's actually a nice intersection. CSV is also a bunch of cool visualizations, like OpenVis Conf, but it's also about small data, basically.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I think CSV Conf is 2nd to 3rd May, and OpenVis Conf is April 24th and 25th.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Sweet. On that note, we'll leave it there. Rate us on iTunes... Thank you, everybody.

Web Audio API and TypeScript is Turing Complete_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,267 @@
+**Alex Sexton:** Alright, welcome to JS Party, where it's occasionally a party with JavaScript. I refuse to say weekly, since it's been a few weeks... But nonetheless, we're here ready to party. So this week we have a special guest filling in for Mikeal - Myles Borins. Introduce yourself, Myles.
+
+**Myles Borins:** Hi, I'm Myles. I'm a developer advocate--
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's enough... \[laughter\] Rachel is also here with us, and this is Alex. Myles, you work on Google Cloud and Node and a bunch of stuff - actually introduce yourself now.
+
+**Myles Borins:** I'm Myles... I going to take long pauses, to make sure that I don't get stopped. I work on Node, I'm on the CTC and TSC.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** What are those?
+
+**Myles Borins:** That is the Core Technical Committee and The Technical Steering Committee. I have a SlideDeck that you can look at if you're interested in learning more about how the governance model in Node works. That means I'm involved in some of the higher level technical decisions and architecture of the project itself. I also work at Google on the Google Cloud platform where I'm a developer advocate. A good chunk of my work is devoted to the Node ecosystem and working on that stuff. I travel around, I talk, and I also work internally with various product teams and engineers to make sure that the products we're making for Node developers are products that Node developers want to use.
+
+In a past life I was an artist and a musician and I'm hoping to find time to do that again in the future.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yay!!!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that segues well into what we wanted to talk about today, which is some music. I think between the three of us, we either have dabbled in web audio or are musicians... Rachel, what's your music story, what's your music history? You definitely have at least like a lot of cred in old indie bands.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, so I started out as a web person because I did a website for an online music magazine for teens, so my first concert was Warp Tour 2001 to go and interview bands like Good Charlotte.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** NOFX?
+
+**Rachel White:** No, I've never interviewed NOFX, but I definitely --
+
+**Myles Borins:** What about Goldfinger?
+
+**Rachel White:** I have not interviewed any ska bands, actually... Which, Goldfinger is questionably ska, I guess. But I've interviewed a lot of pop/punk bands. I interviewed New Found Glory, and 311... \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Hey, 311 was my favorite band for a long time. The drummer's name is Chad Sexton - unrelated, but I'm also a drummer, so...
+
+**Rachel White:** Ooooh...! \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[04:07\] It's not that big of a deal, he's good. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Hold on, sorry... My cat... \[laughter\]
+
+**Myles Borins:** I'll translate - her cat, her cat. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think I understand. \[laughter\] Rachel, do you wanna mute and we can keep going?
+
+**Rachel White:** I'm sorry, my cat was on my lap, and he jumped off and his foot got caught on my headphone. Yeah, we're okay. Go ahead.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay, speaking of NOFX, there used to be no way to do music sound effects on the internet, but -- sorry about this segue, in retrospect... Myles, have you done some audio API stuff? Is that what you were interested in talking about it, or did you just wanna talk about music?
+
+**Myles Borins:** Yeah, my first larger web app that I ever wrote was actually an accessible keyboard. I've been hacking around with Web Audio API for I guess going on five years now. That's how long it's been since I first started hacking on it though, not like a measure of the total amount of time that I devoted to it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure, a solid, unrelapsed five years of pure time. So is that your only project? So you have a keyboard, I assume, on your keyboard. You pretend like you're playing a piano, and then it makes the sounds in the browser?
+
+**Myles Borins:** Exactly. The thing that was neat about it was that it was built with this JavaScript framework that was all accessibility first. The website actually had no instructions on how to use it unless you were using a screen reader, and if you were using a screen reader, it had a full in-depth tutorial on how to use it. It also had an exposed API, so you could change what the frequency of A4 was.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I see... In case you were a 432-er.
+
+**Myles Borins:** Yeah, and it also allowed you to change how many steps you wanted to break the octave into, and then it would distribute keys appropriately. You could set up patterns and start arpeggiating, and then start playing the musical canon instead of the notes, which was a fun little hack.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's great. That's pretty cool. I'd be actually really interested in seeing that. Does it still exist online?
+
+**Myles Borins:** Yeah, it's on GitHub; I have no idea if it still works, but it's called The AutoMagic Music Maker.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's cool. There's a fun story about prints -- there's like a whole cult of people who think that middle A shouldn't be 440, it should be 432. And they'll show you all these cardioid graphs that look way prettier than the ones at 440 and they're like "See? The math works out to be more beautiful visually, so it's gotta be true."
+
+But a lot of people thought for a long time that Prince detuned his guitar to E flat instead of E, but it's actually not quite E flat, it's E, but in the tuning of where middle A is 432 instead of 440. Just some fun Prince facts.
+
+**Myles Borins:** Yeah, that's amazing.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** A lot of his better tone -- a lot of people tune down to E flat just to get... You can play thicker strings because they're a little looser, so you can have kind of a fatter tone, so a lot Prince's well-known guitar tone comes from the fact that he detuned his guitar, essentially, and then was able to kind of play fatter strings, and stuff. Just some fun, normal JavaScript/Prince trivia.
+
+The other interesting thing about your explanation -- I forgot... You're of the origin of Canada, yes?
+
+**Myles Borins:** \[08:05\] Mm-hm.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, the JavaScript owes...
+
+**Myles Borins:** It came out...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Gives it away.
+
+**Rachel White:** I feel like Myles is secretly Canadian, because he doesn't -- when I first met him I didn't know, and he kind of was like, a little quiet about being Canadian.
+
+**Myles Borins:** Am I supposed to introduce myself that way? "Hello, I'm Myles. I like maple syrup and it's called peameal \[laughter\] Thank you. Would you like a poutine and a Caesar?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'd actually flip it around to where you start there and then say your name.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, that's usually... That's how it goes. Usually we know when you say "JavaScript", so...
+
+**Myles Borins:** I'm changing my Twitter profile, it says "Canadian Myles" now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** How do you pronounce the library that is the most popular for transpiling ES6 into ES5?
+
+**Myles Borins:** Oh, are you talking about Babel?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I am. Did you change the way you pronounce it?
+
+**Myles Borins:** So I did say it Babel \[beɪbəll\] at first, and then I was corrected by Seb. I then proceeded to send him a whole bunch of photos of the pig Babe, which I'm not sure if he appreciated. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** Wait, is it Babel? \[bæbl\] Because I say Babel, but I've heard a bunch of other people say Babel \[beɪbəll\].
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's mostly Canadians that say Babel. \[beɪbəll\] But Wes Bos does all the tutorials, and so a lot of people come across the term Babel for the first time from Wes, and since he's Canadian, they hear Babel \[beɪbəll\] for the first time and then they repeat it mindlessly, which is now what America is about, right?
+
+**Rachel White:** I think that's actually where I heard it, which made me question everything I knew, or thought I knew.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Shout out to Wes for making people question everything they thought they knew. Cool. I feel like we didn't get very deep into the audio APIs... Rachel, have you done any Web Audio stuff?
+
+**Rachel White:** I haven't yet. I actually know nothing about music. I took piano for like two years and that was about it. So I haven't, but I've seen a lot of people do really interesting stuff with the Web Audio API. I've seen Myles do some very cool stuff with spatial audio, which I'm sure he'll talk about a little bit more. But I've seen some other really cool examples of people using the Web Audio API with CSS and doing orchestral stuff with the spatial audio... But for me, I don't really know anything about sound, so I haven't played around with it, no.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Myles, tell us about the spatial stuff.
+
+**Myles Borins:** Okay. Do you want like a 5-minute version, a 2-minute version? I can talk about this for hours.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I mean, start going and I'll cut you off when whenever everyone's asleep.
+
+**Myles Borins:** So there's a handful of different ways of doing spatialized audio. The most often used one is what's known as binaural, and that's using what are known as HRTFs (head-related transfer functions). A transfer function is a black box that can take some data, output some data as a pure function of some math stuff. But basically, with an HRTF you can take an audio signal, you can put it into the HRTF, you can give the HRTF a handful of tunings and it'll give you back an audio signal that is spatialized.
+
+The Web Audio actually has some HRTFs built in. They are not super accurate. In general, you kind of need an HRTF to be tuned specifically for your head and your body. They're called "head-related" because of how our brains play sound in space.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[12:00\] So in order to tune one, do you need one of those microphones that looks like a head, or do you have to put microphones in your ears? How does that work?
+
+**Myles Borins:** So you can tune it by sitting in an anechoic chamber - which is a room that's designed to have no echoes - putting microphones inside of your ears, or wearing specific kinds of headsets, which will then create a whole bunch of different sounds in the room and measure the filters of your body. So your ears are really good at determining if a sound is far away by how loud it is, if it's to the left of the right of you, based on how much energy is in each ear. But being able to tell if it's above you, behind you, in front of, below you - all of that's actually based on the filters of your body and the way it filters the sound, and your brain just knows that, if you're just kind of always hearing it that way.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'll interject some interesting information... I have a project studio at the house. The rooms that you see -- like when people mix in rooms, they have all the sound foam and stuff like that on the walls, and those are to prevent early reflections. Your brain has a hard time discerning between the straight sound from the speaker to your ear, and then the sound that goes from the speaker, off the wall, to your ear, because they happen so close together that it feels like the same sound, it's just mushier. Whereas a sound that bounces off a wall 30 feet away and comes back, your brain is like "Oh, that's clearly an echo, or a reverb in the room, and it's not part of the original sound."
+
+So tuning rooms is really important because you wanna remove all of the early reflections that would cause some of that smearing to happen. People have existed for a really long time, so we actually are better at discerning early reflections off of the ground than we are off of walls or ceilings, which is really interesting to me. Your brain can kind of know if the speaker has a sound, it bounces off the ground and gets to your ear. It can do a lot better job of discerning the difference between that than off of a wall, like from the side, which is just kind of magic to me... But it makes sense, because there haven't been walls for that long of human existence, so evolution would maybe kind of cover it.
+
+**Myles Borins:** I wanna expand on that a little bit though, something that's like just a thought experiment that I always found really interesting - sound comes out of a person or a speaker or something, and it reflects off of surfaces; each time it reflects off of a surface, it decays a bit. This is the way that you can just think about filters in general - it's like a change in amplitude or a delay.
+
+As the sound bounces around the room and each time it reflects, it decays more. Generally, that decays is happening in an exponential curve. But mathematically, would it ever reach zero, or is sound infinitely decaying and it's just that kind of sub-perceptual levels, and are we constantly surrounded by the infinite sound of eternity?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... You go half way to the wall an infinite amount of times and you never reach the wall type of thing. I do like the idea of that. It kind of makes you wonder, are we surrounded by this sound, eventually -- like, you know how on a screensaver you wait for it to finally hit the exact corner? (I guess that was The Office) Maybe sound eventually hits the ground at the exact perpendicular direction in order to escape the earth, right? So it still exists, but it no longer is surrounding us maybe... Could be. Maybe the atmosphere bounces it back in though. I wonder if the atmosphere has sound bouncing...
+
+These are all interesting questions that are probably too far outside of the bounds of web audio. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rachel White:** \[16:13\] So I actually wanna interject for a second, because I've seen a lot of proof of concept demos for what people can do with the Web Audio API, but I don't think that I've ever actually seen it in actual use... I guess mostly because I've only seen artsy demos and stuff, but in terms of practical application, I'm thinking of like, obviously, this is gonna have a big space with AR and VR type applications, but what have you two seen that utilizes it in an actual practical end use sense?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm not sure I can think of -- I guess there are games (like legit games, not just demos) that I've seen that use the Web Audio API. But as far as just like business product, I don't see a lot of Web Audio API in those.
+
+**Myles Borins:** I was recently visiting IRCAM, which is a music technology research facility in Paris, and they actually have an entire team that is building interactive installation work and interactive web demos, and it's all built on web technology. One of the examples that I saw that was particularly interesting was this DJ app that they had. It had a native component to it to hook into Bluetooth, but essentially, you would have a loop on your phone, and you would have headphones on; when you got close enough to someone else in the room, your two phones would find each other on Bluetooth and your two things would sync, and then you would be playing music together and make impromptu dance parties throughout the room. The entire audio engine was all Web Audio for that.
+
+**Rachel White:** That's pretty cool. I'm thinking now of like -- what is Spotify written in? Because Spotify is a web app that's like wrapped in something, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right. Well, to some degree... But it's a little different; just playing a song is almost to the point of -- like, maybe they used the Web Audio API to do it, but they're not using the Web Audio API for anything other than like play/pause, start/stop. They're not doing compression or sound leveling, or any of their actual transforms on audio in the client, I don't think... That I've seen, at least.
+
+**Rachel White:** So what exactly is the Web Audio API?
+
+**Myles Borins:** The Web Audio API is an implementation of an audio graph. It gives you nodes that you can use to create sound, and to modify sound. It uses an abstraction that's called unit generators, which is an abstraction... This kind of audio graph unit generator approach is one that you'll see all over the place in audio programming environments, and under the hood of a number of popular audio software; it's how the programmers of those are implementing it.
+
+You'll have a node for the output, you'll have a node for your microphone, you'll have a node for a delay line, and you can connect the microphone to the delay, to the speakers, and it will do its thing. You can add and remove nodes to the graph, and you use a combination of various unit generators to create different effects and different sounds and different audio interactions.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[20:05\] So you can have audio being generated... Can you use the same modifiers from non-generated audio, like audio that's just being sourced from an input, or something like that? (like a guitar) I've seen -- I'm pretty sure it was a Web Audio API, but there was a JSConf EU from a few years back where you did like guitar stompboxes, and stuff like that. Is that the Web Audio API, or is that something different?
+
+**Myles Borins:** Yeah, that would likely be the Web Audio API. You could take an external input and run it through any number of filters.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay, cool. And you can write your own filters, and build a grunge box, and a delay pedal and all that kind of stuff.
+
+**Myles Borins:** Mm-hm, and you have primarily two different ways of doing that. You can do that by either using the variety of Nodes that are provided for you in the API, or you can actually write your own unit generators using the ScriptProcessorNode. As far as I know, the ScriptProcessorNode has been deprecated though, and there's some real problems using it for sample accuracy, because there's a time delay between sending messages to the node and getting the samples out of it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I see. The DSP is all about latency at some point.
+
+**Myles Borins:** I've done some experiments with early asm.js and cross-compiling the Faust signal processing language to the script processor nodes, and we were actually able to get really intense analog amplifiers with non-linear -- all sorts of really fancy stuff running at near native speeds in the browser. The major issue was not the ability to process, but the 10-14 milliseconds you would have in delay going to and from a script processor node.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right... All the platform delay, not the actual code. That's interesting. The nice part about that though is that it shows that it's possible in the future to fix, it just doesn't seem like it's a priority.
+
+Mozilla for a long time prioritized a lot of web audio stuff, and I think they have some of the only built-in tooling to be able to kind of modify it... Does that sound correct? Is that what you used?
+
+**Myles Borins:** I never used those tools, but they did have developer tools specifically around viewing the audio graph, if I remember correctly.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right, yeah.
+
+**Myles Borins:** There is spec work being done right now on AudioWorkerNode which would work more similar to web workers, and I believe they might even have access to SharedArrayBuffers, which would solve the delay issue... Although it would now create the complexity of multiple things maybe \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, you trade one for the other. Well, cool. I look forward to the day when I can load VST plugins into the browser and just go for it... Which doesn't seem too far off -- I imagine wasm even takes the distance between the native stuff even closer. So it seems like getting those nodes to have zero latency or whatever seems to be a priority. I'd be interested -- if anyone wants to follow up if there's like work... Like, is the worker the solution that we're gonna go with, or can we make the current one faster? Let us know.
+
+Break: \[23:41\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay, next we're gonna talk about -- I think this is a little bit of a jumping off point... There was a fun issue lodged on the TypeScript repo that claimed that TypeScript was too incomplete, and there were some people with some requests for mathematical proofs... But he had a pretty compelling example where all he did was add types, and then was able to get like a prime number figure router out of the type checking.
+
+I think he was mostly saying "If you stop the recursion part of this, it'll stop", but it was just kind of a funny issue that, like, you add enough complexity in your type system on top of your language and suddenly you have another Turing complete language on top of your language.
+
+I don't know if there's too much to talk about from this... Have you guys ever seen the Turin complete CSS games, and stuff like that?
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Do you know how those work, can you explain it?
+
+**Rachel White:** No, I don't know how they work. \[laughs\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool. So it always requires input... If you haven't seen the CSS games -- the most simple example of CSS that works like a program would, versus one that works in a way that styling would is a slideshow. If you think about check boxes as having a style around checked or unchecked, you can kind of like put a giant transparent check box on either side of a slideshow, and whenever you check a checkbox - you know, put one between each slide - you can kind of say "Show the slide that is the sibling element (the next sibling) of the selected check box", and then you hide all the check boxes to where they're transparent, but on top. So you essentially build this whole slideshow that has no JavaScript, but every time you click the next hidden check box, it shows the next slide because now the next slide is the one that's the next sibling of the thing. So you can kind of see how you can take JavaScript out of the equation by using this one cool trick to say "Do something based on the act of check box."
+
+You can actually do the same thing to make a game. Tic-tac-toe is an interesting one, to where you can theoretically make check boxes that have x's or o's, but you can make the game have a win state, like say "You won" if it detects any of the potential win states as like, you can imagine, like a selector that has the selector for all possible combinations of three x's in a row. So people can make tic-tac-toe based solely on selectors, and that's kind of like making games that rely on no JavaScript... And there are much more complicated games than that.
+
+**Rachel White:** So isn't the majority of the time that people make the Turing complete CSS projects when -- it's to refute the notion that CSS isn't a "real" programming language?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[28:05\] I think that it's more just for fun. Definitely no one is suggesting that people should use CSS like this, I think. The slideshow is maybe a good example of something that could work, but the tic-tac-toe is unreasonable, and I don't think anyone's saying that. It's the ideal situation.
+
+**Rachel White:** So I guess what is the importance of having a language be Turing complete? I guess it's just another abstraction that's Turing complete in regards to the issue that we're talking about, but what is the importance of that necessarily?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I wouldn't say that there's an importance. I think it's more like exploration as fun. I think the person who wrote the issue did a good job of kind of making light of the situation, saying "No one cares about this. This is just a funny thing." You could turn it off if you didn't want -- because in this case it came along with a problem where you could accidentally create infinite loops of type-checking.
+
+I think more than anything it's just like a fun exploration of taking technology to its limits and exploring areas of it that weren't for an intent, but then being able to do crazy things because of that. Other things that come to mind are using -- there's a language called JSFuck (you can bleep that later), which is completely based off the fact that arrays cast themselves into integers, and then... It's be insane to explain here, but yeah... Go ahead.
+
+**Rachel White:** Actually, that's just an abstraction of the esolang Brainfuck it sounds like. I don't know if you're familiar with that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I am. It's not... It's similar, but it uses very specific properties of JavaScript to where it can kind of bootstrap itself by grabbing letters off of prototype functions and then eval-ing them, all based on positions and arrays... It's very interesting-looking, and it doesn't really work the same as the other one you mentioned, but it is very similar in its incomprehensibility... But everyone should check it out.
+
+I think it's just a good example of doing something entirely unexpected with a language. It falls into the category of uselessware that I think you and I have talked about, Rachel, before; at least on Twitter, maybe... Of just like building something for the sake of saying "This is cool and fun and weird", but no one should necessarily do this for their job.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah. I mean, I think it takes a certain type of person that has a full grasp, a full down to the nuts and bolts grasp of a language to be able to even get down to figuring out that kind of stuff... At least from my perspective, as someone who does not have a full grasp of a language. Not even English, let's be honest.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... \[laughs\] Sorry, I was saying 'yeah' to myself. \[laughter\] Yes, you are bad at English, Rachel. I do find it really fun to try to get so deep into some topic to where you can kind of flip it on its head, break the norms and do something interesting and cool, even if like -- there's a reason why it's not the norm, because it would be a terrible idea. But it's just kind of like, take everything to its logical maximum, to where theoretically we only need three characters in JavaScript to run any program, which is a cool idea, and I'm glad that someone wrote a compiler for it and we can talk about it on the show, but I don't anticipate anyone actually using it in their application. For one, it would break all my CSP rules.
+
+\[32:17\] Myles, can you think of -- this is a little bit on the spot, but can you think of other things in this vein? I know you tend to gravitate -- not gravitate, but you tend to be associated with a lot of projects that do similar... For instance, making a piano that has a tunable middle A, and programmable interval keys is a good example of breaking outside the norm. I'm trying to think if there's other things...
+
+**Myles Borins:** Can you just give me a tiny bit more context? Which norms are we talking about? Are we talking about language norms, or...?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, so I'm just trying to find more examples of this stuff. The situation with TypeScript is we have a thing where someone wanted to add, like "Alright, we wanna type-check integers in these places" and it's like, "Okay, now we have more complex types and we wanna do this and this", and eventually you have such an amount of complexity to where you can kind of do a whole programming language out of the thing that is supposed to attach to your programming language.
+
+It's a fun game to play, but I don't think anyone is going to be programming in TypeScript types anytime soon, if that makes sense... I think this question is potentially just a bad question. Do you have any thoughts on the topic?
+
+**Myles Borins:** I think that I know where you're going at here, which is like the beauty of combinatorial complexity...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure.
+
+**Myles Borins:** You see this happen a lot-- and I'm gonna bring it back to audio, because I'm in that mood now. You see this happen a lot in algorithmic composition, or any sort of generative environments, where like where you get things that are really interesting is you may have one thing that's like repetitive and it's in the randomness that it gets interesting, and in overlapping randomness, but then when you actually make like the ability to program that.
+
+A really good example would be, I've seen a performance where there was like four or five different voices that are playing in there. They're playing different patterns, and each of those patterns have a randomness value that can be added that will randomize the patterns, and this performer mapped that to a fader. So you can make it more random or less random. The way he would do his performances would be kind of put everything out super random and then slowly dial at it, to the point where it reached a stable state.
+
+I think that's kind of what you're talking about, where you create this combinatorial complexity, and within this complexity come these new higher level attributes that you can work with, and then you can use those as the means in which you program.
+
+I think you see that happen a lot in environments like Ableton, or like other kind of programming music environments, where you're no longer worrying about the notes that you're playing, so you can focus on other aspects of the song, such as the timbre, or playing with compressors, or just like effects and stuff like that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I think it's a -- for the tough question that I asked, I think it's a good example of kind of like just taking these side effects of something and using that as kind of your core. It's like someone allowed randomness for one purpose, and then you take randomness and now you're making randomness the core thing. Kind of like types were the point to enforce against this language, and then you're kind of taking them and literally just throwing the language under the covers and only using types, and kind of starting from that new baseline.
+
+\[36:16\] I think it's a thing that kind of -- again, it's always gonna sit on the fringe, but I think it's an art, just like that person kind of created art out of the randomness... Noticing things and doing, like, the CSS games, and all these edge case situations I think definitely falls in the realm of beauty and art, and creativity, in a way that is super interesting to people.
+
+It's similar to -- I think it's called like A Single Div...? Is that a thing?
+
+**Myles Borins:** Yeah. Oh, who did that again? That was such a beautiful project, from India.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** a.singlediv.com. I'm gonna go ahead and start into the projects of the week -- sorry, the picks for this week. My pick this week is gonna be A Single Div. A Single Div is an interesting website where CSS developers get a single div and they create icons and pictures and cartoon characters and scenes and all sorts of stuff, all with just like after-after-after-after-after content type tricks, in order to make a single div turn into an infinitely scalable, beautiful little picture icon type thing, and they're extremely impressive. Lynn Fisher is the person who made that.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Rachel, do you have a pick this week?
+
+**Rachel White:** I do, only because I asked someone for suggestions and they gave me a good one...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Nice.
+
+**Rachel White:** Full transparency... So there is this project that came out this week called StackBlitz that is an online VS Code IDE for Angular and React. I just hit my microphone, sorry. Basically, it lets you create Angular and React projects that are immediately online, so you don't have to push anything to production or rely on any other kind of thing. It just lets you code, and then it installs the dependencies and does magic, and then it's there. So if Angular and React are your thing, I figured since we talked about TypeScript a little bit earlier - this is a nice pseudo-tie-in - you can give that a shot.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Myles, I'm potentially putting you on the spot, but did we tell you to try and pick something ahead of time, or do you have anything new?
+
+**Myles Borins:** I do just-in-time picks, and I've got it... Just in time.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool.
+
+**Myles Borins:** \[38:56\] It's a GitHub repo called Omnitone. It's from the Google Chrome Org. It's a library for doing spatialized audio. It's built on a lot of the stuff that I was talking about earlier. It's a robust implementation of a first-order-ambisonic decoder, and a binaural renderer. It allows you to take spatialized media and play it and rotate it and play it through virtual speakers, and then to actual physical speakers in the headphone.
+
+The thing that's really cool about it too is if you're doing any stuff with Web VR, you can use this in conjunction with Web VR to do spatialized audio that will actually move around with the movement of your viewer.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Nice, that's really cool. Well, this episode got into the weeds a little bit more, Myles, and I tend to be bad at staying on topic. I don't apologize... Hopefully, you enjoy one episode like this and hopefully Mikeal can be back and ground us a bit.
+
+**Rachel White:** Hey, it's better than nothing... Better than nothing.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
+
+**Myles Borins:** You don't realize you're basically apologizing in saying that I'm better than nothing, right? \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No, I said let's not get ahead of ourselves, but... Thanks for listening this week, this has been JS Party.

Web Components and WTF is Shadow DOM_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,355 @@
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Hey, everybody! Welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript. We're gonna talk a bit about Web Components conferences and processing today. Cool, fun stuff!
+
+**Rachel White:** Yaay!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Did you say Web Components conferences, so conferences specifically for Web Components?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, that's the topic; those aren't two topics.
+
+**Rachel White:** I love the conferences about radio buttons. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, so... Let's get into Web Components and custom elements, and things.
+
+**Rachel White:** Shouldn't we say who we are?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh yeah, that's right, that's right... People don't know who we are. I'm Mikeal Rogers, we've also go Alex Sexton - say hello.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Hello.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] We've also got Rachel While, say hello...
+
+**Rachel White:** Hello!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We just brought the pace way down. It's getting like smooth jazz pace now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I actually think, Mikeal, that your lag is high today.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh really, is that what it is?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Everyone else seems to be normal, and whenever we talk to you, it takes you a long time to reply.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I apologize. Alex, why don't you tell us what Web Components are, and what the whole deal is with custom elements, and what the hell is a Shadow DOM?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Web Components are the Web standards version of kind of the popular component-driven model that people like to develop web applications in today. So the best way to think of Web Components, in my opinion, is to think about the current web platform, and think about how the things are implemented behind the scenes.
+
+In the past, we've had a button element - or a radio button element, or a checkbox, or a select menu - and in the really early days this wasn't true, but for the last long time, if you were to go look at the browser implementation of a select box or an input element, it's just HTML, CSS and JavaScript behind the scenes. It's implemented in the web platform, but it's behind this opaque thing called the button, or this opaque thing called the select menu. Because of that, there was this disconnect on what the browsers could offer you, versus what other web developers could offer. Because of this, we wanted to shorten and smallen that gap, and that's what Web Components are for.
+
+Web Components are so you can make your own button, that has not quite an opaque of an API, but you can make your own components that are standalone that you can pull into a page and use just as if you were using a button or a select... You could use the Alex button or the Mikeal button, or the Mikeal select, or the clock, or the social widget component. So kind of like the React world or the Ember world where you're making these discrete components that have their own APIs and then using them as units of development - you can do that. It didn't necessarily come from that, it came before both of those were super popular ideas, but it certainly has taken a longer ramp time as the standards track normally does.
+
+\[03:56\] We can get into some of the technical implementation details of how this works, but I also think you might have mentioned the Shadow DOM already, and that's really just the DOM that exists inside of the component, rather than to the developer once they're using your components. So if you think about the old button, technically there's a span and a div or whatever inside of the button, but that's not exposed to developers. In that same way, whenever you build the clock component, you don't have to expose all the different spans and divs and things inside of your clock component; it just is a clock, and it's not necessarily CSS-selectable from outside.
+
+**Rachel White:** So is it just rendering these components in a cleaner way than having to append all of those other things that exist inside of the regular component?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, everything still exists. You could take away the idea of Web Components and Shadow DOM, and it would just be a larger DOM with a lot more stuff in it, with a lot more CSS scoping, and there's a lot more chance for bleeding together of certain things... But yeah, there's nothing super special about them which is why they're so important for the future.
+
+Right now a lot of the React and Ember model relies on whole, massive libraries being able to run and execute prior to be able to see or use anything on the site, where these Web Components can. Since they utilize more of the web stack, the web stack can do a better job of rendering them instantly without as much work and execution of JavaScript and all that kind of good stuff. So it is more of the web platform... Which isn't to say that -- as time goes on, I think Ember and React can start to kind of merge their different strategies to where you can write React-like code and end up with Web Components, which I think is totally possible.
+
+**Rachel White:** So I'm trying to read this as you go through, because I've honestly -- I hear the term Shadow DOM thrown around a lot, and...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's a very cool word!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[whispering\] Shadow DOM... You have to whisper it.
+
+**Rachel White:** It's one of those things, like, if you ask me what the Shadow DOM was, I could make up a lot of stories about what it definitely isn't... The site that I'm looking at right now is from the developers.google.com site about the primaries in getting started with the Shadow DOM, and they're talking about Light DOM versus Shadow DOM, and they're showing an example that has a little bit more robust write-up or markup in it for the Light DOM version...
+
+So with the Shadow DOM, are you even seeing the other components, if I was gonna use DevTools and inspect it just like out of the box?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, DevTools I think allows you to currently inspect Shadow DOM of Web Components, not of native browser components. The whole idea is that you can have a CSS class in there called button; it literally updates all the button tags, and you no longer have to have a super specific CSS class name added to that. I mean, you probably should - whatever. The whole idea is that it's completely scoped inside that web component; that way, everybody can style their own Web Components however they want and there's no worry about collision of those things.
+
+**Rachel White:** Okay, I guess that does make a lot more sense of you're thinking of React...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Especially if you're pulling in components from other people. So if so-and-so styled this button and so-and-so styled this clock and whatever, in the React world there's a higher chance for collisions. Even the box model - one relies on the newer box model, and one relies on the... Things like that are going to all change.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[08:06\] Cool, so why is this stuff important to know, for people that don't know what it is?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think it's unfortunately a longer-term vision for the web than it would have been if people didn't make such good userland libraries to do similar things... I think there's this very similar world to where we live in, an alternate universe where React didn't come out and Ember didn't do the component version of their views, and Web Components really takes off.
+
+I think Polymer and Web Components get confused a lot. Polymer is kind of like a library on top of Web Components that allows you to do a bunch of extra stuff, like the React and Ember libraries would kind of offer you, including building and fallbacks, and all sorts of fun stuff. But I think if w want to get to a world where the web works as well as native applications on bad internet connections in slow mobile browsers, then I think the Web Components vision is one of the only ones that literally can do that as well as a native application, because it is using native code in order to do the initial renders, and it can do layout better, it can do far less JavaScript execution before it can render... And all sorts of things. It's able to utilize the web platform in a much more efficient way, which means that you can serve a wider audience and have a faster, better experience.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So you mentioned React and Ember, and a few people do stuff kind of like this, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, it's fundamentally different...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, but you can create a class and then you get a constructor that happened when you create these elements, right? Which is great, and you have ways to do that in all these different abstractions, but you didn't have a way to do it natively... Other than the CSS scoping stuff, which is brand new - you can't really do that very effectively with tooling; it's really hard... Are there any aspects of Web Components that actually just give you abilities that you just never had before?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** People talk about element-level media queries instead of window-level, and the Shadow DOM can kind of give you an approximation of that, which is nice...
+
+There are different lifecycle events that don't necessarily occur anywhere else, except for in these components. A lot of the things that are available to you outside now were created for the purpose of Web Components. The template tag was created for the purpose of this, as well as the Shadow DOM is separated from the Web Components spec, so you can kind of use it outside of Web Components, I assume. I don't know. It can land in browsers beforehand, so I assume you can.
+
+Some things we already use are a part of that... I don't know. Some of it leaks back into the top level. I need to look it up, but I'm sure there are a few things.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I'm actually some Shadow DOM stuff in a thing that I'm not using Web Components at all for, and it's really useful just for that element-scoped CSS stuff.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah... \[laughs\] Are we done talking about Web Components?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So there was a question in the chat... "Did Google start this?"
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think while the Google people were the ones -- this all came out of the Web Manifesto, I believe... That was a large amount of Google people, and I think the core authors of this specification started at Google, but it is not a Google-only thing; it is a specification in the W3C that has passed and is real and is in multiple browsers, and things. So I think it is OF Google, but not solely BY Google.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[12:03\] Right, right. I think you addressed the Polymer thing, where people tend to conflate this with Polymer... And Polymer IS a Google thing, very directly. But this is much larger.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think one of the core problems there specifically was in the beginning no browser implemented Web Components, but you could effectively use them if you used Polymer... So for a while the only way to use Web Components was with Polymer, and I think that history caused this conflation, versus other similar situations that that didn't happen in.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that's kind of funny thing though when you think about it, because one of the big benefits that they continue to talk about is that you don't need a bunch of JavaScript in order to do this... Like, you don't need this giant library, that's the benefit, and then people are conflating it with this giant library to do it before it was in the spec.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I think it is pretty fundamentally different though... The size of Polymer is pretty different than the size of Ember or similar things... But also, you can get initial renders and working things before you have full Polymer execution. You can see the page because it's CSS and HTML, and the JavaScript hasn't executed yet, and that is, I think, a pretty fundamentally different thing that the other stuff.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, do you think then that -- like, we talked a bit about React and Ember eventually moving their implementations towards using Web Components - do you think that this is going to be something that we just change the way that we build our tools on top of them, or is it actually a new enough model that it's gonna change the tools that we build? Are we gonna build very different tools in React and all of that, in order to take advantage of this?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I definitely don't think that you could just take the current React and throw Web Components over the top of it, but you could take a very similar... Like React 16 (or whatever we're on) -- no, they have 16; let's call it React 20 - they could theoretically change a bunch of the API, and then be outputting different things at the builds, but it would be a pretty huge leap. I wouldn't actually expect it to really happen. It would be more like, some new person says "Okay, the initial renders for Web Components are insane, but I don't like writing Web Components. Here's this very Reacty model that can do these things."
+
+One of the fundamental things that Web Components adds is the ability to do some of the data binding that some of these libraries do via DOM diffing and re-rendering every time. I think that is actually another interesting reason to use it... Not necessarily like a killer, because a lot of that's very fast and can get faster, but it's certainly an interesting thing where you can kind of bind two sections together. You can bind properties on attributes of the Web Components to the inside of the Web Components.
+
+But yeah, I wouldn't expect that React or Ember ends up with a Web Component version, but someone would do the React for Web Components and it's called WeAct or whatever, and that becomes a cool, popular thing.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Interesting, very interesting. I'm trying to play out in my head how much of the web affects this. Like the way that you use Stripe, for instance, or I was using the Tito embed the other day... You get this JavaScript include, and then you kind of use this custom element, and right now it has to do all this crazy stuff to find that element and do a bunch of stuff after load... Is it really gonna change the model of how that kind of stuff is implemented, where when you're like, "Hey, include my custom element in your page" - is it gonna work really differently and a lot smoother than it does today?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[15:51\] Yeah, I think there are HTML imports which I don't know if have made it into browsers yet... And there are a few things that make a lot of those things really cool. I have implemented a long time the Stripe.js credit card form as a web component just internally to try it out, and the amount of work that I have to do to style safely and do all the third party JavaScript things in the current world versus the Web Component world is pretty vastly different.
+
+And the speed at which our component can kind of render and then be attached, versus execute the JavaScript and then be injected is also pretty different. If we know one thing about the performance of checkout pages is that everybody who's ever tested it is like "This matters a lot." So I think it could be a pretty good fundamental change in the direction of rendering, and I think that's what a lot of -- a lot of the cool wins are the modularity and the composability and the scoping and all those things that we've had trouble with on the web whenever you're building a larger application, and I think those will be the things that people think about more than some of this stuff.
+
+The fundamental turn is that things can render and exist prior to JavaScript executing, so the server-side rendering isomorphic stuff changes in the way -- like, you don't necessarily need to do rehydration as much as you can... Just like render things as Web Components and then the JavaScript can run after.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** What is rehydration? You just ran right over that one...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, sorry. Rehydration in a server-side render... So the competition to Web Components in the world of frameworks these days is that you can get Node.js to render your entire page, and as long as that is a deterministic output, you can 2HTML it and then serve it as the initial load... So no JavaScript has run, it's just CSS and HTML, and you can see the entire page. None of it works yet, but you can see the entire page. And then because that same render function can then run once the JavaScript has executed, it can come up with the exact same deterministic DOM that Node.js did, and instead of killing the whole page and then re-rendering it with the client-side JavaScript, it can just kind of attach itself to the server-side rendered thing and say "We claim these elements as the ones that we would have rendered had they not already existed." Kind of like a re-render that occurs in React all the time; a basic property of React is that if you try to render something and all of it is still there, it's no-op, it's kind of the DOM diff. It's "What's the diff between this Virtual DOM that we've created based on all the data and the one in the actual window? And if there's no difference we won't do anything, but we'll kind of know that all these things are attached to all of our handlers and stuff like that."
+
+That's what rehydration is... It says "We can just attach ourselves to a server-side rendered page without re-rendering it", and that is a pretty good -- like, if you need speed, if you're a content website and you need speed and SEO and all that stuff, you should absolutely be doing server-side rendering with rehydration.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, you just mentioned SEO, which means it's time for a break and we get off this topic... \[laughs\] So we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back we're gonna talk about conferences.
+
+**Break:** \[19:30\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Now we're gonna get into conferences a little bit. JavaScript has an amazing conference scene... There's a million little community conferences out there, it has really exploded in the last few years. We're just gonna talk a little bit about speaking at conferences, and if you're thinking about going to a conference, what to look for; if you're thinking about applying to speak what to look for, and maybe even a little bit about what it's like to run a conference.
+
+**Rachel White:** I would say if someone is looking into wanting to start attending some JavaScript conferences, the best thing that they could do is go to JSConf.com. It's the JSConf family of conferences, and I'm pretty sure what that means is first there was JSConf U.S., and it was started by Chris Williams, and there's this whole family of other conferences, and it has a strict code of conduct where you're nice to everyone, there's no racism, misogyny, making assumptions about people, sexism... It's just super welcoming, it's really fun, it was always at a great location... And then as people started attending these conferences, they were like "Wow, it would be really awesome if we had this conference where I live!" So Chris started allowing other people to have conferences under the JSConf family, and the way that you would be able to do that is if you've attended a JSConf, so that you know how they run, you know how that runs, you're able to branch off.
+
+Now there's like - I'm trying to count really fast - twelve that are JSConf\_WhateverCountryThey'reIn. There's a JSConf\_US -- well, there's not a JSConf\_US anymore for now... There's JSConf\_EU, which Mikeal and I will be going to - I'll be speaking - and there's JSConf\_AU in Australia... There's so many.
+
+If you listened last week, Juan talked about JSConf\_Columbia... They're everywhere. And there's not just the JSConf namesake ones, there's also RobotsConf, there's JSUnconf, there's Cascadia, there's Empire... There's a lot of other ones that are under that umbrella, and it's usually 2-3 days of just really well-curated talks and workshops with a bunch of people that are like-minded. It was the first conference that I ever attended in 2014, and it pretty much changed my life due to the people that I met there, from seeing them speak, and the people that inspired me to go out of my comfort zone and try and do more with JavaScript robotics, and just try and be a better programmer. From there, here we are today... \[laughs\]
+
+There's a lot of really awesome resources, and a lot of these conferences also have diversity sponsorship, so if you are from a marginalized group or underrepresented minority, you can often attend at a severely, severely discounted rate, often sometimes free.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That was a great breakdown.
+
+**Rachel White:** Thanks!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I don't think that we could have done that nearly as well. Alex and I are both people that Chris helped out getting our events off the ground in that JSConf family. For me NodeConf and JSFest, and for Alex TXJS. But yeah, that's a great group of conferences... Even the conferences that aren't "JSConf family" are really directly influenced by that whole thing.
+
+\[24:00\] There's all kinds of new events popping up all over the place, and you can really see the difference in the content and how people are treated... A lot of the code of conduct stuff that is now pretty STDIN conferences really started with JSConf\_US a while back. Alex, do you have anything to add?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Me? This Alex?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, sure. I have to talk...? Mikeal and I were both on staff for some of the earlier JSConfs with Chris, and I just wanted to share a story about -- I think it was in Arizona and it was the morning of JSConf, the first morning, and everyone had to come register. We were laying out badges and putting together bags for people to do, and I remember Chris and Laura scrambling to get everything right and putting everyone in their places, and then I look over and in the corner Mikeal has this coffee grinder Mason jar contraption, and he's just grinding his own coffee in the corner... \[laughter\] And he was just like "I can't help you guys until I'm done grinding my own coffee" and then pouring it over in this corner... That's maybe one of my favorite Mikeal JSConf stories.
+
+Actually, maybe I have an observation that I don't know if it's true... It feels like the actual peak of conferences maybe occurred like two years ago, not now. Does that feel right? I feel like it was almost zero, and then JSConf\_US -- I mean, there was like Ajaxian before that, and some jQuery Camp, things like that...
+
+**Rachel White:** So what you're saying is the decline of conferences started when I started speaking? \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm not trying to imply that, I'm trying to directly state it as fact. \[laughter\] No, I feel like there was kind of this explosion of conferences that was non-linear. 2010 was almost zero, and then by 2014 or so you had a ton of city-based conferences, and I feel like a lot of those have fallen off and now there's again maybe a little more specialized, like React Confs or different things like that.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I think that it's definitely getting more specialized... I think there was one year when there was Cascadia and TXJS and JSConf\_US, and now we aren't gonna have Cascadia, we're not gonna have TXJS, we're not gonna have JSConf\_US, there's not gonna be a JSConf\_Iceland... There's only gonna be, I think, Dinosaur, there's the one in Omaha put on by the \[unintelligible 00:26:55.21\] there's the Techlahoma ones...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Techlahoma - they're a group. Since we've mentioned Techlahoma, they have like a family of different events. They give constant learning and meetups, as well as... Oklahoma - their conference isn't called Techlahoma, I misspoke, but you can look them up. Sorry, I interrupted your entire thing.
+
+**Rachel White:** It's okay. I think that it's getting a lot more spread out, and there's not really any -- I mean, it's hard to put on conferences of that scale... I think that the closest that I've been to where I felt that really -- I mean, every conference that I go to is pretty much... They're all really great, but there's just something special that hasn't been matched for me aside from Nordic.js. Nordic.js goes all out, and it's a different environment obviously because it's not here in the United States, but it's great...
+
+\[28:05\] I think that there's also a lot more speakers now. People realized, "Hey, people are doing that, I wanna do it too." I mean, that's what I did. I guess this is a good segue into how you can speak at conferences.
+
+Jenn Schiffer was like, "Hey Rachel, if you wanna speak at conferences, you should just submit a talk", and I did, and it got accepted, so I had to build a robot... And then I spoke at JSConf last call, and it was awesome. I was like "This is fun!"
+
+I think the best thing about speaking is being able to get people excited about something that they may not have been exposed previously, and inspiring people to try something new, or that they are capable of doing whatever it is that you're talking about. I think that there's this weird stigma that people that speak at conferences are a little bit like -- what's the right word that I'm thinking off...? Like we're special, or like it's something that is hard to achieve, but I don't really think it is, as long as you apply yourself and you're passionate about what you're speaking about.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I agree. I also got into speaking via just the open section of conferences, where you don't even submit a talk... It wasn't a five-minute or lightning talk, but I think it was like a 15-minute style, just... People sign up throughout the whole day, it's a third track, and I think if you wanna get your feet wet, that's a really good time to go and try it. Then maybe speak at a local meetup, and then submit a talk. If you wanna just go slowly, absolutely, if you're interested and you think you can do it, then just submit.
+
+I have a game I like to play - speak/attend/stream. We'll say three conferences - which one would you attend, and which one would you stream?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh yeah, good play.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Mikeal, you're up.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, you gotta throw the conferences at me, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, I have to give you the three conferences? Okay... \[laughter\] Ajaxian 2009, the second Pirate Themes JSConf, and TXJS 2015. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, let me see here...
+
+**Rachel White:** This is a horrible game...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So you're not interested...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So attend would be TXJS, because I'd like to just relax and enjoy Austin and not have to give a talk. Speaking would definitely be the early JSConf's, because there were just a lot of perks of being a speaker back then, even more than today probably. And stream - Ajaxian, because who gives a what...?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That was the only conference, that was the jam...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It was huge, though... The difference between in a thousand-person conference seeing a talk live and seeing it streamed, it's just not that big.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, but that was the first time you had John Resig, Douglas Crockford, Brendan Eich and one of the Andrew Dupont, all on the same stage, just arguing about frameworks or whatever...
+
+**Rachel White:** That sounds terrible.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Exactly! It was the first time something that terrible existed, which is kind of like a car-wreck situation. I thought it was pretty magical at the time, even though I wouldn't attend it currently. 2009 was a different lay of the land.
+
+**Rachel White:** I guess somebody asked about non-JS conferences, and I really haven't actually attended many non-JS conferences, so I'm gonna defer to you two. I've heard good things about OSCON and some other things like that, but...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[32:02\] It's a pretty different beast, I think... There are lots of full-stack conferences, and the core language conferences of almost every language are usually pretty great. Ruby has some... I think a lot of the conferences in JavaScript that are great actually kind of stem from the style of conferences that the Ruby community -- and Chris has admitted as much that I don't which Ruby...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** RubyFringe.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, RubyFringe is kind of where he was like, "Hey, this is a cool model." So I think a lot of the Ruby conferences are really good, as well as some of the full stack conferences. Go has a good conference (GopherCon), and all those things. I think there are lots of good community, and kind of the more open source(y) languages often have similarly valued conferences.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I've heard excellent things about StrangeLoop, which is in St. Louis, and FullStackFest in Barcelona, and RevConf in Virginia, and a bunch of those other ones that don't really focus on any specific language.
+
+I think that you can get a lot more interesting hybrids of talks when you have that kind of balance, even though I don't know, because I haven't gone to any...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So I would say that there's really kind of two classes of conferences that you really have to look at and treat differently. One is the community conferences that we've been talking about, which - the whole JSConf family is really like "developers in the developer community decide that they wanna do a community event for that community."
+
+Then there are really huge events that are run usually by media companies...
+
+**Rachel White:** Like the O'Reilly ones...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Or by Google, or somebody like that. They're very, very different, and if you're thinking about speaking, I would say that speaking at an O'Reilly event is more likely to maybe get you a job or to talk to people that will hire you, potentially, than a 200-300-person community event. But if you're looking to make friends and become more engaged in the community and really have a community impact, attending or speaking at the smaller community events is just a world different. Also, in terms of quality of content, the quality is much higher in the community event, because they don't have a bunch of sponsored talks that they had to sell in order to make the funding model work. They don't have -- look, me and Alex have been running conferences for a long time, and for a while, if you were running a JavaScript or a Node event, you were the only game in town; there weren't any media companies. So these huge companies would come up and they would give us a bunch of money, and they didn't really ask for all the stuff that they ask for now.
+
+Now they don't sponsor a lot of the smaller events because there are these bigger events that are willing to give them a booth. We don't have booths at these conferences.
+
+**Rachel White:** You know what? The bigger events are - hold on, get ready whoever is editing this; I don't know if this is a word I'm allowed to say... They're like such a circle-jerk. It's the same people doing the same stuff at every O'Reilly thing. Sorry, O'Reilly, just saying... If they're recorded, how are they gonna charge a grand for a ticket, and who is even going to those? Is it just other big companies?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I have some answers to that, having participated in some of that... So when a ticket costs a grand, people are not paying for the tickets. I think that is a fundamental reason why the audiences are very different at the two different conferences - it's people who often put up their own money to attend a community conference, versus people who's company have sent them to a conference to learn things.
+
+\[35:56\] So if you're gonna send someone to a conference, you wanna send them to the most reputable one that you can find, and O'Reilly is a very reputable name in tech education. There are very big names on that ticket. And of course, those people give the same talk every time, because you can't give 300 different talks in a year if that's your whole job, or whatever.
+
+So I think you end up with an audience that cares a little less because they're not invested, which isn't to say that there aren't tons and tons of people who care a whole bunch in those places... But I think the environment becomes different because it isn't a bunch of people who are necessarily all on the same page.
+
+I want to be very clear that it's fine if you're a developer who goes to work, programs, isn't interested in spending all your own money in going to a conference, and just go do the things that you love more. I think it's perfectly acceptable and good to have the wide gamut. But I think one of the reasons the community conferences are different is because the motivation for going is not "My work is sending me here", it's "I wanna learn all these things myself."
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** "And I wanna meet these people..."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right, yeah.
+
+**Rachel White:** And I guess you're gonna get exposed to more passionate talks, versus pitchy talks, so that makes sense. I'm a jerk.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'll also say that you would think that a thousand dollars for a ticket, and in some cases the O'Reilly events have like $100,000 for the Platinum membership as well... You would think that they were just raking in money and that's why a lot of the quality was really low, but on the organizing side, every time you go into a new 500-person bracket - when you go from 500 to 1,000 people, or 1,000 people to 1,500, you move away from a lot of different venues and catering options, and all of the things that you can do end up costing more money/attendee for lower quality.
+
+Once you get to the size that like a Google Next is, where there's 10,000 people, those sandwiches cost $40, and they're terrible... And there's just no way out of it. You're locked into it because there's only three places on the West Coast that can hold you, and they know that they have you over a barrel.
+
+So a lot of what we're talking about for the quality being higher for the smaller side is a lot of the funding side of it too, where you can make a lot better choices. If you do a 200-300-person event in Portland, you can get the greatest food in the whole world brought to the event. It's so good! But if you do a thousand-person event in Portland, your options are actually pretty slim and terrible.
+
+**Rachel White:** Dinosaur.js did something pretty awesome last year for food, where they just rented a bunch of food trucks and had everybody walk to a big park, and it was nice. But that's a smaller community conference, so that's where you get that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So if I had one piece of advice for conference organizers around food is be VERY careful of food trucks. Pretty much every food truck situation, including Mikeal's first foray into food trucks, ends up with a line that is not gone by the time lunch is over. So you really have to plan either a food truck that can pre-make everything and just hand things out to people, or get so many food trucks that they can handle the concurrency of enough people.
+
+By far, the majority of food truck situations end up poorly, which is why I have avoided them at TXJS. Even though food trucks are delicious and it's a really good idea, it's very hard to manage. So if you're running a conference, be very aware of that problem.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So here's the tip - you have to find a food truck that also does catering. So if they say specifically that they also do catering, they don't just come and park there, then in their prep kitchen they know how to make a ton of something and then show up with all of it and everybody can eat right away.
+
+The event Alex is talking about was NodeConf 2012, and we actually did two different food trucks, one of which was very good at that, and everybody ate and got out of there in time, and the other one didn't process the line for an hour and a half, and we had to push everything back.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[40:04\] I'd like to circle back really quick to people that are interested and wanting to speak at conferences... So I know that in New York there's this really great thing that Tracy Hinds and Justin put out called Right To Speak, where people get together and they have abstract ideas, or just maybe even a few talk topics that they're interested in workshopping, and trying to help people flesh them out.
+
+I would suggest if you are interested in speaking, don't do it unless you're super passionate -- not "Don't do it...", "Don't do it unless you're like..."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[unintelligible 00:40:43.16\] Don't!
+
+**Rachel White:** Don't do it unless you're actually really legitimately passionate about what it is that you're talking about, because there's nothing worse than somebody that's there obviously just because they wanted to go to a conference and they thought that they could speak because everybody else was doing it, and they get up there and it's just like the driest, painful thing to watch.
+
+Aside from that, I would also suggest reading a lot of abstracts. Go on past few years of conference sites, see what the talks look like that people have written, see the tone that they use, tell the story that you're trying to tell... Don't just tell me what it is that you're going to teach me; I wanna know why you wanna teach somebody that.
+
+I did some proposal reviews for Empire, and you would be so surprised -- well, you two wouldn't be so surprised, but everybody out there that thinks that they can't write an abstract... Let's say you get a conference that has 300 applications and there's maybe only 30 speaking slots; I guarantee you two-thirds of all of those submissions are gonna be terrible anyway, because it's people that are just like putting in a sentence where it's like "I want to talk about React components" or "I think it would be really neat to talk about currying", or something.
+
+The people that actually put in effort are the ones that have a way better chance than people that are just throwing their hat in the ring for the sake of it.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... Before I kind of stopped organizing conferences (because I was kind of burning out on it), the main advice that I put in the CFP every time was "Tell me a story." It should have a beginning, a middle and an end. I don't need to know about the technology, I can read the docs for that... And a lot of the abstracts just look like an outline of the documentation. What I wanna know is "Why did you create it? Why did you decide to use it? What is that narrative that makes this a compelling thing to learn and to get into?" If you're just telling me what the documentation says, I could do that when I leave.
+
+The job of a speaker is not to teach everybody in 20 minutes how to use something, it's actually to teach them why it's compelling enough that they would go home and continue to learn it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I think that's exactly what I was gonna say... As a speaker and as someone who chooses speakers, I absolutely would be fine if everyone walked away having learned nothing, except from being inspired to go learn more. "I saw the value proposition in X, and now I want to go read the docs. I gained enough motivation from that talk in order to go put in the work to actually learn it."
+
+Anyone reading documentation to you for 20 minutes is not going to be compelling, and it's a waste of money for the most part. So I totally agree - definitely inspire people, give them the -- and I don't mean like slimy-wimy, "everybody is great, everyone is a special unicorn type inspiration." Those talks can be very good too, I'm not against those talks, but I mean really talk about why you're excited about something and how it changed things for you, or something like that... Or why it's important for the web, or something. I think those types of talks really go over much better.
+
+**Rachel White:** \[44:17\] I wanna hear about the journey, not the steps.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's a good way to put it.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** On that note, I think we can take a break now. When we come back, we'll get into the project of the week.
+
+**Break:** \[44:33\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, this week's project of the week is p5.js. Why don't you tell us about this, Rachel?
+
+**Rachel White:** Sure, so p5.js is a JavaScript (I'm gonna say) omage, because it's not a direct port of processing. I guess I have to start by telling you what processing is. Processing is this open source thing and an IDE that's super old - it's about 14-15 years old, I think - and it was made explicitly for people that were beginners in programming and visual artists to use something to make some really cool visualization stuff and graphics and art.
+
+It's built on top of Java, it uses simplified syntax, and basically what it does is it lets you export your projects as desktop apps for either Windows, Mac or Linux. So you can't really show it on the web, though... It's like a standalone thing.
+
+The power behind it is really great; it has great FPS, you can build some really robust things, but you can't do things on the web. So somebody build another port of it, which was actually John Resig and some other students, to make Processing.js.
+
+Processing.js is a more true port of processing to JavaScript. You don't have to totally rewrite your code, you use Processing.js to take your processing files and be able to run it in HTML5. It uses regular expressions to convert the Java into JavaScript, and it lets you have some pretty mingled JavaScript that's not readable afterwards, but you get the same effect and it runs on Canvas.
+
+So in comes p5! P5 is a really awesome, accessible library made my Lauren McCarthy, who was at NYU ITP and the Processing Foundation, which deals with Processing.js and a lot of other ports of processing to other languages. What they wanted to do is they wanted to make it so that people could do the same kind of things that you would do with processing, but a little bit looser written. So it's not gonna be exactly the same with all of the super involved animations you can do with your regular processing, but with p5 it lets you write more natural JavaScript to do some really cool stuff in the browser, involving a lot of shapes and interactions, and artsy stuff. It's all Canvas-based.
+
+\[48:19\] There's a bunch of other plugins that you can get for it. There's the p5 library, which is just the regular access to the shapes and stuff, but there's also p5.dom, which lets you interact with HTML5 objects outside of the canvas. You can do video/audio/webcam input, text... I was messing around with the video one, it's really cool. It essentially grabs each pixel in the video and maps it to a drawn instance of whatever shape that you use and hides the video. It makes basically an animation of whatever video you give it to, but with shapes instead for each pixel.
+
+There's also p5.sound, which uses web audio stuff, and you can do playback and effect a lot of the stuff on the canvas that you would build art with there. There's p5.serial, which lets you do serial communications with stuff and lets you interact with it with p5... There's so many. There's also bots, which was made by Sarah Groff-Palermo, who's a New York-based dev who's at Kickstarter...
+
+There's speech, there's geolocation... There's just so much stuff that you can do, and the best thing for me is you don't necessarily even need to understand JavaScript to jump in and use it. I've seen a lot of people that are just starting out as game devs who are used to Unity and some C\# stuff and they heard that you could do some fun stuff with P5.
+
+The reference material on the site is awesome, the examples are awesome... It's just really neat, especially for people that are interested in doing some more creative coding and finding out what they can do with Canvas.
+
+There's another person who teaches at ITP named Daniel Shiffman who has a really amazing YouTube channel called The Coding Train, and they make video tutorials every week that goes from the beginning of basic p5 stuff to super advanced things like Perlin Noise, which is an algorithm that allows you to create true randomized noise for cool glitchy -- well, it's actually used mostly for like terrain generation. They're really good videos and it explains it in an accessible way. If anybody is interested in trying out that kind of stuff, I highly recommend checking out those resources.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** ITP is so cool... Everything ITP ever does is just rad. Clay Shirky is still a teacher there... I've known a few people that have gone through there and done their program, and it's just this amazing mashup of code and art and thinking about social good... It's pretty rad.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah. It's also very expensive, so if you don't wanna go to ITP but you wanna mess with the tools that people there use, p5 is a good start, three.js is a good start... Those are all good places.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. I'm gonna play with this later today, actually... I've been meaning to poke around with some art stuff.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** The music notes on the back of the web page are pretty fun, too.
+
+**Rachel White:** Yeah... People that are super -- this is like a challenge that I'm going to give... If you have never really tried to do anything artsy or you're just a JavaScript dev and you build web stuff all the time, I would love if you tried to make something neat with p5. Because if you know JavaScript in and out with your heart, then you should be able to do some really awesome stuff with -- a lot of p5 stuff is just iterating through objects to place shapes randomly.
+
+\[52:11\] Please make something with it and tweet it at me, because I just wanna see what other cool things that people can use to do this. I also think it's a really good accessible library for people that are trying to try something new, and wanna try and make something every day... Because you could make something with this in like 15-20 minutes, just like a little code sketch, and it's gonna help you get used to regular JavaScript, but also a new library that makes pretty art.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Sweet. Alright, are we ready for picks? Do you have your picks ready?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Totally.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I hope you all do. I'll go first - mine is kind of a shameless plug, actually... I stopped organizing events a little while ago, because it was too much work, but I did now kind of take on this new event that we're trying out, called Slideless (Slideless.com). The idea is that no slides, it's a 15-minute talk that's really telling a story within a theme. The theme for this first one is "What is your superpower?" We'll have some great talks about that, without any slides, that people can just get up and do their narrative.
+
+If you're interested in attending, it will be in San Francisco in July. Tickets are out now, and I'm still looking for a few talks, as well... If you have an idea for a talk on that team, get a hold of me.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** My super power is calling Mikeal Rogers' bullshit.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] That's a really limited power. That requires me being around...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it is unfortunate...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Very portable...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[laughs\] My pick is a person, it's Mike West. Mike West is not that visible outside of the web app security world, but has a massive impact on the security of the web. I don't know if he's an official - I assume he is - of the Web Application Security Working Group, which is a W3C group... He kind of drafted a ton of the security stuff that currently is being added to the browsers in the last five years, including CSP and a lot of the cookie updates and header changes and things like that... Subresource Integrity, all these different cool security upgrades.
+
+I would encourage you to both follow Mike West on Twitter, as well as follow the web app sec mailing lists, because they're not actually that crazy. I think they're somewhat followable, and that's pretty fun and cool.
+
+**Rachel White:** Cool. My pick this week is a person and a book. Sarah Drasner released this book on O'Reilly - since I said so many nice things about O'Reilly conferences earlier, I wanna say nice things about this book, actually. I also apologize if I said her last name incorrectly...
+
+She released this really cool book on SVG animations. I know that we briefly touched on SVG stuff on one of the other picks, which was like DataSketches... But if you were wondering "How do I make SVG animations really pretty? I want better UX implementations." Her book was released within the past week, and I think she said it's the number one new release for programming books on Amazon. It looks great, so if that's something that you have more questions about, check it out!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Awesome.
+
+**Rachel White:** Now I'm gonna go eat a horse. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And with that, we're all done for the week. Thank you all for tuning in. Rate us on iTunes, check us out live every week on Fridays. You can go to changelog.com...
+
+Goodbye, everybody! Thank you very much!

Web Components and WTF is Shadow DOM？_transcript.txt

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+[0.00 --> 5.22]  Bandwidth for JS Party is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com.
+[9.14 --> 13.22]  Welcome to JS Party, a weekly celebration of JavaScript and the web.
+[13.58 --> 18.52]  Tune in live on Fridays at 3 p.m. U.S. Eastern at changelaw.com slash live.
+[18.88 --> 22.90]  Join the community and Slack with us in real time. Head to changelaw.com slash community.
+[23.42 --> 27.16]  Follow us on Twitter. We're at JS Party FM. And now on to the show.
+[27.16 --> 32.38]  Hey, everybody. Welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript.
+[32.84 --> 36.80]  We're going to talk a bit about web components, conferences, and processing today.
+[37.54 --> 38.64]  Cool. Fun stuff.
+[39.04 --> 39.38]  Yay.
+[39.64 --> 41.04]  Let's get...
+[41.04 --> 44.62]  Can you help me actually? Did you say web component conferences?
+[45.14 --> 47.04]  The conferences specifically for web components?
+[47.54 --> 50.18]  Yes. Yes. That's the topic. Those aren't two topics.
+[50.64 --> 53.54]  I love the conferences about radio buttons.
+[54.48 --> 55.04]  Hmm.
+[56.00 --> 56.44]  Yeah.
+[57.16 --> 63.86]  All right. So, uh, let's, let's, let's get into web components and custom elements and things.
+[64.34 --> 65.80]  Shouldn't we say who we are?
+[66.64 --> 70.02]  Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. People don't know who we are. I'm Michael Rogers.
+[70.36 --> 73.40]  We've also got Alex Sexton. Say hello.
+[74.52 --> 74.78]  Hello.
+[76.28 --> 78.60]  We've also got Rachel White. Say hello.
+[79.28 --> 79.68]  Hello.
+[79.68 --> 84.82]  We just brought the, we just brought the pace way down. It's getting like smooth jazz pace now.
+[84.98 --> 88.66]  I actually, I actually think, Michael, that your lag is high today.
+[89.98 --> 91.18]  Oh, really? Is that what it is?
+[91.34 --> 92.18]  Yeah. Correct.
+[92.26 --> 92.38]  Okay.
+[92.38 --> 100.82]  Uh, everyone else seems to be, uh, normal. Um, and whenever we talk to you, it takes you like a long time to reply.
+[100.82 --> 110.38]  Well, I apologize. Um, Alex, why don't you tell us what web components are and what the whole deal is with custom elements and what the hell is a shadow dumb?
+[110.38 --> 126.20]  Um, um, web components are the web standards, um, version of kind of the, the popular component driven model that people like to develop web applications in today.
+[126.38 --> 137.26]  So the best way to think of web components, in my opinion, is to think about the current web platform, um, and think about how the things are implemented behind the scenes.
+[137.26 --> 144.62]  So in the past, we've had a button element or a radio button element or a checkbox or a select menu.
+[145.86 --> 160.40]  And, uh, in the really early days, this wasn't true, but for the last long time, if you were to go look at the browser implementation of a select box or an input element, it's just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript behind the scenes.
+[160.40 --> 168.68]  It's, it's, it's implemented in the web platform, but it's behind this, uh, opaque thing called a button or this opaque thing called a select menu.
+[169.30 --> 177.24]  Um, and so because of that, there was this disconnect on what the browsers could offer you versus what, uh, other web developers could offer.
+[177.72 --> 185.16]  Um, and because of this, um, we wanted to shorten, uh, and small in that gap.
+[185.16 --> 188.98]  And, uh, that's what web components are for.
+[189.18 --> 204.90]  So, um, web components are so you could make your own button, um, that has not quite an opaque, uh, of an API, but you, you can make your own components that are standalone that you can pull into a page and use just as if you were using a button or a select.
+[204.90 --> 213.24]  You could use the Alex button or the Michael button or the Michael select or the clock or the social widget component.
+[213.50 --> 226.02]  So kind of like, uh, the react world or the Ember world where you're making these, uh, discrete components that have their own APIs and then using them, uh, as units, uh, of development.
+[226.16 --> 226.94]  You can do that.
+[227.02 --> 228.10]  It didn't necessarily come from that.
+[228.10 --> 236.44]  It came before, um, I think both of those were super popular ideas, but it certainly has taken a longer ramp time as the standards track normally does.
+[236.80 --> 240.70]  We can get into some of the technical implementation details of how this works.
+[241.28 --> 252.28]  Um, but I also think you might've mentioned the shadow DOM already, and that's really just the DOM that, uh, exists inside of the component rather than to the developer once they're using your components.
+[252.28 --> 261.46]  So if you think about the old button, technically there's a span and a div or whatever inside of there, inside of the button, but that's not exposed to developers.
+[261.70 --> 272.06]  And so in that same way, whenever you build the clock, uh, component, you don't have to expose all the different spans and divs and, uh, things inside of your clock component.
+[272.18 --> 277.18]  It just is a clock and it's not necessarily like CSS selectable from, from outside.
+[277.18 --> 286.98]  So is it just rendering these components in a cleaner way than having to, um, you know, like append all of those other things that exist inside the regular component?
+[287.66 --> 289.56]  Well, everything still exists.
+[289.62 --> 296.98]  It's like, you could take away the idea of, uh, web components, um, and, and shadow DOM or whatever.
+[296.98 --> 308.20]  And it would just be a larger DOM with a lot more stuff in it with a lot more like, uh, like CSS scoping and, and, uh, there's a lot more chance for bleeding together of certain things.
+[308.20 --> 316.38]  But yeah, uh, like there's nothing like super special about them, which is why they're so important, I think, for the future.
+[316.38 --> 330.18]  Um, right now, uh, a lot of the, uh, like React and Ember model relies on whole massive libraries being able to run and execute and, and stuff prior to be able to see or use anything on the site.
+[330.24 --> 343.74]  Whereas these web components can, since they utilize more of the web stack, the web stack can, uh, do a better job of rendering them instantly without, uh, as much work and execution of JavaScript and all that kind of good stuff.
+[343.74 --> 358.24]  So it is more of the web platform, um, which isn't to say that like, as time goes on, I think, uh, Ember and, and React can start to kind of merge their different strategies to where you can write React like code and end up with web components.
+[358.42 --> 360.30]  Um, which, which I think is totally possible.
+[361.06 --> 361.16]  Cool.
+[361.88 --> 370.72]  So I'm like trying to read this as you go through, because I've honestly, you know, like I hear the term shadow DOM thrown around a lot and.
+[370.90 --> 371.80]  It's a very cool word.
+[372.40 --> 372.74]  Yeah.
+[372.74 --> 372.78]  Yeah.
+[373.58 --> 375.64]  I mean, I could, you have to whisper it.
+[377.06 --> 382.74]  It's one of those things that like, if you asked me what the shadow DOM was, I could make up a lot of stories about what it definitely isn't.
+[383.54 --> 396.58]  Um, is, is there a way, I guess I'm, I'm, I'm, the site that I'm looking at right now is from the, like the developers.google.com site about, um, the, the primers and getting started with the shadow DOM.
+[396.58 --> 397.58]  Um, and they're talking about light DOM.
+[397.58 --> 400.48]  Um, and they're talking about light DOM versus shadow DOM.
+[400.48 --> 410.58]  Um, and they're showing, you know, um, an example that has a little bit more robust writeup or markup in it for the light DOM version.
+[410.58 --> 417.86]  So with the shadow DOM, are you even seeing of the other components?
+[417.86 --> 422.76]  If I was going to like use dev tools and inspect it just like out of the box?
+[423.76 --> 423.88]  Yeah.
+[423.98 --> 430.36]  Dev tools, I think allows you to currently inspect shadow DOM of, of web components, not of native browser components.
+[430.36 --> 438.18]  But yeah, kind of the whole, the whole idea is that like you can have a CSS class in, in there called button.
+[438.86 --> 448.22]  Um, like it literally just updates all the button tags and that you no longer have to have like a super specific, uh, CSS class name added to that.
+[448.28 --> 449.22]  I mean, you probably should.
+[449.36 --> 449.72]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
+[449.82 --> 450.48]  Maybe whatever.
+[450.48 --> 454.88]  But like the whole idea is that it's completely scoped to inside that web component.
+[455.16 --> 458.56]  That way, uh, everybody can style their own web components however they want.
+[458.56 --> 461.24]  And there's no worry about collision of those things.
+[461.88 --> 462.28]  Okay.
+[462.52 --> 462.78]  Yeah.
+[462.86 --> 465.52]  I guess that does make a lot more sense if you're thinking of React.
+[466.12 --> 468.46]  Especially if you're pulling in components from other people.
+[468.94 --> 477.68]  So if so-and-so styled this button and so-and-so styled this clock and whatever, there's like in the React world, there's a, there's a higher chance for collisions.
+[477.68 --> 486.40]  And, uh, like the, even like the box model, like one relies on the newer box model, one relies on the, you know, things like that, uh, are going to all change.
+[487.18 --> 487.30]  Cool.
+[487.30 --> 492.62]  So why is this stuff important to know for people that don't know what it is?
+[493.58 --> 508.38]  Um, I think web components, uh, are definitely like, I think it's, uh, unfortunately a longer term vision for the web than it would have been if people didn't make such good user, uh, land libraries to do similar things.
+[508.38 --> 518.64]  So I think there's like this very similar world to where we live in alternate universe where React didn't come out and Ember didn't do the component kind of version of their views.
+[518.64 --> 521.40]  And web components really takes off.
+[521.40 --> 525.36]  I think Polymer, uh, and web components get confused a lot.
+[525.46 --> 532.38]  Polymer is kind of like a, uh, a library on top of web components that allows you to, to do a bunch of extra stuff.
+[532.38 --> 541.54]  Um, like the React and Ember libraries would kind of offer you, including like building and, and, uh, fallbacks and all sorts of, uh, fun stuff.
+[541.54 --> 560.54]  But I think, uh, if we want to get to a world where the web works as well as native applications on bad internet connections, uh, in slow mobile browsers, uh, then I think the web components vision is one of the only ones that literally can do that as well as a native application.
+[560.54 --> 568.12]  Because it is using like native, uh, code in order to do the initial renders and it can do layout better.
+[568.28 --> 574.40]  It can do less, far less JavaScript execution, um, before it can render and all sorts of things.
+[574.40 --> 582.82]  So it's able to utilize the web platform in a much more efficient way, which means that you can serve a wider audience and have a faster, better experience.
+[583.54 --> 583.64]  Cool.
+[584.58 --> 590.16]  So you mentioned that like, you know, React and Ember and a few people do stuff kind of like this, right?
+[590.16 --> 593.00]  Um, well, it's fundamentally different.
+[593.26 --> 593.36]  Yeah.
+[593.38 --> 593.50]  Yeah.
+[593.50 --> 597.80]  But you can like create a class and then you get a constructor that happens when you create these elements, right?
+[597.82 --> 598.54]  Which is great.
+[598.80 --> 604.66]  Um, and you do, you have ways to do that in all these different abstractions, but you didn't have a way to kind of do it natively.
+[604.98 --> 611.02]  Other than the, the CSS scoping stuff, which is brand new, you can't really do that very effectively with tooling.
+[611.12 --> 611.96]  It's really, really hard.
+[611.96 --> 619.16]  Um, are there any aspects of web components that actually just give you abilities that you just never had before?
+[620.16 --> 631.56]  Uh, there are things like people talk about element level media queries instead of like window level and the shadow DOM can kind of give you a, an approximation of that, which is nice.
+[631.56 --> 639.40]  Um, trying to think there are different like lifecycle events that like don't necessarily occur anywhere else except for in these components.
+[639.40 --> 645.58]  Like a lot of the things that are available to you outside now were created for the purpose of web components.
+[645.70 --> 652.76]  Like the template tag was created for the purpose of this as well as the shadow DOM is separate from the, uh, web component spec.
+[652.76 --> 656.12]  And so you can kind of use it outside of web components.
+[656.20 --> 657.66]  I, I assume, I don't know.
+[657.76 --> 659.70]  It kind of can land in browsers beforehand.
+[659.84 --> 660.46]  So I assume you can.
+[660.98 --> 663.78]  So some things we already use are part of that.
+[663.88 --> 664.64]  So I don't know.
+[665.02 --> 667.66]  Some of it leaks back into the, the top level.
+[668.16 --> 670.94]  Um, I need to look it up, but I'm sure there are a few things.
+[671.84 --> 671.88]  Yeah.
+[671.92 --> 676.00]  I'm actually using some shadow DOM stuff in it, in a thing that I'm not using web components at all for.
+[676.12 --> 680.24]  Um, and it's, it's really useful just for that, that element scoped CSS stuff.
+[680.24 --> 680.68]  Yeah.
+[682.96 --> 683.52]  Yeah.
+[684.78 --> 687.32]  Are we, are we done talking about web components?
+[688.46 --> 692.74]  So there was a question, uh, in the chat, uh, did Google start this?
+[693.70 --> 702.56]  Um, I think that while the, the Google people, uh, I think were the ones, this is all came out of the web manifesto.
+[702.64 --> 706.76]  Um, I, I believe, uh, so that was a large amount of Google people.
+[706.76 --> 712.66]  And I think the core authors of the specification, uh, started Google, but it is not a Google only thing.
+[712.72 --> 719.38]  It is a specification in the W3C that has passed and is real and, uh, is in, uh, multiple browsers and things.
+[720.04 --> 724.14]  So I think it is of Google, but not solely by Google.
+[725.08 --> 725.32]  Right, right.
+[725.36 --> 732.34]  I think you, you, you address the polymer thing where people tend to conflate this with polymer and polymer is a Google thing, uh, like very directly.
+[732.34 --> 734.10]  Um, but this is much larger.
+[734.94 --> 744.36]  I think one of the core problems there specifically was in the beginning, no browser implemented web components, but you could effectively use them if you used polymer.
+[744.56 --> 748.62]  And so for a while, the only way to use web components was with polymer.
+[748.62 --> 756.92]  And, and I think that kind of history caused this conflation versus, uh, other similar situations that that didn't happen in.
+[757.78 --> 757.80]  Yeah.
+[757.90 --> 766.40]  That, that's kind of a funny thing though, when you think about it, because one of the big benefits that they continue to talk about is that you don't need a bunch of JavaScript in order to do this.
+[766.40 --> 768.02]  Like you don't need this giant library.
+[768.14 --> 769.46]  That's, that's the benefit.
+[769.46 --> 773.78]  And then people are conflating it with this giant library to do it before it was in the spec.
+[773.78 --> 774.06]  Yeah.
+[774.86 --> 777.34]  I think it is pretty fundamentally different though.
+[777.54 --> 783.92]  Um, a, the size of polymer is pretty different than the size of, uh, say Amber or, or similar things.
+[783.92 --> 791.02]  Uh, but also you can get initial renders and like working things before you have like full polymer execution.
+[791.02 --> 796.64]  Like you can, you can see the page because it's CSS and HTML and the JavaScript hasn't executed yet.
+[796.76 --> 801.62]  And, and that is, I think pretty fundamentally different thing than the other stuff.
+[801.62 --> 809.54]  Well, do you think then that, like we talked a bit about react and Ember kind of eventually moving their implementations towards using web components.
+[809.54 --> 814.42]  Do you think that this is going to be something that we, we just changed the way that we build our tools on top of them?
+[814.42 --> 817.70]  Or is it actually a new enough model that it's going to change the tools that we build?
+[817.70 --> 821.64]  Like, are we going to build very different tools and react and all of that in order to take advantage of this?
+[822.52 --> 822.58]  Yeah.
+[822.66 --> 831.48]  I definitely don't think that you could just take the current react and then like throw web components over the top of it, but you could take a very similar, like react.
+[831.62 --> 834.70]  Uh, whatever we're on, uh, 16 or whatever.
+[834.88 --> 836.32]  No, they have 16th react.
+[836.74 --> 837.68]  Call it just 20.
+[837.80 --> 846.70]  Um, could like, they could theoretically change a bunch of the API and then be outputting different things at the build stuff, but it would be a pretty huge leap.
+[846.70 --> 848.42]  I wouldn't actually expect it to really happen.
+[848.42 --> 857.78]  It would be more like some new person says, okay, the initial renders for web components are insane, but I don't like writing raw web components.
+[857.78 --> 860.94]  It's here's this very reactive model that can do these things.
+[860.94 --> 873.90]  Um, uh, one of the fundamental things I think, uh, that, that web components adds, uh, is the ability to do some of the, uh, data binding that, uh, some of these libraries do via dom diffing and re-rendering every time.
+[873.90 --> 878.56]  Uh, so I think that is actually another interesting reason to use it.
+[878.72 --> 890.42]  Um, not necessarily like a killer because a lot of that's very fast and can get faster and all sorts of that stuff, but it's certainly an interesting thing where you can kind of bind to two sections together.
+[890.42 --> 897.22]  You can bind, uh, properties on attributes of the, uh, web component to the inside of the web component.
+[897.66 --> 908.60]  But yeah, I wouldn't expect that really react or Ember ends up with like a web component version, but someone would do the react for web components and it's called we act or whatever.
+[908.90 --> 911.46]  And that becomes a cool popular thing.
+[912.42 --> 912.94]  Interesting.
+[913.18 --> 914.04]  Very interesting.
+[914.04 --> 931.20]  I'm trying to play out in my head, like how, how much of the web affects this, like in the future is like the way that, um, say if you use Stripe for instance, or, uh, I was using like the Tito embed the other day, like you get this JavaScript include.
+[931.76 --> 935.02]  And, um, and then you kind of use like this custom element.
+[935.02 --> 942.08]  And right now it has to do like all this crazy stuff to like find that element and, and do a bunch of stuff kind of after load.
+[942.08 --> 948.44]  Is it really going to change the model of how that kind of stuff is implemented where when you're like, Hey, you know, include my custom element in your page.
+[948.74 --> 951.84]  Is it, is it going to work like really differently and a lot smoother than it does today?
+[952.56 --> 958.56]  Yeah, I think, um, there, there are HTML imports, which I don't know if I have made it in, uh, to browsers yet.
+[958.56 --> 964.18]  And there, there are a few things that, that make a lot of those things really cool.
+[964.46 --> 972.06]  Um, so I, I have implemented a long time ago, uh, the, the Stripe JS, uh, credit card form as a web component just internally to try it out.
+[972.08 --> 985.28]  And like the amount of work that I have to do to style safely and do all the third party JavaScript things in the current world versus the web component world is pretty vastly different.
+[985.28 --> 995.10]  Uh, and, and the speed at which our component can kind of render and then be attached versus execute the JavaScript and then be injected, um, is also pretty different.
+[995.10 --> 1003.24]  And if we know one thing about the performance of checkout pages is that like everybody who's ever tested is like, this matters a lot.
+[1003.82 --> 1010.46]  So, um, I think it could be a pretty good fundamental change, uh, in the direction of rendering.
+[1010.46 --> 1020.70]  And, and I think that that's what a lot of, like a lot of the cool wins are the modularity and the composability and the scoping and all those things that we've had trouble with on the web whenever you're building a large application.
+[1020.88 --> 1025.08]  And I think those will be the things that people think about more than, than some of this stuff.
+[1025.40 --> 1032.52]  But, um, the kind of the fundamental turn is that things can render and exist prior to JavaScript executing.
+[1032.52 --> 1049.10]  And, and so the, uh, server side rendering isomorphic stuff changes in the way, like you don't necessarily need to do rehydration, uh, as much as you can do, uh, just like render things as web components.
+[1049.10 --> 1051.22]  And then the JavaScript can, can kind of run after.
+[1052.20 --> 1053.04]  What is rehydration?
+[1053.16 --> 1054.42]  You just ran right over that one.
+[1055.14 --> 1055.94]  Oh, sorry.
+[1056.06 --> 1058.54]  Uh, rehydration and a server side render.
+[1058.54 --> 1068.28]  So, so like the competition to web components in the, in the, uh, world of frameworks these days is that you can get no JS to render your entire page.
+[1068.58 --> 1073.74]  Uh, and as long as that is a deterministic output, uh, the render is a deterministic output.
+[1073.74 --> 1077.66]  You can, you know, like to HTML it and then serve it as the initial load.
+[1077.66 --> 1083.10]  And so, uh, no JavaScript has run and it's just CSS and HTML and you can see the entire page.
+[1083.16 --> 1086.24]  And I don't know if it works yet, but, uh, you can see the entire page.
+[1086.24 --> 1096.96]  And then, uh, because that same render function can then run once the JavaScript has executed, it can come up with the exact same deterministic DOM that Node.js did.
+[1096.96 --> 1114.94]  And instead of killing the whole page and then re-rendering it with the, the client side JavaScript, it can just kind of attach itself to the server side rendered thing and say, we claim these, uh, elements as the ones that we would have rendered had they not already existed.
+[1114.94 --> 1119.28]  Kind of like a re-render that, uh, that occurs in, in React all the time.
+[1119.36 --> 1126.26]  It's, it's kind of, uh, a basic property of React is that if you try to render something and all of it's still there, it's a no op.
+[1126.32 --> 1127.26]  It's kind of the DOM diff.
+[1127.34 --> 1134.38]  It's what's the diff between this virtual DOM that we created based on all the data and the one in the actual, uh, window.
+[1134.38 --> 1142.38]  And if there's no difference, we won't do anything, but we'll kind of know that all these things are attached to like all of our handlers and stuff like that.
+[1142.58 --> 1145.06]  So, uh, that's what rehydration is.
+[1145.12 --> 1150.66]  It says, um, we can just attach ourselves to a server side rendered page without re-rendering it.
+[1150.70 --> 1161.52]  And that is a pretty good, like if you, if you need speed, if you're a content website, especially you need speed and SEO and all that stuff, you should absolutely be doing a server side rendering with, with, uh, rehydration.
+[1161.52 --> 1166.16]  Well, you just mentioned SEO, which means it's time for a break and we get off this topic.
+[1166.54 --> 1169.62]  So, so we're going to take a quick break.
+[1169.76 --> 1171.48]  Uh, when we come back, we're going to talk about conferences.
+[1172.84 --> 1178.64]  First sponsor of the show today is our friends at Century, helping you to find and fix your errors in your applications.
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+[1210.86 --> 1211.96]  And now back to the show.
+[1211.96 --> 1216.06]  Now we're going to get into conferences a little bit.
+[1216.40 --> 1220.34]  So, um, JavaScript has an amazing conference scene.
+[1220.56 --> 1223.66]  There's a million, uh, little community conferences out there.
+[1223.74 --> 1225.90]  It's really exploded in the last few years.
+[1226.06 --> 1228.66]  Um, and we're just going to talk a little bit about speaking at conferences.
+[1228.98 --> 1236.56]  Um, if you're thinking about going to a conference, what to look for, if you're thinking about applying to speak, what to look for, and maybe even a little bit about what it's like to run a conference.
+[1236.56 --> 1248.92]  So, I would say if someone is looking into wanting to start attending some JavaScript conferences, the best thing that they could do is go to jsconf.com.
+[1249.32 --> 1252.96]  So, it's the jsconf family of conferences.
+[1253.54 --> 1261.68]  And, um, I'm pretty sure what that means is first there was jsconf.us and it was started by Chris Williams.
+[1261.68 --> 1266.16]  And there's this whole, um, family of other conferences.
+[1266.50 --> 1271.48]  And it has a strict code of conduct where, you know, you're, you're nice to everyone.
+[1271.66 --> 1278.16]  There's no, you know, um, racism, misogyny, making assumptions about people, sexism.
+[1278.32 --> 1279.94]  It's just like super welcoming.
+[1280.34 --> 1281.66]  It's really fun.
+[1281.86 --> 1283.44]  It was always at a great location.
+[1283.44 --> 1291.72]  And then as people started attending these conferences, they were like, wow, it would be really awesome if we had this conference where I live.
+[1292.14 --> 1298.48]  And so Chris started allowing other people to have, uh, conferences under the jsconf family.
+[1298.82 --> 1307.66]  And the way that you would be able to do that is if you've attended a jsconf so that you know how they run, you know how that runs, uh, you're able to branch off.
+[1307.66 --> 1311.66]  And now there's, there's like, I'm trying to count really fast.
+[1311.76 --> 1314.70]  There's, there's two, that's four, eight, 12.
+[1314.82 --> 1320.54]  There's 12 that are jsconf underscore, like whatever country they're in.
+[1320.66 --> 1324.40]  There's a jsconf US or, well, there's not jsconf US anymore.
+[1324.76 --> 1330.88]  Um, for now there's jsconf EU, which Michael and I will be going to, I'll be speaking.
+[1330.88 --> 1333.86]  And there's jsconf AU in Australia.
+[1334.30 --> 1335.92]  And there's, there's just so many.
+[1336.02 --> 1342.40]  If you listened last week, um, Juan talked about jsconf Colombia and they're everywhere.
+[1342.86 --> 1346.86]  And then there's not just the jsconf, uh, namesake ones.
+[1346.86 --> 1348.58]  There's, there's also robotsconf.
+[1348.70 --> 1349.68]  There's jsunconf.
+[1350.12 --> 1350.88]  There's Cascadia.
+[1351.66 --> 1351.88]  There's Empire.
+[1352.64 --> 1354.88]  There's a lot of other ones that are under that umbrella.
+[1354.88 --> 1361.98]  And it's usually, you know, like two to three days of just really, really well curated talks
+[1361.98 --> 1366.02]  and workshops with a bunch of people that are like-minded.
+[1366.46 --> 1371.04]  And it was the first conference that I ever attended in 2014.
+[1371.10 --> 1376.56]  And I mean, it, it pretty much changed my life due to the people that I met there from
+[1376.56 --> 1382.56]  seeing them speak and the people that inspired me to, you know, go out of my comfort zone and
+[1382.56 --> 1390.56]  try and do more with JavaScript robotics and, um, just, just try and be a better programmer.
+[1390.82 --> 1394.24]  And from there, here we are today.
+[1395.28 --> 1398.28]  So there's, there's a lot of really awesome resources.
+[1398.28 --> 1402.74]  And a lot of these conferences also have, um, you know, diversity sponsorships.
+[1402.74 --> 1409.54]  So if you are from a, um, marginalized group or underrepresented minority, you can often attend
+[1409.54 --> 1413.32]  at a severely, severely discounted rate, often sometimes free.
+[1413.88 --> 1415.04]  That was a great breakdown.
+[1415.54 --> 1417.84]  I don't think that we could have done that nearly as well.
+[1418.92 --> 1419.32]  Yeah.
+[1419.36 --> 1423.66]  Alex and I are, are both people that, you know, Chris helped out, uh, getting our events
+[1423.66 --> 1425.72]  off the ground in that JSConf family.
+[1426.02 --> 1431.80]  Um, for me, NodeConf and JSFest and, um, for Alex, TXJS.
+[1431.80 --> 1434.52]  But yeah, I mean, that's, that's a great group of conferences.
+[1434.84 --> 1440.00]  Even the conferences that aren't quote unquote JSConf family are really directly influenced
+[1440.00 --> 1441.80]  by that, that whole thing.
+[1442.02 --> 1442.42]  Yep.
+[1442.60 --> 1446.00]  There's all kinds of new events popping up all over the place and you can really see the,
+[1446.00 --> 1448.90]  the difference in the content and how people are treated.
+[1448.90 --> 1452.94]  And, and I mean, a lot of the code of conduct stuff that is now pretty standard in conferences
+[1452.94 --> 1456.70]  really started with JSConf, uh, US like a while back.
+[1458.48 --> 1459.94]  Alex, do you have anything to add?
+[1460.94 --> 1461.34]  Me?
+[1461.80 --> 1462.50]  This Alex?
+[1463.24 --> 1463.68]  Yeah.
+[1463.96 --> 1465.06]  Uh, yeah, sure.
+[1465.30 --> 1466.84]  Um, uh, I'd love to talk.
+[1467.26 --> 1473.62]  No, uh, Michael and I, uh, we're both on staff for some of the earlier JSConf with Chris.
+[1474.30 --> 1480.32]  Um, and I just wanted to share a story about, I think it was in Arizona, uh, and it was the
+[1480.32 --> 1485.32]  morning of JSConf and, uh, like the first morning and everyone had to come register.
+[1485.52 --> 1490.20]  We were like laying out badges and putting together bags for, for people to do.
+[1490.20 --> 1495.38]  And I remember Chris and Laura scrambling to get everything right and putting everyone
+[1495.38 --> 1495.98]  in their places.
+[1495.98 --> 1503.24]  And then I look over and in the corner, Michael has this coffee grinder, Mason jar contraption
+[1503.24 --> 1506.42]  and he's just grinding his own coffee in the corner.
+[1506.72 --> 1513.16]  Um, and he was just like, I can't, uh, help you guys until I'm done grinding my own coffee
+[1513.16 --> 1515.72]  and then pouring it over, over in this corner.
+[1515.72 --> 1522.78]  Um, that's just maybe one of my favorite, uh, Michael JSConf, uh, stories.
+[1523.20 --> 1529.94]  Um, I actually, uh, maybe have, uh, a, a observation that I don't know if it's true.
+[1530.10 --> 1535.50]  It feels like the actual peak of conferences maybe occurred like two years ago.
+[1535.60 --> 1537.96]  Not now that does that feel right.
+[1537.96 --> 1540.74]  I feel like it was almost zero.
+[1540.92 --> 1545.64]  And then JSConf US, uh, I mean, there was like a Jackson before that and some like jQuery
+[1545.64 --> 1548.52]  camp or, you know, a few things like that.
+[1549.22 --> 1553.42]  So what you're saying is the decline of conferences started when I started speaking.
+[1553.78 --> 1554.14]  No, no, no, no, no, no.
+[1557.44 --> 1560.70]  Uh, I'm not trying to imply that I'm trying to directly state it as fact.
+[1560.70 --> 1567.70]  Um, the, the, no, I feel like there was kind of this explosion of conferences, uh, that
+[1567.70 --> 1568.72]  that was nonlinear.
+[1568.96 --> 1571.50]  So, you know, like 2010 was almost zero.
+[1571.78 --> 1578.00]  Uh, and then by 2014 or so you had a ton of like city based conferences.
+[1578.08 --> 1583.38]  And I feel like a lot of those have fallen off and now there's again, maybe a little more
+[1583.38 --> 1586.58]  specialized like React comps or different things like that.
+[1586.58 --> 1590.00]  I think that it's definitely, definitely getting more specialized.
+[1590.28 --> 1594.98]  Cause I mean, there, there used to be, uh, well, I think there was one year there was
+[1594.98 --> 1600.54]  like Cascadia and Texas JS and JSConf US.
+[1600.54 --> 1604.28]  And now we aren't going to have Cascadia.
+[1604.48 --> 1605.92]  We're not going to have TXJS.
+[1606.02 --> 1607.70]  We're not going to have JSConf US.
+[1608.12 --> 1611.06]  There's not going to be a JSConf Iceland.
+[1611.38 --> 1614.02]  There's only going to be, I think, Dinosaur.
+[1614.02 --> 1619.32]  There's the one in Omaha put on by, uh, the Harlins.
+[1620.46 --> 1625.48]  There's, um, you know, there's the Taclahoma ones.
+[1625.74 --> 1627.44]  There's their, their group.
+[1628.18 --> 1633.14]  Since we mentioned Taclahoma, they have a, like a family of, uh, different events.
+[1633.14 --> 1638.84]  Like they, they have like constant learning and meetups as well as, but the Oklahoma is
+[1638.84 --> 1640.62]  their, their conference isn't called Taclahoma.
+[1640.82 --> 1642.94]  I misspoke, but you can look them up.
+[1642.94 --> 1644.32]  Sorry, I interrupted your entire thing.
+[1644.76 --> 1645.30]  Oh, it's okay.
+[1645.30 --> 1655.38]  I think that it's getting, um, a lot more spread out and there's not really any, I mean, it's
+[1655.38 --> 1659.02]  hard to put on conferences of that scale.
+[1659.02 --> 1665.78]  I think that the closest that I've been to where I felt that really like, I mean, every
+[1665.78 --> 1670.12]  conference that I go to is pretty much, they're all really great, but there's just something
+[1670.12 --> 1678.30]  special that hasn't been matched for me aside from like Nordic JS and Nordic JS like goes
+[1678.30 --> 1684.78]  all out and it's a different environment, obviously, cause it's not here in the United
+[1684.78 --> 1685.38]  States.
+[1685.38 --> 1687.74]  But I mean, it's great.
+[1687.74 --> 1693.54]  I think that there's also like a lot more speakers now, like people realized, Hey, people
+[1693.54 --> 1694.94]  are, people are doing that.
+[1695.06 --> 1695.80]  I want to do it too.
+[1695.88 --> 1697.82]  Cause I mean, that's what I did.
+[1698.20 --> 1703.16]  Um, I wouldn't, I guess this is a good segue into how you can speak at conferences.
+[1703.16 --> 1708.32]  Um, Jen Schiffer was like, Hey, Rachel, if you want to speak at conferences, you should
+[1708.32 --> 1709.16]  just submit a talk.
+[1709.20 --> 1710.94]  And I did and it got accepted.
+[1711.24 --> 1712.86]  And so I had to build a robot.
+[1713.54 --> 1717.28]  And then I spoke at JSConf last call and it was awesome.
+[1717.28 --> 1718.62]  And I was like, this is fun.
+[1718.74 --> 1726.40]  And I think that the best thing about speaking is being able to like get people excited about
+[1726.40 --> 1732.52]  something that they may not have been exposed to previously and, you know, inspiring people
+[1732.52 --> 1738.30]  to, to try something new or that they are capable of doing whatever it is that you are
+[1738.30 --> 1739.02]  talking about.
+[1739.02 --> 1744.22]  Um, and I think that there's this weird stigma that people that speak at conferences are a
+[1744.22 --> 1747.30]  little bit like, what's the right word that I'm thinking of?
+[1747.30 --> 1753.96]  Like, like we're special or, or it's not like something that is hard to achieve, but I don't
+[1753.96 --> 1758.22]  really think it is as long as you apply yourself and you're, you're passionate about what you're
+[1758.22 --> 1759.86]  speaking about, you know?
+[1760.50 --> 1761.20]  Yeah, I agree.
+[1761.46 --> 1768.22]  Um, I, I also got into speaking via just the open section of conferences where you not even
+[1768.22 --> 1769.22]  like submit a talk.
+[1769.22 --> 1774.06]  Like it's the, uh, it wasn't a five minute, it wasn't a lightning talk, but I think it was,
+[1774.06 --> 1777.90]  you know, like a 15 minute style, just people sign up throughout the whole day.
+[1778.22 --> 1779.28]  It's a third track.
+[1779.74 --> 1783.94]  And I think that's a, if you want to get your feet wet, that's a really good time to go.
+[1783.96 --> 1789.88]  Um, and try it and then maybe speak at a local meetup, uh, and then submit a talk.
+[1789.92 --> 1792.48]  If you, if you want to just go slowly, absolutely.
+[1792.66 --> 1797.44]  If you're interested in, you think you can do it, then, uh, then just submit.
+[1797.56 --> 1803.00]  So I have a, I have a game I'd like to play, speak, attend stream.
+[1803.62 --> 1809.18]  Uh, so we'll say three conferences, uh, which one would you speak at?
+[1809.26 --> 1810.36]  Which one would you attend?
+[1810.42 --> 1811.48]  And which one would you stream?
+[1812.26 --> 1812.78]  Oh yeah.
+[1812.78 --> 1813.48]  Let's play.
+[1814.34 --> 1815.02]  Michael, you're up.
+[1815.50 --> 1815.86]  Okay.
+[1815.92 --> 1817.58]  Well, you got to throw the conferences at me, right?
+[1817.58 --> 1818.86]  Oh, I have to give you the three conferences.
+[1819.36 --> 1819.70]  Okay.
+[1820.00 --> 1820.30]  Yeah.
+[1821.42 --> 1831.20]  A Jackson in 2009, the second pirate themes JSConf and TXJS, uh, 2015.
+[1831.20 --> 1833.72]  I'll let you see here.
+[1833.80 --> 1833.92]  Okay.
+[1834.12 --> 1844.02]  So, uh, attend would be TXJS because I'd like to just relax and enjoy Austin and not have
+[1844.02 --> 1844.62]  to give a talk.
+[1844.98 --> 1851.46]  Uh, speaking would definitely be the, um, the early JS comps because there was just a lot
+[1851.46 --> 1855.36]  of perks of being a speaker back then, even more than today, probably.
+[1855.36 --> 1859.76]  Um, and stream a Jackson cause who gives a what?
+[1860.18 --> 1863.08]  That was the only conference that was, that was the jam.
+[1863.54 --> 1865.70]  Uh, that was huge though.
+[1865.74 --> 1869.80]  I mean like, like the, like the difference between like in a, in a thousand person conference,
+[1869.80 --> 1872.50]  seeing a talk live and seeing it streamed is just not that big.
+[1872.50 --> 1873.18]  Yeah.
+[1873.18 --> 1879.52]  That was like the first time you had John Resig, Douglas Crockford, Brendan Eich, and like
+[1879.52 --> 1881.06]  one of the Mutuals people.
+[1881.32 --> 1885.96]  Oh, and Andrew DuPont all on the same stage, just arguing about frameworks or whatever.
+[1886.12 --> 1887.94]  It was, uh, terrible.
+[1888.22 --> 1888.66]  Exactly.
+[1889.94 --> 1894.88]  It was the first time something that terrible ever existed, which is kind of like, you
+[1894.88 --> 1901.54]  know, car, car wreck situation is, uh, I, I, I thought it was, uh, pretty magical at
+[1901.54 --> 1903.94]  the time, even though I wouldn't attend it currently.
+[1904.22 --> 1906.74]  2009 was a different lay of the land.
+[1907.68 --> 1915.74]  Um, I, I guess somebody asked about like non JS conferences and I really actually haven't
+[1915.74 --> 1918.02]  attended many non JS conferences.
+[1918.48 --> 1921.32]  Um, so I'm going to defer to, to you two.
+[1921.40 --> 1925.42]  I've heard good things about like OSCON and some other things like that, but.
+[1925.82 --> 1926.70]  It's a pretty different beast.
+[1926.70 --> 1933.00]  I think, uh, there are lots of like full stack conferences and then the core language conferences
+[1933.00 --> 1936.08]  of almost every language are usually pretty great.
+[1936.08 --> 1942.48]  Like Ruby has some, like, I think a lot of the conferences in JavaScript that are great
+[1942.48 --> 1947.18]  actually kind of stem from the style of conferences that the Ruby community, I think Chris has
+[1947.18 --> 1950.80]  admitted as much that, uh, uh, I don't know which Ruby.
+[1950.80 --> 1951.34]  Yeah.
+[1951.34 --> 1954.64]  Ruby friend is kind of where he was like, Hey, this is a cool model.
+[1955.24 --> 1957.74]  Um, and so I think a lot of the Ruby conferences are very good.
+[1957.96 --> 1964.20]  Um, as well as like, uh, some of the full stack conferences and, um, like go has a good
+[1964.20 --> 1967.14]  conference, go for con and, and, and all those things.
+[1967.14 --> 1972.08]  I think there are lots of good community and kind of the more open source languages, uh,
+[1972.08 --> 1976.26]  often have like similarly valued conferences.
+[1976.26 --> 1976.74]  Yeah.
+[1976.90 --> 1984.48]  I've heard excellent things about, um, strange loop, which is in St. Louis and full stack
+[1984.48 --> 1987.24]  fast in Barcelona and rev conf in Virginia.
+[1987.56 --> 1993.76]  And, um, a bunch of those other ones that don't really focus on any specific language.
+[1993.76 --> 1998.92]  I think that you can get a lot more interesting, um, hybrids of talks when you have that kind
+[1998.92 --> 2002.08]  of balance, even though I don't know, cause I've never gotten to any.
+[2002.08 --> 2006.36]  So I would say that there's really kind of two classes of conferences that you really
+[2006.36 --> 2007.78]  have to look at and treat differently.
+[2008.34 --> 2012.98]  One is the community conferences that we've been talking about, which the whole JS comp
+[2012.98 --> 2016.92]  family is really like developers in the developer community decide that they want to do a community
+[2016.92 --> 2017.78]  event for their community.
+[2018.30 --> 2024.90]  And then there are really huge events that are run usually by media companies or by Google
+[2024.90 --> 2026.78]  or Google or somebody like that.
+[2026.84 --> 2027.04]  Right.
+[2027.14 --> 2030.90]  Like then they're, they're completely, they're very, very different.
+[2030.90 --> 2035.64]  And if you're thinking about speaking, I would say that, you know, like speaking in an O'Reilly
+[2035.64 --> 2040.64]  event is more likely to maybe get you a job or to talk to people that will hire you potentially,
+[2040.86 --> 2044.22]  um, then say like a two or 300 person community event.
+[2044.64 --> 2049.46]  Um, but if you're looking to sort of like make friends and become more engaged in the community
+[2049.46 --> 2055.42]  and, um, and really kind of like have, have a community impact, um, attending or speaking
+[2055.42 --> 2058.14]  at the smaller community events is just a world different.
+[2058.14 --> 2064.22]  But also in terms of quality of content, the quality is much higher in the community events
+[2064.22 --> 2068.42]  because they don't have a bunch of sponsor talks that they had to sell in order to make
+[2068.42 --> 2069.40]  the funding model work.
+[2069.50 --> 2074.74]  They don't have, um, I mean, like, like, look, I mean, we've, me and Alex have been running
+[2074.74 --> 2075.78]  conferences for a long time.
+[2075.78 --> 2081.24]  And for, for a while, if you were running a JavaScript or a node event, you were the only
+[2081.24 --> 2081.78]  game in town.
+[2081.84 --> 2083.04]  There weren't any media companies.
+[2083.04 --> 2086.78]  And so these huge companies would come up and they would give us a bunch of money and
+[2086.78 --> 2088.96]  they didn't really ask for all the stuff they ask for now.
+[2089.38 --> 2093.30]  Now they don't sponsor a lot of the smaller events because there are these bigger events
+[2093.30 --> 2094.84]  that are willing to give them like a booth.
+[2095.00 --> 2096.08]  Like we don't have booths.
+[2096.14 --> 2096.28]  Yeah.
+[2097.76 --> 2102.48]  The bigger events are like, hold on, get ready.
+[2102.54 --> 2103.92]  Who was ever editing this?
+[2103.98 --> 2105.72]  I don't know if this is a word I'm allowed to say.
+[2106.06 --> 2107.84]  They're like such a circle jerk.
+[2107.84 --> 2112.62]  Like it's the same people doing the same stuff at every O'Reilly thing.
+[2112.78 --> 2118.06]  And like, what, I don't need, are the O'Reilly, sorry, O'Reilly, um, just saying like, if they're
+[2118.06 --> 2121.76]  recorded, how are they going to charge like a grand for a ticket?
+[2121.76 --> 2124.86]  And like, who is even going to those?
+[2124.86 --> 2127.58]  Like, is it just like other big companies?
+[2128.18 --> 2128.72]  Um, yeah.
+[2128.84 --> 2131.14]  So, you know, so I have some answers to that.
+[2131.22 --> 2137.74]  Um, but having participated in some of that, so when a ticket costs a grand,
+[2137.84 --> 2140.16]  people are not paying for the tickets.
+[2140.56 --> 2147.72]  Um, and so I think that is a fundamental reason why the audiences are very different
+[2147.72 --> 2152.06]  at the two different conferences is that it's people who often put up their own money to
+[2152.06 --> 2157.84]  attend a community conference and then versus people whose company have sent them to a conference
+[2157.84 --> 2158.68]  to learn things.
+[2159.14 --> 2162.44]  So if you're going to send someone to a conference, you want to send them to the most reputable
+[2162.44 --> 2163.56]  one that you can find.
+[2163.56 --> 2167.40]  And O'Reilly is a very reputable name in tech education.
+[2167.40 --> 2170.52]  And so you're going to send this and there are very big names on that ticket.
+[2170.58 --> 2174.08]  And of course, like those people give the same talk every time because like you can't
+[2174.88 --> 2177.96]  give 300 different talks in a year if that's your whole job or whatever.
+[2178.52 --> 2183.42]  Um, and so I think you end up with an audience that cares a little less because they're not
+[2183.42 --> 2187.32]  invested, which isn't to say that there aren't tons and tons of people who care a whole bunch
+[2187.32 --> 2188.50]  in those places.
+[2188.50 --> 2192.22]  But I think the environment becomes different because it isn't a bunch of people who are
+[2192.22 --> 2195.04]  like, uh, necessarily all are on the same page.
+[2195.14 --> 2201.08]  It's, uh, people who, and I, I want to be very clear that it's fine if you're a developer
+[2201.08 --> 2206.46]  who goes to work programs, isn't interested in spending all your own money and going to
+[2206.46 --> 2209.16]  a conference and then like go do the things that you love more.
+[2209.26 --> 2213.66]  I think it's perfectly acceptable and good, uh, to have the wide gamut.
+[2213.66 --> 2217.72]  But I think one of the reasons the community conferences are different, uh, is because
+[2217.72 --> 2222.34]  the, the motivation for going is not my work is sending me here.
+[2222.34 --> 2224.94]  It's, I want to learn all these things, uh, myself.
+[2225.12 --> 2227.80]  Um, and I think I want to meet these people, right?
+[2227.88 --> 2228.12]  Right.
+[2228.20 --> 2228.36]  Yeah.
+[2228.90 --> 2235.80]  And I guess you're going to get exposed to more passionate like talks versus pitchy talks.
+[2235.88 --> 2237.78]  So that makes sense.
+[2237.96 --> 2238.10]  Yeah.
+[2238.10 --> 2238.72]  I'm a jerk.
+[2238.72 --> 2244.24]  I'll also say that like, um, you, you would think that a thousand dollars for a ticket
+[2244.24 --> 2247.70]  and in some cases the O'Reilly events have like a hundred thousand dollars for the platinum
+[2247.70 --> 2248.50]  membership as well.
+[2248.64 --> 2252.92]  You would think that they were just raking in money and, and that's why a lot of the
+[2252.92 --> 2254.00]  quality was really low.
+[2254.24 --> 2259.24]  But, um, on the organizing side, every time you go into a new 500 person bracket, when
+[2259.24 --> 2264.20]  you go from 500 to a thousand people or a thousand people to 1500, you move away from
+[2264.20 --> 2268.52]  a lot of different venues and catering options and all of the things that you can do.
+[2268.52 --> 2271.80]  You end up costing more money per attendee for lower quality.
+[2272.22 --> 2276.22]  Whereas once you get to the size that say like a Google next is where there's like 10,000
+[2276.22 --> 2281.42]  people there, those sandwiches cost like $40 and it's, and they're terrible and there's
+[2281.42 --> 2282.44]  just no way out of it.
+[2282.52 --> 2285.98]  You're locked into it because there's, there's only three places on the West coast that can
+[2285.98 --> 2287.98]  hold you and they know that they have you over a barrel.
+[2288.68 --> 2293.04]  So this is, so a lot of what we're talking about for like the quality being higher for,
+[2293.18 --> 2296.76]  for the smaller side is a lot of like the, the funding side of it too, where you,
+[2296.76 --> 2298.42]  you can make a lot better choices.
+[2298.42 --> 2304.30]  Like if you do a two or 300 person event in Portland, you can get the greatest food in
+[2304.30 --> 2306.46]  the whole world brought to the event.
+[2306.72 --> 2307.74]  It's so good.
+[2308.28 --> 2312.60]  Um, but if you do a thousand person event in Portland, you, your, your options are actually
+[2312.60 --> 2313.70]  pretty slim and terrible.
+[2314.54 --> 2319.36]  Dinosaur JS did something pretty awesome last year for food where they just rented a bunch
+[2319.36 --> 2324.16]  of food trucks and had everybody walk to a big park and it was, it was nice, but that's
+[2324.16 --> 2325.44]  a smaller community conference.
+[2325.44 --> 2327.66]  So that's, that's where you get that.
+[2328.28 --> 2334.96]  So if I had one piece of advice for conference organizers around food is be very careful of
+[2334.96 --> 2335.54]  food trucks.
+[2335.86 --> 2341.06]  Uh, pretty much every food truck situation, including Michael's first foray into food trucks
+[2341.06 --> 2346.14]  ends up with, uh, a line that is not gone by the time lunch is over.
+[2346.14 --> 2351.56]  Um, so you really have to plan either a food truck that can pre-make everything and just
+[2351.56 --> 2356.76]  hand things out to people or get so many food trucks that they can handle like the concurrency
+[2356.76 --> 2358.08]  of, of enough people.
+[2358.64 --> 2363.62]  Um, uh, pretty much every food truck, like by far the majority of food truck situations
+[2363.62 --> 2366.90]  end up poorly, uh, which is why I've avoided them at TXJS.
+[2367.00 --> 2372.02]  Even though food trucks are delicious and it's a really good idea, it's, it's very hard to,
+[2372.10 --> 2372.66]  to manage.
+[2372.66 --> 2377.44]  And so if you're running a conference, be very, be very aware of, of that problem.
+[2377.80 --> 2379.46]  So, so here, here's, here's the tip.
+[2379.52 --> 2382.34]  You, you have to find a food truck that also does catering.
+[2382.34 --> 2385.86]  So if they say specifically that they also do catering, they don't just come and park
+[2385.86 --> 2386.10]  there.
+[2386.20 --> 2390.18]  Then they, in their prep kitchen, they know how to make a ton of something and then show
+[2390.18 --> 2392.02]  up with all of it and everybody can eat right away.
+[2392.52 --> 2397.36]  Um, the, the, the, the, Alex is, is talking about was a node conf in 2012.
+[2397.36 --> 2401.32]  And we actually did two different food trucks, one of which was very good at that.
+[2401.32 --> 2403.52]  And everybody ate and got out of there in time.
+[2403.52 --> 2405.80]  And the other one didn't process the line for an hour and a half.
+[2405.84 --> 2407.18]  And we had to push everything back.
+[2407.76 --> 2413.72]  Um, I'd like to circle back really quick to people that are interested in wanting to speak
+[2413.72 --> 2414.40]  at conferences.
+[2414.40 --> 2422.76]  Um, so I know that in New York, there's this really great thing that Tracy Hines and Justin
+[2422.76 --> 2429.30]  put out called a right to speak where people get together and they have like abstract ideas
+[2429.30 --> 2434.92]  or just maybe even like a few talk topics that they're interested in, you know, workshopping
+[2434.92 --> 2437.16]  and trying to help people flesh them out.
+[2437.16 --> 2444.16]  And if you're, I would suggest if you are interested in speaking, don't do it unless
+[2444.16 --> 2447.36]  you're super passionate, not don't do it.
+[2447.36 --> 2447.94]  Like don't do it.
+[2448.94 --> 2456.56]  Don't, don't do it unless you're actually like really legitimately passionate about what
+[2456.56 --> 2457.86]  it is that you're talking about.
+[2457.86 --> 2463.30]  Cause there's nothing worse than somebody that's there, obviously just because they wanted to
+[2463.30 --> 2468.06]  go to a conference and they thought that they could speak because everybody else was doing
+[2468.06 --> 2472.84]  it and they get up there and it's just like the driest painful thing to watch.
+[2473.28 --> 2479.30]  Um, aside from that, I would also suggest saying, read a lot of abstracts, go on, you know,
+[2479.36 --> 2484.60]  past few years of conference sites, see what the talks look like that people have written,
+[2484.80 --> 2489.82]  um, see the tone that they use, tell like the story that you were trying to tell.
+[2489.90 --> 2492.78]  Don't just tell me what it is you're going to teach me.
+[2492.78 --> 2495.28]  I want to know why you want to teach somebody that.
+[2495.28 --> 2504.28]  And I've read a lot of, uh, I, I did some, um, proposal reviews for, um, empire and you
+[2504.28 --> 2506.02]  would be so surprised.
+[2506.18 --> 2510.16]  Well, you two wouldn't be so surprised, but everybody out there that thinks that everybody
+[2510.16 --> 2515.78]  out there that thinks that, oh, they can't write an abstract you get, I would say, let's
+[2515.78 --> 2522.76]  say you get a conference that has 300, uh, applications and there's maybe only 30.
+[2522.76 --> 2525.52]  30, uh, 30 speaking slots.
+[2525.76 --> 2531.88]  I guarantee you like two thirds of all of those submissions are going to be terrible anyway.
+[2531.88 --> 2536.26]  Cause it's people that are just like putting in a sentence where it's like, I want to talk
+[2536.26 --> 2542.36]  about react components, or I think it would be really neat to talk about, you know, currying
+[2542.36 --> 2547.68]  or something like the, the people that actually put in effort are the ones that have a way better
+[2547.68 --> 2551.00]  chance than the people that are just throwing their hat in the ring for the sake of it.
+[2551.32 --> 2551.64]  Yeah.
+[2551.94 --> 2552.22]  Yeah.
+[2552.34 --> 2557.02]  But before I kind of stopped doing, uh, organizing conferences, cause I was kind of burning out
+[2557.02 --> 2557.28]  on it.
+[2557.38 --> 2561.50]  The main advice that I put in the CFP every time was tell me a story.
+[2561.58 --> 2563.62]  Like it should have a beginning and a middle and end.
+[2563.70 --> 2565.46]  I don't need to know about the technology.
+[2565.56 --> 2566.66]  I can read the docs for that.
+[2566.68 --> 2569.72]  And a lot of these abstracts just look like an outline of the documentation.
+[2569.72 --> 2574.14]  What I want to know is like, why did you create it or why did you decide to use it?
+[2574.22 --> 2578.58]  Like, what is that, that narrative that makes this a compelling thing to learn and to get
+[2578.58 --> 2578.86]  into?
+[2579.00 --> 2582.18]  Because if it's, if you're just telling me what the documentation says, like I could
+[2582.18 --> 2583.18]  do that when I leave.
+[2583.38 --> 2588.26]  The job of a speaker is not to teach everybody in 20 minutes how to use something.
+[2588.26 --> 2592.50]  It's actually to teach them why it's compelling enough that they would go home and continue
+[2592.50 --> 2593.00]  to learn it.
+[2593.58 --> 2593.68]  Yeah.
+[2593.76 --> 2597.72]  I think that's exactly what I was going to say is, is that as a speaker and as someone who
+[2597.72 --> 2603.98]  choose the speakers, I absolutely would be fine if everyone walked away having learned
+[2603.98 --> 2608.38]  nothing except for being inspired to go learn more.
+[2608.62 --> 2613.32]  Like I saw the value proposition in X and now I want to go read the docs.
+[2613.60 --> 2619.50]  Like I gained enough motivation from that talk in order to go put in the work to actually
+[2619.50 --> 2624.90]  learn it because anyone reading documentation to you for 20 minutes is not going to be compelling.
+[2624.90 --> 2628.18]  Um, and this is a waste of your money for the most part.
+[2628.56 --> 2634.78]  So I totally agree that definitely inspire people, like give them the, and I don't mean
+[2634.78 --> 2639.24]  like, uh, slimy wimey, uh, everybody is great.
+[2639.42 --> 2642.30]  Uh, everyone is a special unicorn type inspiration.
+[2642.52 --> 2643.84]  Those talks can be very good too.
+[2643.94 --> 2649.66]  I'm not against those talks, but I mean like really, uh, talk about why you're excited about
+[2649.66 --> 2655.40]  something and how it changed things for you or something like that or, or why it's important
+[2655.40 --> 2657.74]  for like the web or something.
+[2657.82 --> 2661.32]  And I think those types of talks really go over much better.
+[2662.06 --> 2665.46]  I want to hear about the journey, not, not the steps.
+[2665.92 --> 2666.36]  Yeah.
+[2666.98 --> 2668.54]  That's a, that's a good way to put it.
+[2668.64 --> 2668.82]  Yeah.
+[2669.36 --> 2669.58]  Cool.
+[2670.08 --> 2674.82]  On that note, I think we can take a break now and when we come back, we'll get into the
+[2674.82 --> 2675.58]  project of the week.
+[2676.86 --> 2682.08]  If you're looking for trusted freelance talent, ready to join your team right now.
+[2682.08 --> 2687.54]  I mean, like within the week, call up all my friends at top tile, T O P T A L.com.
+[2687.68 --> 2693.24]  And as a listener of the show, you might actually be one of those developers or designers looking
+[2693.24 --> 2698.58]  for awesome freelance, independent contractor type opportunities where you can still be a
+[2698.58 --> 2699.10]  remote worker.
+[2699.20 --> 2702.44]  You can still have the freedom you have right now, which means you can travel anywhere.
+[2702.44 --> 2704.80]  You can be anywhere and do what you do.
+[2705.20 --> 2706.06]  We love top top.
+[2706.10 --> 2708.14]  They've been supporting this show for a very long time.
+[2708.42 --> 2709.84]  They're really good friends of ours.
+[2710.04 --> 2712.80]  If you want a personal introduction, I'd be glad to give that to you.
+[2713.08 --> 2715.74]  Email me, Adam at change law.com.
+[2715.94 --> 2717.80]  Otherwise head to top top.com.
+[2717.86 --> 2720.64]  That's T O P T A L.com to learn more.
+[2720.92 --> 2722.64]  Tell them Adam from change law sent you.
+[2722.90 --> 2724.16]  And now back to the show.
+[2726.32 --> 2726.98]  All right.
+[2727.12 --> 2731.34]  Today's project of the week or this week's project of the week, I should say, uh, is P five
+[2731.34 --> 2731.88]  JS.
+[2731.88 --> 2734.26]  Uh, so why don't you tell us about this, Rachel?
+[2735.10 --> 2735.50]  Sure.
+[2735.72 --> 2739.72]  Um, so P five JS is a JavaScript.
+[2739.72 --> 2744.06]  I'm going to say homage cause it's not a direct port of processing.
+[2744.52 --> 2748.88]  Um, what it does, I guess I have to start by telling you what processing is.
+[2749.08 --> 2757.18]  Um, so processing is this open source thing and IDE that's super old.
+[2757.18 --> 2760.38]  It's about 14, 15 years old, I think.
+[2760.38 --> 2766.68]  Um, and it was made explicitly for people that were, um, you know, big beginners in programming
+[2766.68 --> 2774.04]  and visual artists to use something to make some really cool, uh, visualization stuff and
+[2774.04 --> 2774.98]  graphics and art.
+[2774.98 --> 2777.32]  Um, it, it, it's built on top of Java.
+[2777.32 --> 2779.20]  It uses a simplified syntax.
+[2779.20 --> 2786.08]  And, um, basically what it does is it lets you export your projects as desktop apps for,
+[2786.44 --> 2788.52]  um, either windows, Mac or Linux.
+[2788.52 --> 2793.42]  So you can't really show it on the web though.
+[2793.42 --> 2794.98]  So it's like a standalone thing.
+[2794.98 --> 2797.74]  Um, the power behind it is really great.
+[2797.90 --> 2799.26]  Uh, it has great FPS.
+[2799.70 --> 2803.90]  Uh, you can build some really robust things, but you can't do things on the web.
+[2803.90 --> 2812.84]  So somebody built another port of it, um, which was actually John Resig and some other students
+[2812.84 --> 2814.62]  to make processing JS.
+[2814.92 --> 2820.22]  And so processing JS is a more true port of processing to JavaScript.
+[2820.94 --> 2823.70]  Um, you don't have to totally rewrite your code.
+[2823.78 --> 2829.70]  You use processing JS to take your processing files and be able to run it in HTML five.
+[2829.70 --> 2833.52]  It uses regular expressions to convert the Java into JavaScript.
+[2833.90 --> 2839.46]  And it lets you have some pretty like, uh, mangled JavaScript.
+[2839.46 --> 2844.20]  That's not readable afterwards, but you, you get the same effect and it, it runs on canvas.
+[2844.58 --> 2855.08]  So in comes P five, um, P five is a really awesome, accessible, uh, library made by Lauren McCarthy,
+[2855.08 --> 2862.88]  who, um, was at NYU ITP and the processing foundation, which deals with, um, like processing JS and
+[2862.88 --> 2865.68]  a lot of other ports of processing to other languages.
+[2866.22 --> 2873.34]  And, um, um, what they wanted to do is they wanted to make it so that people could do the
+[2873.34 --> 2878.98]  same kind of things that you would do with processing, but, um, a little bit looser written.
+[2878.98 --> 2886.44]  So it's not going to be exactly the same with all of the, um, super involved animations that
+[2886.44 --> 2888.94]  you can do with your, your regular processing.
+[2889.26 --> 2895.54]  But with P five, it lets you write more natural JavaScript to do some really cool stuff in the
+[2895.54 --> 2901.94]  browser involving a lot of shapes and interactions and, um, you know, artsy stuff.
+[2902.00 --> 2903.58]  It's all canvas based.
+[2904.00 --> 2907.22]  There's a bunch of other plugins that you can get for it.
+[2907.22 --> 2912.16]  So there's the P five library, which is just, you know, the regular access to the shapes
+[2912.16 --> 2918.16]  and stuff, but there's also P five dom, which lets you interact with HTML five objects, um,
+[2918.16 --> 2919.16]  outside of the canvas.
+[2919.16 --> 2922.60]  You can do like video, audio, webcam input text.
+[2922.60 --> 2924.90]  I was messing around with the video one.
+[2925.00 --> 2926.16]  It's, it's really cool.
+[2926.28 --> 2933.18]  It essentially grabs each pixel in the video and maps it to a drawn instance of whatever shape
+[2933.18 --> 2935.30]  that you'd use and hides the video.
+[2935.30 --> 2941.58]  So it makes, um, basically an animation of whatever video you give it to, but with shapes
+[2941.58 --> 2943.54]  instead, uh, for each pixel.
+[2944.02 --> 2949.58]  Um, there's also P five sound, which uses web audio stuff and you can do playback and affect
+[2949.58 --> 2952.94]  a lot of the stuff in the canvas that you would build art with there.
+[2953.44 --> 2958.82]  Um, there's P five serial, which lets you do serial communications with stuff and lets you
+[2958.82 --> 2960.66]  interact with it with P five.
+[2960.80 --> 2965.28]  There's so many, there's also like bots, which was, um, made by Sarah Groff Polaris.
+[2965.30 --> 2967.32]  Who's a New York based dev.
+[2967.38 --> 2968.14]  Who's a Kickstarter.
+[2968.26 --> 2968.80]  There's speech.
+[2968.90 --> 2969.66]  There's geolocation.
+[2969.86 --> 2972.12]  There's just like so much stuff that you can do.
+[2972.30 --> 2979.58]  And the, the best thing for me, um, is you don't necessarily even need to understand JavaScript
+[2979.58 --> 2980.92]  to jump in and use it.
+[2980.98 --> 2985.30]  I've seen a lot of people that are just, you know, starting out as game devs who are used
+[2985.30 --> 2987.26]  to unity and some C sharp stuff.
+[2987.26 --> 2990.24]  And they heard that you could do some fun stuff with P five.
+[2990.24 --> 2993.54]  So the reference material on the site is awesome.
+[2993.90 --> 2995.30]  The examples are awesome.
+[2996.26 --> 3000.50]  It's just really neat, especially for people that are interested in doing some more creative
+[3000.50 --> 3005.80]  coding and finding out what they can do with, uh, with canvas.
+[3005.80 --> 3012.56]  And there's another, um, person who teaches that ITP named Daniel Schiffman, who has a
+[3012.56 --> 3015.64]  really, really amazing YouTube channel called the coding train.
+[3015.64 --> 3023.14]  Um, and they make video tutorials every week that goes from the beginning of, you know, basic
+[3023.14 --> 3029.46]  P five stuff to super advanced things like Perlin noise, which is, uh, this algorithm that
+[3029.46 --> 3034.08]  allows you to create true, like randomized noise for cool glitchy.
+[3034.08 --> 3037.50]  Well, it's actually used mostly for like terrain generation.
+[3038.20 --> 3044.34]  Um, but it's, they're really good videos and it explains it in a, in an accessible way.
+[3044.74 --> 3050.82]  And if anybody is interested in trying out that kind of stuff, I highly recommend checking
+[3050.82 --> 3052.00]  out those resources.
+[3053.10 --> 3054.24]  ITP is so cool.
+[3054.52 --> 3056.90]  Everything ITP ever does is just rad.
+[3058.30 --> 3058.82]  Yeah.
+[3059.10 --> 3063.72]  Like, uh, Clay Shirky is like still a teacher there and they just, yeah, I've known a few people
+[3063.72 --> 3065.26]  that have gone through there and done their program.
+[3065.26 --> 3071.84]  And it's just this amazing mashup of like code and art and kind of thinking about social
+[3071.84 --> 3072.16]  good.
+[3072.34 --> 3073.08]  It's pretty rad.
+[3073.74 --> 3073.90]  Yeah.
+[3073.96 --> 3075.26]  It's also very expensive.
+[3075.26 --> 3079.30]  So if you don't want to go to ITP, but you want to mess with the tools that people there
+[3079.30 --> 3081.34]  use, P five is a good start.
+[3081.50 --> 3082.82]  Three JS is a good start.
+[3083.04 --> 3084.94]  Um, those are all good places.
+[3085.62 --> 3086.02]  Awesome.
+[3086.08 --> 3087.26]  I'm going to play with this later today.
+[3087.26 --> 3090.74]  I actually been meaning to poke around with some art stuff.
+[3091.00 --> 3094.94]  So the music notes on the back of the webpage are pretty fun to, yeah.
+[3095.28 --> 3095.60]  Yeah.
+[3095.86 --> 3099.86]  Like people that are super, this is like a challenge that I'm going to give.
+[3099.86 --> 3108.80]  Um, if you, you know, have never really tried to do anything artsy or, you know, you're just,
+[3109.08 --> 3113.80]  you're just a JavaScript dev and you build, you know, web stuff all the time.
+[3113.80 --> 3119.76]  Um, I would love if you tried to make something neat with P five.
+[3120.18 --> 3125.24]  Um, because if you know, JavaScript, like in and out with your heart, then you should
+[3125.24 --> 3130.92]  be able to do some like really, really awesome stuff with, um, a lot of P five stuff is just
+[3130.92 --> 3135.52]  like iterating through objects to do the place shapes randomly.
+[3135.88 --> 3138.80]  Uh, please make something with it and tweet it at me.
+[3138.80 --> 3143.74]  Cause I just want to see what other cool things that people can use to do this.
+[3144.22 --> 3148.20]  Um, I also think it's a good, it's a really good accessible library for people that are
+[3148.20 --> 3153.44]  trying to try something new and want to try and make something every day because you could
+[3153.44 --> 3157.10]  make something with this in like 15, 20 minutes, just like a little code sketch.
+[3157.10 --> 3162.78]  And, um, I don't know, it's going to help you get used to, you know, regular JavaScript,
+[3162.92 --> 3166.06]  but also a new library that makes pretty art.
+[3167.24 --> 3167.64]  Sweet.
+[3168.08 --> 3168.78]  All right.
+[3168.96 --> 3169.84]  Are we ready for picks?
+[3170.18 --> 3171.24]  We'll have their picks ready.
+[3172.22 --> 3172.66]  Totally.
+[3172.66 --> 3174.02]  I hope y'all do.
+[3174.16 --> 3174.44]  Okay.
+[3174.62 --> 3175.94]  I'll, I'll go, I'll go first.
+[3176.22 --> 3179.18]  Um, mine is, is, it's kind of a shameless plug actually.
+[3179.86 --> 3186.04]  Um, I decided, I stopped organizing events a little while ago cause it was too much work.
+[3186.46 --> 3191.66]  Um, but I did now kind of take on this new event that we're trying out called slide list.
+[3191.66 --> 3193.20]  So it's at slide list.org.
+[3193.20 --> 3197.58]  But the idea is that, um, no slides, it's a 15 minute talk.
+[3197.58 --> 3200.16]  That's really telling a story within a theme.
+[3200.36 --> 3203.32]  So the theme for this first one is, is what is your superpower?
+[3203.94 --> 3207.98]  Um, so we'll have some great talks about that, you know, without any slides that people can
+[3207.98 --> 3210.18]  just get up and do their, their narrative.
+[3210.26 --> 3213.94]  So, you know, if you're interested in attending, it'll be in San Francisco in July.
+[3214.18 --> 3215.08]  Tickets are up now.
+[3215.08 --> 3217.90]  Um, and I'm still looking for a few talks as well.
+[3218.00 --> 3221.32]  So if you want to, if you have an idea for a talk in that theme, get ahold of me.
+[3222.36 --> 3227.76]  My superpower is, uh, calling Michael Rogers bullshit.
+[3231.36 --> 3232.76]  That's a really limited power.
+[3232.86 --> 3234.50]  Like that requires me being around.
+[3234.70 --> 3236.42]  Yeah, no, it is unfortunate.
+[3237.42 --> 3238.82]  Uh, very portable.
+[3238.82 --> 3241.86]  My pick is a person.
+[3242.06 --> 3242.66]  It's Mike West.
+[3243.22 --> 3251.40]  Uh, Mike West is not that visible outside of the web app security, uh, world, but has
+[3251.40 --> 3253.96]  like a massive impact on the security of the web.
+[3254.08 --> 3256.28]  He kind of, uh, I don't know if he's an official leader.
+[3256.38 --> 3262.38]  I assume he is of the web application security working group, uh, which is a W3C group.
+[3262.38 --> 3269.34]  He kind of drafted, uh, like a ton of the security stuff that currently is being added to the
+[3269.34 --> 3274.28]  browsers, um, in the last, you know, like five years, uh, including like CSP and a lot
+[3274.28 --> 3278.70]  of like the cookie updates and, and header changes and things like that.
+[3278.70 --> 3285.16]  Uh, sub resource integrity, um, all these different, uh, cool security upgrades.
+[3285.16 --> 3291.48]  And so I would encourage you to both follow Mike West on Twitter, uh, as well as follow
+[3291.48 --> 3295.60]  the web app sec, uh, mailing lists because they're not actually that crazy.
+[3295.90 --> 3300.34]  Um, I think they're, they're somewhat followable and, and that's pretty fun and cool.
+[3301.20 --> 3301.36]  Cool.
+[3301.70 --> 3306.22]  Um, my pick this week is a person and a book.
+[3306.32 --> 3312.46]  Um, Sarah Drasner released this book on O'Reilly since I said so many nice things about O'Reilly
+[3312.46 --> 3313.38]  conferences earlier.
+[3313.38 --> 3315.36]  I'm going to say nice things about this book.
+[3315.42 --> 3315.82]  Actually.
+[3316.34 --> 3321.44]  Um, I also apologize if I said her last name incorrectly, but, um, she released this
+[3321.44 --> 3327.52]  really cool book on SVG animations, which like, I know that we like briefly touched on SVG
+[3327.52 --> 3331.14]  stuff on, on one of the other picks, uh, which was like data sketches.
+[3331.14 --> 3336.40]  But if you were like wondering, how do I make SVG animations really pretty?
+[3336.40 --> 3339.86]  Like I want, um, better UX implementations.
+[3340.16 --> 3345.36]  Uh, her book was released within the past week and I think she said it's the number one
+[3345.36 --> 3349.34]  new release for programming books on Amazon and it looks great.
+[3349.34 --> 3353.88]  So if that's something that you have more questions about, check it out.
+[3354.62 --> 3355.06]  Awesome.
+[3355.74 --> 3357.36]  Now I'm going to go eat a horse.
+[3360.24 --> 3363.08]  And with that, uh, we're all done for the, for the week.
+[3363.22 --> 3368.34]  Thank you all for tuning in, uh, rate us on iTunes, uh, check us out live every week
+[3368.34 --> 3369.08]  on Fridays.
+[3369.36 --> 3373.28]  Uh, you can go to the changelog.com and, uh, goodbye everybody.
+[3373.40 --> 3374.10]  Thank you very much.
+[3374.10 --> 3375.64]  All right.
+[3375.68 --> 3378.36]  That wraps up this episode of JS party.
+[3378.54 --> 3381.68]  Join the community and slack with us in real time during the show.
+[3381.74 --> 3384.40]  Head to changelog.com slash community.
+[3384.78 --> 3385.70]  Follow us on Twitter.
+[3385.76 --> 3387.86]  We're at JS party FM special.
+[3388.00 --> 3391.28]  Thanks to our sponsors century and top towel.
+[3391.44 --> 3395.72]  Also thanks to fastly, our bandwidth partner at the fastly.com to learn more.
+[3395.88 --> 3400.36]  This episode was edited by Jonathan Youngblood and the theme music was produced by break
+[3400.36 --> 3401.18]  master cylinder.
+[3401.18 --> 3402.58]  We'll see you again next week.
+[3402.82 --> 3403.56]  Thanks for listening.

Web Standards, ECMAScript Modules in Browsers, and Learning JS_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,493 @@
+**Alex Sexton:** Hello and welcome to the JS Party Podcast, where some people might say that it's a party every day with JavaScript, but I certainly would never say that. This is a ridiculous tagline.
+
+Anyways, today we have two guests who are members of the JavaScript community who I'm happy to have on. We were talking a little bit before the show how we were finally brave enough to do an "all-JavaScript dad podcast", the most important, under-represented group of JavaScript developers, almost certainly.
+
+Today we have Wes Bos and Mike Taylor. Wes, introduce yourself.
+
+**Wes Bos:** Hey, everybody. My name's Wes. I'm a full-stack dev from Canada, and I primarily make coding tutorials and courses on how to become a better web dev.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Very nice of you. Mike, how about yourself?
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, I'm Mike Taylor, I work for Mozilla. I guess technically I'm a manager. I manage the web compatibility team, and that makes me a half-empty stack developer \[laughter\], because I see lots of really depressing things. I work from home, here in Austin, Texas.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I also work from home in Austin, Texas. Wes, do you sometimes work from home? Is that true?
+
+**Wes Bos:** I always work from home. I'm in Hamilton.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** What's the HackerYou stuff that you do?
+
+**Wes Bos:** The HackerYou stuff is I teach twice a week part-time classes in Toronto at HackerYou. So I guess I do go in to teach there, but everything else is from home.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So you lied. This first thing out of your mouth was a lie.
+
+**Wes Bos:** Well, well... Well... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You have a pretty good A/V setup. I know this isn't an A/V podcast, but I appreciate a good A/V setup because you do all the tutorials, yeah? So you have like a little office with microphones and video...
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah, I think I even asked you about how to do this stuff when I was first getting into it. I had to find a whole bunch of boxes with knobs, and they're turned the right way, and it makes me sound boomier than I actually am, which is nice...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Very nice! I actually haven't received any of the royalty checks from that help initially...
+
+**Wes Bos:** Well, I sent it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[laughs\] Okay. It must be the damn U.S. Mail.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** You should cash those as fast as you can, because he sent them in Canadian Dollars.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You're just kidding that we should visit Canada? What's the deal there, just as an economics podcast?
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah, there's stuff that's happening in Canada with oil and NAFTA and mortgages, and the Canadian Dollar is going down, which makes those who have U.S. Dollars kings in Canada. So you can come here and... Kings have oysters, buy gold bars, listen to Drake...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Poutine...
+
+**Wes Bos:** Poutine, all day.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, you could upgrade to the meat poutines, the brisket...
+
+**Wes Bos:** Oh, that's so gnarly... Did you have that when you came here?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, I had the brisket poutine, for sure.
+
+**Wes Bos:** Oh yeah, that's good... I usually get Slaughterhouse, which is every type of meat...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, man... That's intense.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** That sounds terrible.
+
+**Wes Bos:** If anyone's listening, it's amazing... Poutine is like French fries with cheese curds, and then gravy, so the cheese curds melt. Then you just put like every type of topping on top of it and you just go to sleep after you've eaten it.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** This is how Canadians make it through the winter, right? \[laughter\]
+
+**Wes Bos:** \[04:04\] Exactly! You hunker down... It's sort of like bears, except we still have to live, so we eat large amounts of potatoes and cheese...
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, and sleep...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I've always thought that the name "cheese curds" didn't really do the actual thing justice. It sounds gross, the name "cheese curd."
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah, curd... I don't know what would be a better name, though. Cheese nuggets?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, cheese nuggets would be fine, I guess. What a cheese curd actually is is just like the leftover cheese chunks that fall off in the cheese factory. So it's like the...
+
+**Wes Bos:** Swept off the floor?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. Well, maybe not the floor, but swept off of something... \[laughter\] I think we may be a little too far into dairy, but we can come back out. There were a few things to happen in the world of the web this week -- or JavaScript I guess is the party we're having specifically. There is quite a bit of talk about ECMAScript modules hitting browsers, and I'm not sure there's a ton to talk about here... Wes, you've even done some ECMA module tutorial stuff as part of a larger tutorial, yeah?
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yes, I've got a ES6 series, and part of that is obviously learning about how the modules work, but currently what that is is you have to use Webpack or something to bundle it up... So I guess now we are able to use modules straight away in the browser.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, and that's the type attribute equaling module. One interesting thing that I think was misunderstood a little bit from the Node drama around ECMAScript modules, which was that you were going to have to use the .mjs extension - so instead of .js, you have to use .mjs... Mike, I don't know if any of this hit standards versus just Node stuff -- because I think it's kind of Node-specific... But on the web, the web version of it, that's not actually true. You can use JavaScript, because we don't currently have a module spec that people are using wrong; it's all pre-built anyways.
+
+The web doesn't give any damn about what extension you use. You could use .php for all your module files.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** You probably should.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, yeah. I think it's a best practice, for sure... Just to show your mastery of your knowledge of the non-importance of extensions on the web. Mike, I asked you a question and then I answered most of the question I asked you, but is there any kind of movement in the standards space here that you've seen, or has it just mostly been like "This came out"?
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, I mean... I think there's still problems that need to be resolved. I don't follow -- a lot of this work was done in conjunction with TC39, so they're the standards body that works on ECMAScript the language, which is what we know as JavaScript. But the actual module loading stuff happened in the HTML spec in the WHATWG, and that's just like... If you ever run out of email to read, you should subscribe to that GitHub repo, because it's -- it's impressive that individuals are able to keep up with that. I'm kind of just like... I like to collect emails for fun, but I haven't followed it too closely.
+
+Alex, you were talking about some of the problems around backwards compatibility for the Node ecosystem, and you're right - we don't have those on the web, in browsers, because like any "module system" we've had, if you used a module loader like RequireJS or the other one... I think you wrote a couple maybe, Alex...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No, definitely not.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** \[07:58\] That's all just like regular JavaScript, right? It all evaluated to just be like -- the exact same thing is, I don't know, a script tag, at the end of the day. So there have really been no browser compatibility constraints. But there is this issue... There's this "no module" attribute, and that's something that I don't really entirely understand, and browsers don't even really support this now, but there are some kind of problems you can get into if your browser supports modules and you're mixing module code and non-module code.
+
+So there will be a way for you to say like "This one's not a module. This is my fallback for Safari 9 or Firefox 38", or whatever it is.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, I see...
+
+**Mike Taylor:** But that said, I know like 1% of things to know about that. But if you're concerned about compatibility, like if it's your job...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's Mike's job.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** ...in theory, you should know about this. So that's on my to-do list. You know, anytime you add stuff to the web platform -- hang on a second... Is this like a PG podcast, or PG-13?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** PG-13 is fine.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Okay, so I'll just say stuff is gonna break. \[laughter\] We'll save our swear words for the end, like when we put our kids to bed. Stuff's gonna break, so whenever you add to the web platform... People make all these weird assumptions. Heck, someone might have used type=module, so you're gonna run into broken web pages. This is an area where I imagine in a year or two when we start actually serving web pages like this we'll feel that pain. We just don't know right now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I don't think there's a ton of people using this in production quite yet, by the nature of how new it is.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, this is like this week, right? \[laughter\] They even serve like an evergreen demo-type thing.
+
+**Wes Bos:** I'm just looking at a quick little blog post about it here, and for those listening that wanna know a little bit more about it, what this blog post is recommending is that you ship your ES6 modules to the browser, and then you use this "no module" attribute that Mike was talking about to signify to the browser "Hey, when you do not support ES6 modules..." So you should sort of ship two versions of your code base - one compiled and one not - and you can sort of fall back to the compiled version when there's not module support.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Sounds like a transition phase, right?
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's been the no-script of modules, right? \[laughter\]
+
+**Mike Taylor:** It's the no-module, yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I see where they came up with the name...
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Amazing.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** One interesting thing that I guess I didn't really consider until now - and I may be considering it incorrectly... Whenever they did the modules back in TC39, there are things about modules that are true that they were able to like, since modules are new, and if you're using a module, that must mean you're using new JavaScript, which means that they can make different defaults to the language while you're in a module, if that makes sense. So they assume that since you're in a module, you must be in strict mode. I believe that's the case.
+
+So this would be the first time - since this is the first native implementation of modules anywhere - that that is enforced, versus just...
+
+**Mike Taylor:** An opt-in type thing...?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, a part of the compiler that you're using, that may or may not care about the strictness of your code. Because it wouldn't actually be enforced by the engine at runtime, right? So it probably actually means that to some degree there are places where modules could run faster, because they have fewer old things to worry about.
+
+It's async by default, so you also can't do "document.write" and things like that, so it could very potentially allow the browsers -- like, browsers are pretty good at look ahead and all that stuff now, so it may not actually material and make a ton of difference.
+
+\[12:09\] But it's kind of cool that because modules are a new enough thing, that we can unbreak some old things if you use them.
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah. That reminds me of service workers. If your browser supports service workers, in order to support a service worker you have to implement a bunch of other things like Fetch and other things... So you only need to do one level of feature detection to be like "Do I have a service worker on the document?" or however you do that. And then you can make all these assumptions, like "Okay, now I'm in a modern environment", and you don't have to worry about all the other gross stuff.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, there's something with the CSP that's a very similar content security policy, where things on the page break if you're in an old browser and you have the CSP, but since those old browsers don't have CSP support, then it kind of accidentally works. It's this nice accidental upgradiness that breaks in a really nice way in the old browsers. It's nice when we can move things forward that way. It's kind of cool.
+
+Let's talk about... Mike, you work on low compatibility; it's kind of similar to some of the stuff that we're talking about. I've seen you give a few talks on this, and you're at it from Mozilla, but there's a lot of actual more like general... Is it part of the Standards Organization, the compatibility effort? Feels like it's cross-browser people working on it together to help move the web.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, it's not just a Mozilla thing. I mean, Mozilla pays for my mortgage at the end of the day, which I'm grateful for, but our mission... So I guess you have to take a step back. If you've ever looked at what the Mozilla - we call it the Manifesto, the Mission... Maybe I should go take a step back and re-read that... But you've got these guiding principles of what it is that we do; there's ten of them, and number three, six and nine - don't fact-check me on that - really have to do with this notion of like "As an individual, I should have the freedom to experience the internet in any way that I see fit." So that doesn't just mean "As an individual I should download Firefox and use it", which you should, because I like to feed my kids... But you should be able to use -- you know, the promise of the open web and the internet is that anybody can access this information independent of their browser choices or their ability to do certain things... It kind of raises questions of accessibility, or even access to bandwidth etc.
+
+So with that being one of the guiding principles of what Mozilla does, we obviously want the internet to work in Firefox, but we also want the web to work in Chrome, in Edge, in XYZ, Opera Mini etc. So I think by the nature of what it is that we do, we collaborate a lot with other vendors.
+
+This morning I was on a call with some of the good people at Google who work on the platform predictability team. Rick Byers is one, Philip Jägenstedt another, who used to be at Opera... And we were talking about ways we can collaborate and understand what are the pain points in the platform where things -- you know, like "Is this something that Chrome is not following the spec, but lots of web pages depend on? So what are the solutions there? Is Google willing to break that to move towards a standard, or should we change the standards to move towards reality?"
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's what happens... That's kind of the default answer, usually. Especially with very old Internet Explorer stuff, it seemed like half of HTML5 was us just standardizing internet for...
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Exactly.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Is it still the case?
+
+**Mike Taylor:** \[16:11\] It's often the case. A lot of the work I've been doing in the past year and a half, two years is just standardizing what I call "the de facto web". So you've got the web that you were promised, or the web that was written in specs and, you know, like people like Zeldman and others said "Code to web standards, and it will work everywhere." And then you've got the reality, which is, you know, like Apple came out with some really cool advanced CSS features years ago... Five, six, seven, eight years ago they had masks and gradients and reflections and all this cool stuff that you just couldn't do anywhere else... So of course designers and developers wanna experiment, they wanna put that in their products, and what happens over time is Apple didn't do such a great job at actually moving those things towards standards bodies, but it worked in browsers, and then we know Chrome came to be and they ended up using WebKit, and then they forked to Blink and inherited all this code.
+
+So basically, the internet depends on this one feature, so you can either pretend, or get really upset, like "Oh, it's non-standard." You can care about that, or you can just say like "You know what? This is part of the web and it has a crappy name... That crappy name happens to just start with -webkit, so let's create a spec for it and let's get all the browsers to implement it, and then it just works."
+
+At the same time, that kind of stuff kind of ruffles feathers. People are not entirely happy about it, both users and some other people at W3C... Some of this stuff that I worked on, the CSS Working Group, they were like "Oh, this is not our ideal design", so they're partially motivated to go make better versions, which I think is great for the web.
+
+To circle back, you were hinting at this... There's an expression, "Pave the cow paths." I'm not sure if everyone's ever heard that with respect to standards or just like path-paving in general - I don't know if that's a profession.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I always assumed that Ian Hickson the editor of the HTML5 specs default response, like his autoresponder on his email is just "We're actually just standardizing the way things have always been, not designing a new thing." That seemed like his answer to a lot of things, which is fair, but often frustrating.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah. I mean, that's why drag and drop is so terrible, for example, right? It's like, "Well, IE3 did this, and then Safari 2 copied it, so we might as well make everyone else do it", and then nobody uses it.
+
+So paving the cow path is this notion that like, you know, all these cows walked this way, so that's obviously the optimal solution, so you wanna lay down some asphalt on that. So that's kind of one aspect of this work.
+
+A part of that, my team works on this website called WebCompat.com, and that's a place where you can go if you're just like, "Oh, this website doesn't work in this browser" - it could be Firefox or Chrome...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Like an issue tracker...
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, it's basically like a Honeypot for broken web pages... And we've got a small team that goes in and tries to triage... But it's like an open community effort; anybody can contribute, diagnose, do outreach etc. But we use that to try to help us understand "What does the web really look like? What's the shape of the web?" Because it doesn't always line up with the shape of what web standards are.
+
+That shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who has developed more than one web page and opened it in two browsers. It's all hacks, and there's bugs, and you want certain features but they only exist on one browser, so it's kind of like this big mess. That's a lot of fun and has a lot of potential.
+
+\[20:10\] Just to spitball a couple examples off the top of my head... You can tell me when to stop talking, and I will.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No, keep going.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** One thing that's really common, a problem for Firefox for Android users is there's this streaming video format called hls - I'm not sure if anyone's familiar with that... That stands for HTTP Live Streaming. So this is not a web standard, it's not like MPEG-Dash or MSE... We have these standards that exist to where you can take segments of video and kind of stitch them together and let people stream them live...
+
+Apple went and they created this other version, which is really popular. I don't know why it's popular; it might be way easier to use. But basically, what you could do is you have a manifest file, it's called an m3u8 file, and that's literally just a text file with a list of MPEG-TS segments. You stick that in the video source, <video src="bla.m3u8"/>, and then the browser that supports it will play it.
+
+It's not an open standard, so that means you can't freely implement this, if that makes sense. You might have to pay some money to some people... And I'm being careful here, I don't wanna use the p-word because then we're all subpoenaed, and... \[laughter\] Right.
+
+So Gecko doesn't implement this, because it's not free as in free stuff, and so...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You nailed that one... \[laughs\]
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, thank you. Shoutout to my spiritual mentor, Richard Stallman. \[laughter\] So people go to look at their favorite live streaming web pages, which are typically not PG-13, and it doesn't work, and that's really frustrating, and they report this bug to us. So we come to understand that "Whoa, there's a lot of web pages that are using this non-standard streaming format. This is a problem we need to understand and tackle. What is not working for these people?"
+
+**Alex Sexton:** This is like the classic Betamax vs. VHS story, isn't it?
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, a little bit. \[laughter\] What was the other one...? It was like HD DVD...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, versus Blu-ray.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah. So another one of these things that I'm working on right now is called Window.Event. It's this global event object, and if you know what this is, I'm amazed, and hopefully you don't use it in your code... This is something that IE invented. They had a different event model before the W3C came up with their own.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** addEvent?
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah... attachEvent."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** attachEvent, yeah.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** And as part of that, you had this global event object. So when you're inside of an event handler, you can just access it by calling event.target, or... It was called "source element", but same thing. And so the W3C was like "No, we're gonna do our own thing called addEventListener" - I think they copied what Netscape was doing - and you pass in the event object.
+
+If you've ever written some JavaScript, you'll know that when you're writing your little onclick=function and you pass in sometimes an e, or an ev, or an event, you can use that guy inside of your event handler, your callback.
+
+So it turns out IE invented this thing, and Safari, back when it was actually KHTML - so this was before Apple even forked... Some crazy Norwegians in Oslo made this - they were called Trolltech... They made a browser engine which turned into KHTML, and they had to implement that for compatibility to get some banks running, or whatever.
+
+\[24:04\] So then Safari has it, people start probably copying and pasting code from Stack Overflow, and it just keeps on working because you had no idea this was even a thing, and it works in Chrome and it works in Edge, because they forked from IE.
+
+So this is one of these things where you're like, "Oh, we should just spec this and call it -- it's part of the web platform, it's ugly, it's historical..." Yeah, so this is something -- I'm working with [Anne van Kesteren](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_van_Kesteren) who is a web standards wizard; he works on HTML and DOM, and probably 50 other things... There's an open pull request, and then that'll just be part of the web.
+
+**Wes Bos:** You're saying the event is just not standardized?
+
+**Mike Taylor:** So the event object is standardized. Having a global variable that references that event...
+
+**Wes Bos:** Oh, I see!
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's such a terrible architecture... It's so obviously wrong that it's beautiful that 10-15 years later we were all forced to implement it as a standard. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mike Taylor:** We're stuck with it. So in your work, when you started programming, global variables were amazing, right? And then as it became more sophisticated, you're like "Oh, wait... These cause and create pain."
+
+I don't know what the moral to that story is... You know, this is the technical debt of the web, basically.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I think we're running off on a break, but we'll get back with some hot text after the break.
+
+**Break:** \[25:54\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And we're back. So I wanted to ask both of you a question that is not like a normal question that we ask on the show but I often find interesting, especially since both of you have ended up in standards and teaching and stuff like that, rather than necessarily directly creating -- I think we've all done some direct creating, but you guys are in somewhat different positions now.
+
+So I'm interested in how you got into web development. Do you have computer science degrees, and did you do web stuff when you were 10, or was it your MySpace page? Wes, how about you?
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah, it was my MySpace page. That's exactly how I got into it... \[laughs\] Which I don't know if you knew that or not, but...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No.
+
+**Wes Bos:** ...pretty standard for folks like me, I guess. I initially got into it way back when I was sort of in the music scene, and that allowed me to build MySpaces for bands, and that turned into doing T-shirts and CD art, and from there I just started charging, and then I worked all the way through grade school, high school, and then through university building this sort of stuff. Then as I finished university, I just started working for myself, doing consulting and what not.
+
+I've been at it for probably 10-15 years, but I've probably built some sites even before that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So you're primarily self-taught?
+
+**Wes Bos:** \[28:08\] Yeah. Well, I would say entirely self-taught. I went to school for what's called "Business technology management", so I have a business degree that's focused on running IT. Generally, they sort of like -- you go to work at banks and stuff, and run the IT infrastructure, and you work on projects and stuff like that for these big corporations. But we were taught a lot about swimlane diagrams and sending emails and the business side of things, but the actual coding - there was no actual coding in the entire course. It's more like that obnoxious manager that doesn't know what they're talking about. But I was coding all through university, so I kind of have the best of both worlds now, where I can understand, I can speak to people, I can write emails, and I know the business side of things, but then I can also sling the code.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's very interesting, because your primary job is a teacher, whether it's via the tutorials or via HackerYou school.
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That comes across to me in a way... I was programming on MySpace, but I really came up through members.aol.com before MySpace. But I was in the MySpace scene for sure. I have a computer science degree, and it's interesting to me how many of the people who write very good, relatable tutorials for people to learn web development don't have that, and I think that's almost a benefit to them rather than something that is harmful.
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's such a relatable position.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** I think people with computer science degrees by nature lack empathy... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Do you have a computer science degree...?
+
+**Mike Taylor:** No, I don't... So my story -- it's kind of interesting. I studied linguistics in school; I did a bachelor's and I ended up working towards a PhD at NYU...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I was very disappointed whenever you did not finish. Me and your mom.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, I dropped out, and Alex and my mom are still working through this. My wife was not sad, by the way.
+
+I was interested in computers as a kid, but we never really had the finances to have a PC at the house, so for me computers was all about the public library, and I would read those old programming magazines where they had basic programs... But I would just kind of like read them and imagine what they did; it's a tragic story. \[laughter\]
+
+Later, when I was in college, I was 22 years old or something, I was at my buddy's house and his younger brother - his name is Karl - was doing something on the computer and he had some text open in a text editor (it was like notepad.exe) and I said "Hey, what are you doing? That looks interesting." So he was a total brat, and he was just like "You wouldn't understand... It's like way too complicated." And it turns out he was editing a theme not for MySpace, but there was a web page called DiaryLand, so it was like even more emo than MySpace... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I was on MyTeenOpenDiary at one point, I believe... \[laughter\]
+
+**Mike Taylor:** That sounds .. \[laughter\] I'm gonna go look for those blog posts.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** And so out of spite I went to the library and I checked out a book on like HTML 3.2 - I don't even think they had 4.0.1 or whatever - and I taught myself how to make web pages, just kind of as a hobby; I thought it was fun.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It was a challenge from Karl... "Don't tell me what I can't do."
+
+**Mike Taylor:** You kid! It was spite-driven development.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[32:08\] Exactly.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** So later in grad school at NYU I needed a way to earn money to pay rent during the summer months; I had a fellowship which paid me $3/day to live in New York City. We were mostly covered for the academic year, and I ended up with some internships and some freelance stuff... And just kind of really self-taught, and got interested in web standards and specs and stuff like that, and just kind of read a lot email in my free time.
+
+Honestly, Chris Coyier (css-tricks.com) taught me CSS. That was like my go-to resource. SitePen had some amazing books and tools, and then as I got more interested in it, I got to audit a few classes at NYU. I took a Ruby on Rails class, and had no idea what I was doing.
+
+I remember the very first assignment was like "SSH into this box and put your contact details in a file. That's homework number one." I remember sitting there in my office, in my little grad student office, trying to google what the heck SSH was... \[laughter\] It took me hours to figure that out. It was pretty painful.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** A part of my computer science degree was linguistics. Do you ever find that it's a useful thing in the language parts of programming itself?
+
+**Mike Taylor:** I think so. I was just thinking about this the other day... What's that thing called that Facebook just came out with, that is like a...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Prepack?
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yes, thank you. So Prepack - I was looking at that... It uses Babel - I don't know how you pronounce that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It depends... If you're Canadian, like Wes, it's Babel \[baybel\]. If you're normal, then it's Babel \[babble\].
+
+**Wes Bos:** That's offensive to Canadians... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Mike, explain what that is, just since it is pretty relevant news... Prepack.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, so Prepack is basically something that simplifies your code. It takes Babel, and what that does is it creates an AST, which is an abstract syntax tree... So it will go through and understand what's the structure and the operations that your code is trying to do, at this kind of like abstract, wonky level. You're basically drawing graphs and trees. And once you know that information, you can transform it and spit it out in different ways that will be functionally equivalent.
+
+So what Prepack is trying to do is -- if you go to their homepage, one of the examples they give is like you've got this really complex recursive function trying to get like a Fibonacci sequence, and you're gonna call it, and it's gonna recurs like 27 times. The end result of that function is just the number, like 32,000... Something. I can't remember.
+
+So Prepack will go through and it will do that operation for you beforehand, so the code you actually have to ship to the user is literally like VarX=20, or VarX=30,000, or whatever it is; so you're reducing the computation that has to happen on the client, and also the size of the file you have to send.
+
+Long story short, I was thinking about this... I've spent years in college in syntax classes, and our homework was basically like "Here's a sentence. Now write an AST for this sentence using Chomsky's minimalist syntax, whatever... So it was a lot of drawing trees and doing grammar transformation, so I think that logical education definitely helped understand programming, and it's probably helped with spec writing; you have to be really algorithmic. I'm terrible at everything I do, but it's not so foreign as you might imagine if you have that kind of background.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[36:14\] That's nifty. I guess it sounds weird, but you were talking about Prepack, and we're talking a little bit about news... There was a thing that came out this week called Interface Lovers, Ekechukwu is a friend of the podcast, Iheanyi is a dev out of New York. It's InterfaceLovers.com. It's interviews kind of like what we're talking about, on just great designers from different backgrounds on "Where do you come from? How did you get into design?" It's more design-focused than JavaScript-focused, but I thought it would be interesting from a perspective of most JavaScript developers care at least somewhat about the interface design and UX. I just wanted to give it a shoutout, since this was kind of relevant to the things we were talking about here.
+
+I think we may land a plane and go into another break here, but we'll be back with some more from Wes after this, since he's a little bit too polite to interrupt Mike and I.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** I talk way too much. \[laughter\]
+
+**Break:** \[37:14\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And we're back! Wes, you work quite a bit on education, almost entirely, we've decided... We've talked a little bit about education on this podcast, but you weren't here, so I'd like to get your take on -- explain the things that you've put out in the past, and sell it or do whatever you need to do here for that; it's not why you're here. You're here because we love you. \[laughter\]
+
+For the record, Mike, Wes and I all go back to the days of the jQuery IRC channel from 2009-2010 area. We were all helpers in that channel back when that was cool, and we know each other from conferences. So before Wes became massively famous and successful doing tutorials, I knew him as a person who helped newbs in the jQuery IRC channel.
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah. Or I was asking for help myself. What a nightmare! Already! Work!
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Nobody knows.
+
+**Wes Bos:** Nobody knows.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So tell us a little bit about the stuff you've been putting out, and I'll ask you some more questions about techniques and stuff.
+
+**Wes Bos:** So I've got maybe six or seven different courses, all surrounding different web development. My two biggest ones that are paid are ES6.io and ReactForBeginners.com. I'm just on the brink - probably by the time you heard this it will be out... I'm gonna launch a series called Learn Node.
+
+So just series that are approachable, they're real-world based, they're project-based, they're fun, they don't really put you to sleep... Just tutorials learning how to attack new technologies that are on the web, and how to implement them into your own world.
+
+Another one -- I've got a whole bunch of free ones, as well. I've got more free ones than paid ones. My biggest one is JavaScript 30, which is essentially just like, from teaching I generally get a lot of questions from people, like "Wes, how do I get better? What do I need to do in order to get better?" Well, the answer is always just like "Keep doing it. Build lots of stuff."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Program bore.
+
+**Wes Bos:** \[40:12\] Yeah, program bore. And they're like, "Well thanks, but that doesn't help me, because I don't know what to build." I was lucky enough that I'm always curious and I always have ideas of stuff I wanna build, but some people are not that way, or they're just sort of sitting there and they need somebody to guide them through it. So I came up with this JavaScript 30, which is just 30 projects that are between 10 minutes and 30 minutes long.
+
+It's totally all over the place - it's from webcam stuff, to speech detection, to creating speech, to just doing basic DOM stuff, understanding how event listeners work, and clicks, and ES6 and what not... And people seem to really like it, because it's just a great way of -- I don't know, it's kind of a neat way to learn modern JavaScript.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Get a lot of surface area
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah, just to put your time in and get towards that -- 10,000 hours is what they say you need?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. Malcolm Gladwell probably needs a few more citations for that, but it seems like a pretty good general idea. The React For Beginners course - I personally purchased that. I kind of knew React and have been using it at work for a while, but I had never done an official read of the docs or read of anything, so I was like "I'm sure there's stuff that I misunderstand or I'm missing that someone who was breaking this down..." -- and I'm happy to announce that I knew everything ahead of time. I learned NOTHING from your course. \[laughter\]
+
+The reality was that, but it was still extremely helpful. I definitely encourage -- not even just this... Like, certainly go buy Wes's React For Beginners course even if you're not a beginner in React and you just wanna make sure you have the holes in your knowledge built... But for other things, too.
+
+I've brought it up a few times with the Redux Egghead.io thing that Dan Abramov did. I've been using Redux for months, or a month, or something like that at that point, and I listened and I was like, "Oh, this is really cool, kind of breaking it down and going back to basics", now that I had jumped into it.
+
+But sometimes it's hard for certain personality types to start directly on a tutorial; you kind of have to jump in and use it, and then be like "Okay, I'm not smart enough to just use this", but that's enough motivation to go learn the tutorial side of things. So I definitely appreciated that tutorial.
+
+The other thing that is interesting is that React kind of moves quickly. How do you handle the fact that context changes, or the version numbers change? What's the strategy there?
+
+**Wes Bos:** Generally, it's just a lot of re-recording, because React moves so quickly... It's sort of a blessing and a curse of doing it. I've re-recorded it twice now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** The whole thing?
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Wow.
+
+**Wes Bos:** It's a lot of work. It takes about a month to record it. So it's just re-recording it. Or I can go in and jump into a video and be like, "Hey folks, this totally changed, so you'll see me grabbing the index file in the root here, but it's now in a folder. That's where it changed." Or - this is one thing I have to do now - React Router 4, which we use in the class and React Router 4 that actually got released is a totally different API, so I have to import it again... So I'll have to cut into that video and redo it.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Do you ever think about doing a course with Scriptaculous 1.7? It's settled down, it's pretty mature... \[laughter\]
+
+**Wes Bos:** That's something that I want. When I choose what to do, how fast it's moving is definitely something I take into account, just because I don't want it to be out of date. If it takes me a couple months to build this thing, I don't want it to be out of date within a month.
+
+\[44:06\] I've been talking with some of the Webpack guys about creating a Webpack course, and I'm like "So what are your plans with the API?" and they're like, "Oh, we're totally gonna change it again." \[laughter\] Good! So I don't know... We'll see. It's definitely something that just comes with working on cutting edge stuff.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. It's good that you do that, though. It's very frustrating as someone who's learning to come across a tutorial that is no longer up to date. It's so anti-helpful... So I think you're a very noble, good soul for doing that. Good work, good work!
+
+**Wes Bos:** Thank you.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** So you also teach at HackerYou? Is that just general programming stuff? What's HackerYou all about?
+
+**Wes Bos:** Well, I've been there for about five years, and I primarily do part-time classes. I have done two of the bootcamps, but right now I primarily do the part-time classes, as well as one to two-day workshops.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Let's talk about bootcamps in general. I'm interested in your feelings on how people come out of those... You don't have to name names of others ones; do you have a general idea -- I think probably a lot of people who listen to podcasts or people who are just getting into things, maybe they're in a bootcamp or they're thinking about a bootcamp... Where does it put you, how much can you learn in just your tutorials versus these bootcamps etc.? I'd love your thoughts on that.
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah, I think there's really no substitution for learning in person with somebody. Hands-on, having somebody sitting next to you in order to do that, especially when you are first learning -- that's what the bootcamps are targeted at, it's people who are looking to break into the industry. You can get up to speed so much faster by doing a bootcamp, rather than just -- obviously, you can do it with tutorials, but your time is probably better spent... If you are able to quit your job and all the thousands of dollars that these things cost, then absolutely... I think it's a really nice way to start.
+
+It's not for absolutely everybody; I think that there's a certain type of person that you need to be in order to make a bootcamp work for you, but I'm definitely a big fan of them. And I don't just say that because I run one; I actually think that. I've seen hundreds and hundreds of people come out of it, both from the HackerYou one, as well as other people I talk to that take my course, and they're all in really good shape.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I guess that's kind of the next question that I'm interested in. My feeling is that the way that, and I don't think this is the case with HackerYou, but I think the average pitch for these courses is -- there's a huge lack of available programmers, and because of that, you can come in and learn everything you need to learn by doing this extensive ten-hour day course for ten weeks, and pay these thousands of dollars, and then immediately when you leave, you'll make a six-figure salary.
+
+I think they are very responsible, and I think HackerYou definitely falls into this category of more responsible -- and I don't even necessarily disagree with the idea behind that, which is definitely there's a need for programmers... Honestly, I find that the need for programmers should more be stated "There's a need for senior programmers." I personally don't think people hire nearly enough junior programmers, but how do you find the transition out of the school? My gut is that it's actually more like you can go become an intern at a company and then you can turn that into a job if you do well, and then three years later you can have the hundred thousand dollar salary - which is still great, but I'm interested in how the bootcamp that you see typically translates into being able to get a job, being able to get a high salary, or what the pathway is to that.
+
+**Wes Bos:** \[48:12\] Yeah... I don't have the numbers off hand, but I do know that the people are coming specifically out of the HackerYou bootcamp, within a month of graduating, I'd say about 80%-90% of them do have a paying job. It's pretty surprising how quickly people can get a job. There's lots of companies who are just hiring out of these bootcamps, because they know that they're sort of ramped up... But that is also to say that it's not like anyone can come off the street, take this course and do it; it's generally the type of people that even get into this program, that are sort of filtered through that, they're already good learners, they're already self-starters, they're already smart people. Almost everybody that comes into this has a college university degree already, and they're just looking for a career shift.
+
+That's generally how it is - you can get a paying job right out of the gate if you have the personality type, and then a couple years later you start to see -- are people burned out of it because they didn't actually like this? They don't actually like coding and they're frustrated that Webpack changed again and they're sick of it, because they just wanted cash and they don't necessarily care all that much about all the changing in the web development. Or they actually love it, they love building stuff and they love staying up to date. It really starts to show through after a couple years, because some people I do know after a couple years of bootcamp are making six figures, and some people I know are not longer doing development because it's just not in them, they got into it for the wrong reasons, or they just didn't know... Which, in that case, I'm glad you tried it, but maybe it's not for you.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** The explosion of bootcamps happened probably in the last three, four years maybe...? They existed before that, but the massive explosion of availability of these... Accreditation is not necessarily meaningful if there's no accreditation possibility and things like that, but it's really kind of difficult as someone who doesn't know about programming, if you're going to a credible source. Again, I dislike that we're talking about HackerYou and then talking about non-credible bootcamps, because it's one of the finest bootcamps, for sure.
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah, it is accredited actually.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, really? Cool! Is that a Canadian thing?
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah, the Ministry of Education came along and was like, "Hey, you have to have this accredited." It's a lot of work for them; I wasn't involved in that, but I know that they did a lot of work, which is just amazing for students coming out of it now.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's really great. So to that end though, I'm really interested to see what hopefully comes out of the -- I think it's a good thing for the industry if in five years after the boom you have suddenly way more programmers who have five years of experience, who have worked at their first job now and know enough stuff to move into more senior roles, and things like that. I'm interested to see how that kind of plays out, and it seems like HackerYou has been around long enough to where you're seeing that definitely happened for some of the students... But I'm hopeful that these bootcamps as a jumping off point can increase the diversity -- HackerYou is especially very good at diversity; I don't know the specifics, but it's woman-led... Are there other things...?
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah, the CEO is a woman... So it was born out of this thing that we did in Toronto called Ladies Learning Code, which is... It's in the name - ladies learning code. So a lot of people who come to HackerYou and come to the bootcamp, they're coming from Ladies Learning Code, because they took a couple weekend courses, then they stayed up all night building their website, because they realized they just absolutely love it.
+
+So yeah, a huge push for diversity, and I think it's great to see that sort of stuff, an increase in diversity in the industry.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[52:24\] Yeah. And I know we're three white guys on a podcast talking about diversity so we should get Heather on the show sometime for sure, because she has a lot of very interesting, good input on all this stuff. But the focus at these bootcamps on diversity seems very important and good, because a lot of times it is absolutely not the case that this is the only problem, but your pipeline is part of the problem; the pipeline of available engineers who exist is not a great pipeline, as well as the industry does not have favorable conditions for diverse members of our community. But if we can get these kind of quicker starts, it seems like a faster fix than going -- which we should actively still do; we should do the slow fix, but also the fast fix.
+
+You can go to elementary schools in different parts of town and put in more computers and add more teachers doing more courses... There's all that, but that's like a 20-year path to fixing things, which we should do... But I really like that if someone came up through a different path, they can switch into the bootcamp path and change their career... Obviously, that opportunity is gonna be available to people who have better opportunities in general, and that's not always the case with diversity, but focusing on that I think can really help to magnify those efforts more quickly, which I think is good.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** So Wes, you're constrained by time... The students that are in HackerYou - did you say it was ten weeks?
+
+**Wes Bos:** I think it's nine weeks.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Okay... Naturally, I'm biased towards thinking about cross-browser compatibility and interoperability... Is it like, "Here's your assignment. If it works in Chrome, you get an A+?" or do you actually teach what the reality is of front-end development with multiple browsers?
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah, that's definitely a part of it. I wouldn't say it's a huge part; obviously it's the latest Chrome, Firefox working - that's great, and then the cross-browser compatibility stuff sort of comes after... It's not a huge, huge focus, but I think that can also be a bit of a -- as important as it is, it's also a huge put-off for people, because then you tell them to open up a VM and get IE9 working, and then it starts to become less fun.
+
+That stuff definitely comes, and there's definitely a lot of pain moments that you can hit along the way, but generally it's more focused on actually learning the stuff and getting the fundamentals down.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think there's definitely a difference between web compatibility in the sense that things work back to IE6 and web compatibility in the sense that things work in all current major browsers because the existing \[unintelligible 00:55:14.21\] and stuff like that. Those are two different skills...
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah, and it's honestly not even that big of a deal anymore. It's funny, because you do hear these bootcamp students and part-time students going off about "Oh, freakin' IE11! It's so old! I can't believe I have to support that!" \[laughter\] I was like, "Oh, son... Sit down, and let me tell you about the old days of pngFix and all of these things: the rounded corner hack that we had, Cufon, so...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Let me tell you about some sliding doors...
+
+**Mike Taylor:** \[55:50\] Off-topic, but I used to work at this music-based start-up. We redesigned the site, and it was working in all the evergreen browsers. We were using HTML5 back when that was interesting; then it turned out that the people who we were partnering with only used IE7 - these were like record industry execs - and it was such a painful month after that... We were like, "Seriously?" IE10 was about to come out, or something...
+
+The reality of what's important and when it's important is an interesting topic that's totally not what we're talking about, so I'll be quiet now... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's fine... We're kind of coming up in the last section of the podcast, where we do picks. For people who haven't listened before, this is kind of where we give (let's call it) a shoutout to maybe something that is cool in the industry, or someone, or a book, or a tutorial... And I'll start, since I have one off the top of my head.
+
+My pick this week is gonna be InterfaceLovers.com. I talked about it earlier - it's a website where you can go look at what inspires and got other people into design and user interfaces and UX, and kind of gain inspiration yourself.
+
+Mike, do you have something? Did I catch you off-guard?
+
+**Mike Taylor:** No, I do have something... Maybe this is not cool anymore, but I recently started using this project called Prettier... I guess it's just a JavaScript formatter, and it runs -- it's like an npm thing, so you need the Node stack to get it to work; you don't have to be developing on Node to use it, but basically it's opinionated... You can configure a couple of things, but it's nice... If you've ever had to do code review and you're constantly writing "'nit-, space before paren', or 'nit-'" a big waste of time. So on this project I work on, we decided "Let's just stick this in there..." You can code however you want, you can use all your own weird habits, but run this thing before you submit a pull request, and it's great; you never have to worry about indenting your code ever again.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Classic. Wes, how about you?
+
+**Wes Bos:** Mine is a Chrome extension called NiM (Node Inspector Manager). If you run a Node app from the command line and you wanna console log something, you know that it's kind of stone-agey, because all you get is text and you don't get any of the formatting that you do in the regular console, or any of the debugging tools that you're getting in Chrome's tools. So if you throw --debug to a Node process, it will give you this random URL that you can visit in your browser, and then that will allow you to use the Chrome dev tools to inspect your application.
+
+The problem with it is every time your application starts, it gives you a new URL, so you have to copy/paste or click through that URL every single time. So what Node Inspector Manager does is it will watch your system for these instances and it will automatically open it up.
+
+Recently after I was chatting with the guy who builds it - now if you have a nodemon that kills your process and restarts it every single time that you save a file, it will just refresh the page to the new URL of the updated version of your debugging instance.
+
+So it's just like you would normally use in like a front-end debugging, you can use this to debug all of your Node stuff.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's nifty. So it's a Chrome extension that port scans your computer and watches all your processes.
+
+**Wes Bos:** Exactly.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Make sure everyone installs it as root... \[laughs\]
+
+**Wes Bos:** Well, okay... You give it a port and everything, and it's on GitHub as well. Maybe I am gonna get totally hacked and whatnot, but... \[laughter\] You can manually connect to it as well, but it's no way to live your life.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[01:00:12.07\] It seems really cool, because -- and I always hate talking about Node without Mikeal, because I'm sure he goes back and listens to these and then he's yelling because he knows something that I don't, but... \[laughter\] The path to this point has been long for Node debugging. We've had Chrome DevTools pretty much the entire time that Node has been around - I'm pretty sure that's roughly accurate - the good Chrome DevTools that could do this... And there have always been little projects that pop up - Node Debugger, and there was another one back in the day - and it was always just like it runs Chrome DevTools, but it actually runs it as a totally separate web server, so it's not actually the Chrome DevTools you know and all the good features are gone and you can't do any of the stuff... So it's been years in the making, and now you can finally just run your Node app and you get Chrome DevTools automatically attached.
+
+The kids that you're gonna teach this to in your Node class are gonna be like, "I can't believe that it has to reload every time and it just can't do in-memory swapping of something!" Well, let me tell you... \[laughter\]
+
+Mike Taylor is one of my favorite "Kids, get off my lawn" tweeter, so if you don't follow Mike on Twitter, he often tweets about websites he comes across that have poor compatibility with the web in general, and his dry "get off my lawn" attitude about it is potentially some of my favorite Twitter content. And Wes is notorious at this point for tweeting on tips and tricks, so go follow @WesBos.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** You have these really nice hot tips...
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah.
+
+**Mike Taylor:** So you can search for "Wes Bos" and like a flame emoji and you'll learn so much really cool stuff.
+
+**Wes Bos:** You actually can't!
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Nice!
+
+**Wes Bos:** No, you can't, because you can't search by emoji on Twitter. I get emails all the time; people are like "Where's the archive of your hot tips?" and I don't have one. You can use the Twitter stream API to search by emoji, but you cannot do a back search by emoji.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's rough.
+
+**Wes Bos:** Yeah...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So Mike Taylor's Twitter is his name, @MikeTaylr - without the "o" at the end. That's what you guys both are pretty much everywhere. Check these guys' stuff out, and well it was nice to talk to you all!
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Bye!
+
+**Wes Bos:** Thanks for having me!
+
+**Mike Taylor:** Thank you!

yayQuery Reunion!_transcript.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,707 @@
+**Alex Sexton:** Alright, welcome to episode 24 or so... Of the yayQuery podcast, a takeover of the JS Party podcast. It's been a couple minutes, maybe a few weeks here now since we've had a yayQuery episode, but for JS Party listeners who don't know yayQuery - yayQuery is myself, and then... In order, introduce yourselves: Paul, Rebecca, Adam.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Paul Irish. I am a JavaScript developer and I like the web. And that's me. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Known for his ability to communicate well, Paul Irish.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Known for liking the web... Paul Irish. I'm Rebecca Murphey. I'm also a JavaScript developer. I think the web's okay.
+
+**Paul Irish:** That's fair...
+
+**Adam Sontag:** I'm Adam Sontag. I love the WWW which is I believe Paul's real original bio. Also, I'm an erstwhile JavaScript developer, and now a community director, I guess.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** We used to have a podcast called yayQuery... One of the first nascent JavaScript podcasts. It was loosely about jQuery, but we branched very quickly into most frontend web development topics pretty quickly. JS Party actually somewhat gets its name from the whimsy of the yayQuery days. I think one of the original names for JS Party was JS Matters, because it's events and things about JavaScript, and also that it matters...
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Not like Family Matters?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yea, exactly. Pretty much exactly like Family Matters. \[laughter\] Normally, I'm joined by Mikeal Rogers and Rachel White, but they're in Germany, or something... I have no idea where they are. Who knows, who could possibly know that information? So this week we've decided to have a little yayQuery reunion for everybody. So let's jump in, since we have a little bit to talk about. What has changed since the last episode that we've had?
+
+I think Rebecca and I both have children now...
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** That's no big deal...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I mean, 2.0...
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Yeah. You know, it never occurred to me until now that we never put dates on the yayQuery website, so it kind of seems kind of evergreen...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's evergreen until you listen to like 3 seconds of it and we're like "jQuery 1.4.111, commit 93870 came out today..."
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** It seems so important...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[03:52\] Yeah. I mean... It was, at the time. Alright, I think we're gonna start off with not a traditional segment, but we kind of wanna talk about things that didn't exist in the web or JavaScript the last time we were all on a podcast together - which is quite a bit, which is kind of cool in how fast things gather speed and become the main deals that everyone talks about, but you don't realize how quickly that comes up. Paul, do you wanna talk about something that has happened since then?
+
+**Paul Irish:** Sure, there was a JavaScript framework that was introduced in this time period that some of you might be familiar with, called ReactJS.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** I hear they wanna put XML in our JavaScript?
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Hold on! I'm going to need to angrily put down my Margarita to listen to this... \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Irish:** So the interesting thing here was ReactJS actually launched at JSConf in Florida... Were all of us there at that one?
+
+**Adam Sontag:** I think we were actually --
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I intro'd the talk.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Oh, damn!
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Didn't we do yayQuery reunion?
+
+**Adam Sontag:** We were already doing yayQuery reunions when React came out. \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, and I remember from that the vibe that day at the conference... Like, "Facebook just showed this thing where they wanna put XML in JS. That is crazy! This framework... Why are they doing this? Why don't they just work with one of the existing frameworks? This is so against the community, or something." I felt like there was so much concern and being like "I don't like this!" that day.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** There were two tweets from close friends of the yayQuery podcast... I think Rick Waldron and Ben Alman both had tweets that were pretty much like "Facebook is belittling all best practices that have ever existed in the face of..." - just a so very serious tweet... But to be fair, I think Tom Occhino - I don't know if he was ever on a yayQuery show; he definitely spoke at the first TXJS, because he was friends with us... But I think they focused on the wrong stuff in that first talk. Because later they did the talk (six months later at EU) and everyone loved it.
+
+I think they were trying to focus on the autobindy-type stuff, because that was really hip, and they were glossing over the fact that they had added this ES4 feature of JSX back into the language, and didn't necessarily -- like on-click handlers, and all that stuff.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** And Pete Hunt talked about that at TXJS 2015, about the mistakes of that rollout. I remember there was probably alcohol involved, because it was the end of the day and it was like the big reveal, but I just remember the room being appalled at this thing that they were seeing... And yeah, it was a long time before it kind of recovered from that.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, there was a good at least six months where everyone had a really bad opinion of it, and it was just like "Ugh... Don't like it!"
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** But Dojo though, guys... Dojo is totally still... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I often think about our arguments back in the day, Rebecca, of rolling your own large application with jQuery or using Dojo. I think Paul one time said something along the lines of like "Alex, I think you won that argument in that people agreed with you and went that direction", but Rebecca was right and then we were all wrong... None of those things occur anymore.
+
+**Paul Irish:** In that you were right in the argument of rolling your own is just more feasible and kind of easier...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[08:01\] But Rebecca was right in the sense that it's actually better...
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Rebecca was right in that Rebecca was at bizarre voice for another three years after Alex rolled his own...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh yeah, for sure.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** ...and left us. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Moving on... \[laughter\] You're at Indeed now, correct Rebecca?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** That's right.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Do you guys use types? Do you use Flow or Typescript or anything?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Oh god, do I have to answer this?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, I mean, that's the next thing that I was gonna talk about, because FlowType - another Facebook thing, but also Typescript...
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** The actual answer is yes, but we mostly use Google Closure... But we're fixing that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** The comments?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Yeah. Google Closure itself, Google Closure the library, and then the Closure Compiler.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, I see.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Oh, you use the Closure library?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Yeah... But we have some teams that are -- people really like the strong typing of that, so we have some teams that are moving away from Closure because no one uses it except Google (no offense), but moving to things like Typescript and Flow; we haven't really settled down on one, but people like their types because they're Java people.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's a really interesting segue, because Closure had type annotations in comments in order to do way better building way back in the day. I added them to YepNope and I would double minify YepNope with Closure, and then with uglify it would come out smaller...
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** And it would take ten minutes...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** For sure... I mean, it was small enough. Since then, we've had FlowType and Typescript come up. FlowType's written in OCaml, so if you ever wanna tribute to that, brush up on your OCaml. But I guess I'm interested in knowing what the uptick on types across the regular JavaScript community is. It seems popular. Paul? Adam?
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, at least, I'll say -- \[laughter\] I work on a few projects... I work on both the Chrome DevTools and on Lighthouse, which is kind of auditing performance tool. DevTools is written -- we use the Closure Compiler, so everything has the annotations. When the entire project is annotated, that compilation step is super valuable and super useful. Or in Lighthouse we have a portion of it, our CLI - we actually ported it over to Typescript, and then we're using Closure annotations for the remainder of the JavaScript in the project. So we're using a little bit of both there.
+
+And it's interesting, because at least on our team, we haven't come to a conclusion about it. It's like, "Well, the Typescript is nice, because it catches different things, and there is better in-editor tooling support, but the compile step is annoying... Whereas the immediate reload or rerun of just JavaScript is so attractive." So we're just kind of like in that holding pattern.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** I've overheard people say things to that effect, which is like "Are you in Typescript?" "No, I'm going as far as ES6 modules." It feels like if I wanna be going down the path of what JavaScript is going down, maybe I might avoid that.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** And I think that what we've seen is that the types help, but they don't make you write good JavaScript. And so you can have a Closure Compiler comment that says "These 40 arguments are these types", but you still are passing in 40 arguments. I think it can seem like kind of a safety net for people who maybe aren't used to writing JavaScript, which is kind of my world, but it doesn't make your JavaScript good.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[12:04\] Yeah. It's interesting, because I think part of the standards bodies are kind of maybe taking -- like, normally, when people do their own things and add to, like -- CoffeeScript happened, and then I think a lot of ES6 was at least sped up, and some syntax like Feathers were inspired by CoffeeScript. The innovations to the language end up in the spec, but I almost feel like the opposite thing is happening with types, where they're like "We wanna get types in. We've been looking at it for a long time, it's hard. Let's try this, let's try this..." and then whenever FlowType and Typescript came out, they were like "Okay, well those things solve it, so let's not work on it as hard in the spec, because people have options already." So I'm interested to see how that plays out long-term. I don't ever see JavaScript bringing types, for what it's worth; it would just change it too fundamentally... But maybe I'm wrong. That's a prediction.
+
+In that same vein, ES5 - we did an episode whenever ES5 landed, and we talked about the new array prototype functions and things like that, and how you'd have to use polyfills to get it all to work. Since then, a few versions of JavaScript have been released, and it's kind of evergreen now, and it's hard... I guess JavaScript isn't evergreen, it's HTML, whatever. But we've had ES6, ES7, ES2015, ES2016, and now we're in the midst of 2017. I think we're all using -- everyone's using Babel for everything. I guess DevTools probably isn't, Paul, right?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** ...except Brian LaRue.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Well, sure.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, we don't use Babel... I think part of it is because -- yeah, in the DevTools case, we only run in Chrome, so we make sure that what we're writing today and lands essentially in Canary will work in Chrome stable; that's what we have to operate under. But yeah, compiling the source has some ergonomic downsides, so we're not really interested in it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool. And one of the news segments on the show that we did was talk about when Node was released at JSConf EU...
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** No one's ever gonna use JavaScript on the server. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** We seemed excited about it, but I think none of us really understood what it was, and we were all just excited because Twitter was so excited about it.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** I had my favorite story about it...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Go ahead.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** You all know my story, which is that when Node.js came out, we all were excited about it running around in Europe, and I was like "What is No.js? What is No.js?" and like "NoSQL looks like a thing", and I was like "Oooh, so No.js is like a NoSQL of JavaScript! It's like JavaScript without JavaScript!", but then I found out that it was called NODE.js... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No.js... I like it.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** So yeah...
+
+**Paul Irish:** Can I ask another question on this topic? Because I think one of you guys know the answer better than me... Around ES modules and .mjs extension. Because I don't really know where things are completely, but I just remember being slightly infuriated that we're gonna have to adopt .mjs for all the ES module files, for this whole load compatibility, and I was like "Come on! The people that have been doing it wrong, they get the real extension, and now the real thing gets kicked off...? This is so stupid! It's stupid!" And then at some point I was hanging out with Alex Russell and Domenic Denicola, and I was like "Guys, isn't this so stupid?!" and they were like "Why? What's the problem with it?" They were like "It seems okay..." and I was like "Well, if they think it's okay, then probably I guess it's okay..." \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[16:07\] You kind of glossed over that -- I think Bradley Meck mostly was working on how to do importing of JavaScript modules in Node.js officially based on this stuff... I don't even know the exact details of the problem, but there was some problem where because people were doing modules in a weird way before, all their stuff would break if we kept using the same system that they're currently using. So in order to differentiate between those two different systems, you would name your real new official modules with the extension .mjs instead of .js... And I think I agree that the people who broke it should have to change -- I think it's an Office Space quote, "Why should I have to change my name? He's the one who sucks." \[laughter\]
+
+We don't have a ton of time to get to the beginning of this, so we're gonna move on a little bit. There was an io.js release and fork, and a few other things, but Node.js 8 is coming out soon, so I don't think we can cover all that... Plus Mikeal's not on the show and he'll want to have opinions.
+
+That was our section of things that didn't exist in JavaScript since we last had an episode; I don't think we nailed it, because we talked about two things we've talked about on previous episodes, but whatever.
+
+The next section we have in here is things that used to exist when we had episodes, but don't anymore. I only put two things in here - YepNope... I deprecated YepNope, but people still use it; it's still very popular, for some reason. And JSConf US is something we talked about a lot... Maybe it'll come back though.
+
+I wanted to intentionally rush through that section because it wasn't that interesting. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Moving on...!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... The last thing that I wanted to talk about was a little background behind some of the language we used on the show. I don't think we ever...
+
+**Paul Irish:** Some kind of behind-the-scenes action, yeah?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, a little bit of -- I don't know a different word from behind-the-scenes, actually... \[laughs\] Paul, people may have seen us talking about "editing on a clap" or "this is what's on the clap."
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Can you give me some background on that?
+
+**Paul Irish:** \[laughs\] Okay, sure. So the way that we put together yayQuery episodes - we would get together, and I think we'd get on video chat, we would get on a little EtherPad document... EtherPad was like an Ajax app with collaborative editing where everyone's edits is highlighted, so it's very clear who wrote what. And then we'd just get on there, and start drinking, and then figure out what the hell we were gonna talk about, and then two hours later actually record an episode, eventually.
+
+But anyways, that EtherPad instance that we had was hosted on OkSoClap.com, and this was hosted by our friend Vlad, who set the whole thing up for us. It was the coolest little instance, and it worked so good for us. Now, the history of that OkSoClap is pretty much because in the beginnings of yayQuery I think it was my fault that -- it was that just when I was getting tired of a topic, or...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it was at the beginning of every segment... \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Irish:** Oh, right! And I'm starting to be like "Okay, this is how it went", and I'd be like "Okay, so... \[clap\] This is how the story goes." I'd say "Okay, so" and then I'd clap my hands; it was just like, I don't know, like a nervous tick, but it just turned into a thing that Alex picked up on and made it into a thing.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** And that all the DNS entry doesn't resolve...
+
+**Adam Sontag:** \[19:52\] If I recall, Alex is a guy who knows when things are things... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm a guy who knows when things are things, and that was a thing. I think we're running up on the first break, so we're gonna take a break right now and come back with a few classic segments.
+
+**Break:** \[20:10\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And we're back. During the break, Paul reminded me of the fact that the OkSoClap EtherPad instance was actually used by TC39, the Technical Committee number 39 from the ECMA standards body organization system enterprise... \[laughter\] They used the OkSoClap for years to take notes, so the official JavaScript language was partially developed using the OkSoClap.com EtherPad created by yayQuery... So our tentacles go deep into the language.
+
+**Paul Irish:** \[laughter\] So deep.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** I remember, it's a symbol of how different that whole standards process is than when we started yayQuery. It's a lot more open, and I think that that is a nice thing to point out.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, the fact that when we started it was a bunch of people that -- who knew who it even was? And then nowadays not only Rick Waldron has been involved in it forever, but people from Twitter and Node, and a lot of actual JavaScript developers from the community are engaged in TC39, so it's a much different and a much more open, collaborative feeling these days.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think it was Rick that was the crossover between yayQuery backchanneling and taking notes at TC39 meetings. And he did that through the jQuery Foundation seat that we bought on TC39 for him and Yehuda. So it was actually -- the popularity of jQuery was able to raise enough money to create a foundation that was able to buy seats on TC39 to put real developers and open up notes and do those things.
+
+I think a lot of that history of the community - getting more involved and stuff - was really nifty, and nice, and I'm glad to have seen it happen.
+
+I forgot... Mikeal and Rachel are gonna be gone next week, and I need to get Rick on the show maybe... We'll see.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** You could just do this again.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... Whatever.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** I can shave my head, or something. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** We'll just fully take over the podcast, lock Rachel and Mikeal up in a closet every Friday.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** I could do a part where I talk about steak, or something... I don't know.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** The steak that you flew home with you?
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Oh, that's a different story!
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Oh!!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'm lost. There's a soundboard... Sometimes we get Rachel talking about cat hair, which is probably my favorite one. Can we play that?
+
+"Hold on, I have cat hair in my mouth..." \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it's really good... Don't say anything you don't want to be turned into--
+
+"Oh wait, that happens on an episode of Gilmore Girls... I know what that is."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That was about Node.js' forking into io.js... That was the Gilmore Girls, season two, episode three.
+
+\[24:01\] Let's get into a classic segment. This is a little segment... It's about little, tiny things that you never thought you knew. It's something that we like to call
+
+\[all together, loud\] "Hideeeeenhancements!" \[The Little Tiny Things/ You Never Thought You'd See\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And if we're lucky, we'll edit some audio for our old song to be there.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** So you didn't have to hear that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And if you're unlucky, then you heard us yelling it. Maybe you got both. Cool. So the hiddenhancement this week... Adam, why don't you introduce the concept?
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Okay, so the concept of a hiddenhancement - it's an enhancement that's hidden; kind of like the first syllable of the word "enhancement" is hidden and the last syllable of the word "hidden". \[laughter\] So this is a segment where we would talk about cool stuff that was around and you didn't know you could use.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Like, in jQuery.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Primarily in jQuery, but now most of that is in the DOM... Right, Paul? \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, sure. Okay, so there was at least two hiddenhancements that I wanted to share... Actually, they're both kind of new. You might be familiar with document.elementFromPoint(), where you provide an x, y location and it tells you the element that is right there. But there is another method which is more useful in some cases. If you know about that one, you might have some code where you're like, okay, we take the first one and then we're gonna set pointer events or just hide it and then find out what's underneath it. The other method is document.elementsFromPoint() (elements - the plural), and this returns an array of nodes from top to bottom that live at that x, y coordinate, so you can just see exactly what the stack is.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Is it a NodeList or is it an Array?
+
+**Paul Irish:** It's an Array. God damn... Well, you know, there's an interesting distinction between Arrays and NodeLists, right?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** What's that, Paul?
+
+**Paul Irish:** \[laughs\] A NodeList is like this Array-like thing, but it's kind of -- it's been frustrating, because we always get back NodeLists from querySelectorAll() or getElementsByTagName(), right? And in NodeLists you can't do things that you'd normally do with an Array, right?
+
+**Adam Sontag:** If I recall, there's like prototype methods missing...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Do a slice, yeah. \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, it's always been frustrating, so that's why we always do that arrayed prototype slice deal. So number two hiddenhancement is that the NodeList object is now iterable.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's everywhere?
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, it is everywhere. I think probably IE10 is where it bottoms out. But yeah, iterable NodeList available on all modern browsers. You get back the result from querySelectorAll(), and you have foreach sitting on that.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Speaking of IE10, I just wanted to let you know about this other browser that came out... It's called IE9. It's gonna have CSS3 support, and you can hear us talk all about this in the South by Southwest (???) episode of yayQuery. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[27:41\] Yeah, me and Paul -- oh, that's a good story. Paul and I were given, via yayQuery - because we were on the yayQuery podcast, for some reason, we got VIP press badges to the IE9 launch party at South by Southwest, and we sat at press tables as they did the press announcement. We were next to Wired. Wired was writing the article on IE9 being launched, and me and Paul were just writing tweets about how IE9 was just gaming all of their demos. It was a really good time.
+
+Then we got to go see yaySayer at the after party, in the VIP section. We were there with -- who was it...? Werner Vogels from Amazon, the CTO of Amazon. It was a wild ride. IE9... Good old days. \[laughter\] Yeah, yayQuery press badges were a thing at some point... \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Irish:** That was so legit!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** That's funny. So one other hiddenhancement that I wanted to bring up... I saw an Addy Osmani tweet maybe a few bits ago; there's a new feature in DevTools -- Paul knows a little bit about DevTools, Chrome DevTools specifically... And we're always talking about splitting up your code, and only uploading the code that you need for the initial load and stuff like that - and this is actually a pretty difficult thing to know. You can have really cool, good dependency management and try to figure it all out, and do trees and some sort of something, but DevTools can tell you now exactly what code runs... I think splitting it up still might be difficult, but it's a really good indicator of that. Can you tell us how to find that, Paul?
+
+**Paul Irish:** Sure. In DevTools, what you can do is -- it's in a place that we call "the drawer", which is the little console at the bottom, when you hit Escape and that pops up... So you can definitely hit Escape to bring up that, or you can go through the top-right, the little three dots menu, go to More Tools and click Coverage. Either way, you're gonna click a little menu, the three dots, and go for Coverage. From there, there's a little Record button; start recording, and stop it when you're done.
+
+You can do it instantly... If all you wanna look at is CSS, it's just gonna look at the CSS that's used on the page. But usually, you're looking at scripts, so you'll wanna load the page and maybe open up, like try out some functionality. Then you get a report on exactly how many bytes of every file that's loaded have been evaluated, either by the JavaScript engine or the style engine, and then from there you can go see the exact lines, and whether they were evaluated or not... And evaluate, figure out on your own what you can kill off, or what you could move to another module, lazy-load it, things like that.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Very nifty.
+
+**Paul Irish:** We're also thinking of making it more like live, so all those results would be streaming, and maybe you would be able to rewind to certain interesting points, like at DOM content loaded it was this, but then you scrub the slider forward and see what it was at window load, so you can get the history of all that coverage, so you can get a better idea of how it kind of changes over time, as each file was loaded and each thing happens. So those are some ideas there; if anybody wants anything in particular, just holler at me.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Is this available as data from Lighthouse, or anything like that?
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, we have it available... We have some audits for this in Lighthouse 2, and we just kind of summarize it at a high level. You can also build some tooling around this on your own, if you wanna dig into the DevTools protocol. It's pretty raw data over there, it's gonna need some massaging, but if you are interested in building a tool that automates looking at this, then you definitely can.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure. I think you have a tool that was my pick last week... It's pw-something or other, right?
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, pwmetrics.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[31:55\] Pwmetrics - it's a command line tool that will automatically run Lighthouse locally in a Chrome instance... So if you wanna hook that up to your build process to get metrics out, and then kind of like test that pass. I think it could be a really nifty test to say that like "You can never ship more than some bottom line of like 80% of the code that gets loaded must be executed, otherwise the tests fail", or something. Does that make sense? It could be a really nifty build-time check that causes you to never go over that... Because once you go over too far, it's much harder to fix.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool. That's really nifty, good job! Good job at your job! \[laughter\] Next up we have probably the most famous segment... It's the --
+
+**Adam Sontag:**  Plugin of the Week!
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** What would we have today? Would we have like the Webpack loader of the week? \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** The Babel transform of the week...
+
+**Adam Sontag:** The React reduction of the week... \[laughter\].
+
+**Paul Irish:** Today's plugin of the week - I picked this, but Rebecca, I don't know if you've actually looked at it... So why don't you go ahead and actually take this one for us?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Wow... That's really -- I mean, it's an explosive modal... It's the most explosive modal on the web.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** What is it called?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** It's called Explodal - duh! Like, what else would you call the most explosive modal on the web...? This is in the true spirit of jQuery plugins, I feel like.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's just CSS. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Well, I was gonna say it's functionality that you probably don't need on your website, but there's a plugin for it, so why don't you add it? It's good.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's a modal that explodes open!
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** It explodes!
+
+**Paul Irish:** I think some good use cases for this like the Add To Cart button on Amazon would be good; so you click Add To Cart, and instantly, Amazon's like "Boom!!!' with flames and fire... Yeah, it's those little touches that really add to that user experience.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Only 97.32% CSS, so I don't think we can say it's CSS.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think the other part is a gif though, right?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** No, there's one line of JavaScript.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, okay...
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** I don't know, I'd have to look at this on GitHub really to see...
+
+**Paul Irish:** It's an onclick handler...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh, they really should have done the old CheckBox Checked thing, where you didn't need JavaScript...
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, I mean, they're using a straight up on-click handler, like in-line onclicks. That's pretty classic.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** So you just mean that they might not need JavaScript? \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I also... As part of the plugin of the week - I don't think it was ever the plugin of the week, but this felt like the right place to talk about it... One friend of the podcast, Ralph Holzmann, let me know recently that there was recent activity in the LABjs project. LABjs, if you remember, was one of the many entrants to the script loader wars back in the day, the good ol' wars, for asynchronous...
+
+**Adam Sontag:** We lost a lot of good devs out there... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[35:38\] Yeah... LABjs was Kyle Simpson, or getify, as you've probably seen streams of consciousness fly by your Twitter stream from him... Really bright dude, but I definitely did not expect a 3.0 or any late updates to the script loader entries. So yeah, 3.0 is in the works... I think it actually is somewhat in relation to actual standards that have gotten through.
+
+Kyle did some work with the standards bodies to do some of the async false stuff, in order to guarantee in-order async loading... So if you inject a script with async false after the DOM was already loaded, it means that it must execute in order, and that is like a thing now.
+
+**Paul Irish:** That's a thing?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I think yeah.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Oh, wow...
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Alex gets to say when things are things.
+
+**Paul Irish:** I believe him.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** If he says it's a thing, it's a thing.
+
+**Paul Irish:** If he says it, okay...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... But specifically, <link rel="preload"> Another one of Paul's co-workers, Eric Bidelman, recently tweeted about <link rel="preload"> for scripts and styles landing. So you can preload critical resources... But you can also do that with service workers and stuff too, so choose your tools wisely.
+
+But yeah, I thought it was interesting... A little LABjs update for everyone, in 2017.
+
+Next up, we were going to have "Paul Irish's jQuery Anti-pattern for Performance of the Week. Whump-whump!" Yeah, whump-whump is correct, because I think Paul just decided that jQuery is the anti-pattern for performance of the week...?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Ouch!
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, yeah I guess...
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Oh, man... That's a double-burn because that was my pre-show goal.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** We'll move on quickly... \[laughter\] Next up is a less oft used segment that we add in yayQuery, called "the yayQuery Beginner's Corner", and I would implore us to not sing this one... Okay, Adam can sing it. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Sontag:** \[singing\] The yayQuery -- or something like that -- Beginner's Corner! Where everything is new!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Where everything is new, yeah ok, cut that out.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Jonathan Neil is dying somewhere in the JS Party Slack.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** I think he started an octave too high... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, also a shoutout to Jonathan Neil for all the music that hopefully you're hearing again... There's a band camp with all of this music out there from John.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, just google "John Neil band camp", and all the music is right there; it's so good.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I remember back in the day, we were like "Hey, John, you had written some jQuery song once... Do you wanna do a theme song for us?" and then a day and a half later he's like "Here's 21 songs..." \[laughter\], all of different lengths, all perfectly recorded, for segments you didn't even know you had yet.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** With like dense Beachboys-esque vocals... It wasn't just like he turned on his tape recorded and let his melodica rip... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Bizarre in how fast and good the turnaround was on that.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Amazing... Truly amazing.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Anyway, let's get into the beginner's corner. Rebecca, I think you were talking about...
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Yeah, this was always my segment, of like "say things that maybe you didn't know."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's a different segment, actually.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** What?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** The things you maybe didn't know - that's the hiddenhancement... \[laughter\]
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Is this the throwdown here? \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Sontag:** \[\\00:39:46.14\]
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Yes, he did! \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Classic!
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** \[39:51\] He did just do that... As men do. No, sorry. No, I just saw this video, and... A lot of people are mystified by Webpack and how it works - especially people who are kind of new to JavaScript and frontend development, or people who have been doing it for a while, but feel like they need to be "doing it right" now, and they're like "Oh, I need to learn Webpack" and "Yikes, that's scary!" This was just a really great video by Naomi Jacobs at BuzzJS, so check that out. I haven't heard of her, but she was just a really approachable speaker, who kind of laid out "Here's what Webpack actually does. It's not magic, it's just JavaScript to make your app be able to load asynchronously, be able to load in tiny chunks, instead of all at once, and be able to do all the cool things that you can do with Webpack."
+
+So check it out, it's 45 minutes or so long, but it was super approachable. I sat in a room with a bunch of other devs watching it, and could see them like "Oh, I get it now...", so I highly recommend it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** On the topic of Webpack - I do some Webpack work and have configured some crazy Webpacks in my day, but there's some of it that's weird, right? Does anyone fully get why it's query parameter based configuration in parts? Is there a reason for that?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** It's like anything else -- somebody needed something, so somebody wrote code to make that thing; it wasn't like a design review behind it, I imagine, like "Here's how we should do it." \[laughter\] But you don't have to pass it -- the query parameters are a nice, string-based way to express configuration, but you can also set those as an object in the loader config on your Webpack config.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right, right.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** I don't now, it's a cool hack... Do you wanna write JSON strings by hand?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** No...
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** No, right? So query strings - here we are.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I added something to this section too, so I might as well mention it. I think everyone shared it a million times, but if you ever wanna learn Redux, I really like the Getting Started With Redux course on Egghead.io from Dan Abramov, who wrote Redux. It's very good. He takes you through the concepts of Redux by more or less building Redux for you; that sounds actually way scarier, but he's like "Let's do this thing where we have this very simple thing; it turns out we need this tool" and then he builds that tool in front of you. He's like "Yeah, it's already in Redux." It's kind of a good way to do it.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Can I say something about Redux?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, sure.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** You might not need Redux.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Do you have a web page for that?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** I don't, but I will by the time this podcast is over.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** "I will by the time my company sponsors me to write one, so that we get some sweet marketing buzz." \[laughter\]
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** No, we were rewriting a thing on Indeed.com that I can't really say much more about, but we were rewriting it and we were using Preact and Preact Redux and Redux, and I did the Webpack bundle analyzer thing, and it was like 7k of my 21k bundle was for Redux and Preact Redux... And it was like, you know, this is actually really simple and totally not worth one-third of our bundle. We'll just do old school React state management, and it's like, it's okay... You don't have to use all these tools.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Just like they did in the Articles of Confederation... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Jeez, the deep hole... \[laughter\] And I already praised Addy once in this episode, which is more than enough, but he just informed us of an article written by Dan Abramov, who wrote this --
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Oh yeah, great! "You might not need Redux."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** ...called "You might not need Redux."
+
+**Paul Irish:** That's a good way to get out ahead of things... Ship something on your own and then write the "You may not need this" post before anyone else does.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** For sure. Alright, I think we running up on a break, so... Yeah.
+
+**Break:** \[44:07\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** And we're back! One segment that I believe only happened one time - I don't think it was officially a segment, because in the episode we didn't know it would become a segment, because - a lot of becauses in this - Adam intro-ed it. There was some show on The Food Network, Adam...? Throwdown - is that what it's called? Or is it like a segment of a show?
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Oh yeah, Bobby Flay's Throwdown! \[dramatically\] Throwdown!
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Exactly! I think Adam and Paul had planned an argument to have, and Adam gave it The Throwdown section, but... I recently got into a pleasant, friendly argument with a friend about function binding in the new world, especially in the world where we're not compiling fat arrows. Fat arrow functions cause a function to be bound to a lexical this. It would be very similar to a function that at the end had a .bind(this), but not exactly, because you don't actually have to do the binding; it literally just uses lexical scope, or whatever... Versus a function that doesn't use "this" inside at all, and also is not a fat arrow and it's not bound, so an unbound function. So there's not such thing as an unbound fat arrow function, because it's always bound to a lexical "this".
+
+This friend was saying that by default now we should use fat arrows that way; everything is always bound to a lexical "this". Let's lint for that, and let's not allow us to use the function keyword anymore. Thoughts?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** In the code that I write, I feel like we do this a lot, but not always, but it's because we need the --
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So there are a few cases where it's fine, like constructors - there's no constructors with fat arrows, and a few other edge cases. Those would be perfectly fine to lint for. But I can definitely understand the argument where the fat arrow -- like, in my mind, unbound functions are the default, and if you don't use this, why would you bind the function? And I pretty much agree, that was my argument - I'm smart enough to know if I use the word "this"... But let's add the team aspect, and the fact that we already lint for semi-colons and all these other things, but I can definitely see the argument that if everyone just uses fat arrows for everything, then this is always what you expect it to be; even in the unbound case, everything is always bound to a lexical "this", and it kind of like smoothes over maybe that confusing part of the language.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Yeah, that's kind of what I'm saying. I think that we tend to do this anyway, but we don't lint for it, but I think it's more out of laziness that we tend to do it, because it's less typing. Whether we need the "this" or not, we just do it because it's a really handy way to write.
+
+\[47:58\] We do this all the time with arrow functions that you pass to map, or something like that; we don't NEED the "this" binding, but it's just a handy way to do it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Right, yeah. So I guess I lose. It seems like...
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** But I don't know if there's a reason to do it...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** My opinion is pretty much that I'm fine for our company choosing to have an application where we lint in this way and write JavaScript in this style, but I think it's weird to refer to fat arrows as like the default way to write functions and to refer to functions.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** And I feel like it's kind of a beginner-unfriendly history, like it's a retcon of JavaScript to try and be like "This is the new right way to do it, and everything you've seen that's older than three years ago is just wrong and weird now."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, and I think one interesting thing about this person is that pretty much their entire JavaScript career is in the era of fat arrows, so I think actually to them fat arrows are default; like, why would you write out function? And to me, that's just a bizarre concept. The first thing I do is write a function, and then if I think about it and I want it to be bound to a lexical "this", then I would choose to use the fat arrow. But that's not always true.
+
+Some of the stuff with fat arrows is inside classes can get a little wonky. You have to do an equals fat arrow rather than do the shorthand, because then things aren't bound to a lexical "this". So there are some tricks and stuff that don't make it super easy, but I don't know... I think I'm kind of sold.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** I think that you could rephrase this as like "Kids these days!" or "Get off my lawn!".
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Sure, sure, sure... Nay Query.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Well, I mean, there's no better time for the kids to get off your lawn than right f\*\*\*\*n now. \[laughter\]
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** We're gonna have to beep that out, aren't we? Family-friendly podcast.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think every once in a while we get an explicit tag, so... We'll see. Even back in the day we used to curse -- I mean, not a ton, but a good amount. But how many sparkles and ponies and rainbows were presented definitely did not give a fair indication of the amount of cursing that'd end up on a show.
+
+This isn't a segment either, but we did this during our live reunion show last time, and I thought I might bring it back. I wanted to feel the air for predictions for the web or JavaScript in the next 1-5 years, or something like that. What's gonna change, what standards are gonna make it, what's gonna die? Does anyone have any considerable thoughts here?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** I have one... Somebody's gonna tell me why I'm wrong...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It's the point of having a podcast.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** In five years - maybe less, but I don't know how much less - Brave is gonna overtake Firefox.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Wow...
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Brave prediction. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** For what it's worth, my primary browser has been Brave on mobile and desktop for maybe the last month, and most of the time it's fine.
+
+**Paul Irish:** What's the rendering engine? What's Brave built on?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Chromium.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** You knew the answer to that.
+
+**Paul Irish:** No, for some reason I actually thought they built it on Gecko.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** No, it's Chromium.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It definitely looks more Firefoxy in a few places, and I dislike a lot of those rough edges, but I think they've got a pretty small team, especially working on that type of stuff, so I forgive them for now.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Yeah, I use it as my primary personal browser, I don't use it for -- like, I have a Chrome for work, that I use for Gmail, but then I use Brave for browsing.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[52:00\] Yeah. I was talking to Brendan a little bit on Twitter about new features... One weird thing, Paul, is that DevTools in Brave can't be doc-ed. It has to be a separate window, because of some -- I think it has to do with sandboxing, or something like that.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Process sandboxing. There's two separate processes, so putting them in the same thing is kind of painful, I guess... But interesting...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, and they're looking into doing some stuff where you could put Brave as your native runtime - Webkit native, or something like that? Electron - that's the one. Electron is like the Webkit native thing, and some people are looking into getting Brave as the browser that by default is more user secure.
+
+And my last tidbit there is private browsing - it's something that I think users get wrong a lot of times. They think that you can log into your Twitter account in private browsing mode and no one knows it's you... They don't realize that your identity is tied to them a hundred different ways, and just not having your cookies there isn't going to stop literally everyone from knowing your IP address and everything you do. It doesn't force HTTPS - none of those things, so they're looking into doing -- bcrypt, I think, has a wiki page on the Brave GitHub for a Tor mode. So when you open up a new tab in private mode, it's Tor-ed. Your regular browser isn't Tor-ed, but if you open up a private thing, they delete all your cookies and there's no -- like normal private mode, but also it runs over Tor... Which I think is kind of brilliant, in the sense that that's what users expect whenever they think about private mode.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** I think private really is...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I mean, still you can then leak information via a hundred other different ways, but that's kind of on you. The browser actually is doing it's job if they had a Tor private one. I think it'd be really nifty, but also the Tor infrastructure needs some work before that can necessarily become a super reality. Anyways, that was a long time on...
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Well, that's my prediction.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, good job! I like that prediction. I don't know if I believe it... Anyone else have a prediction?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** I don't know if I believe it either, but...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, sure. Even if Brave doesn't beat Firefox, I think Brave will influence the other browsers for sure.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** For sure, yeah.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** I mean, I just think that eventually their coding is gonna get easier on things that are not keyboards - and I don't have any insight into when or how, but it just seems kind of unsustainable. Especially like a generation of people have their primary internet access on their phone, and it's in a world where you're used to having your terminal next to your editor, next to your browser... Like, how do we make this work for people who are primarily developing without that? And maybe -- I can't imagine it's gonna be as bad as it is now, in five years.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I also have no idea what it would be, but I guess that is ripe for all you entrepreneurs out there to fail a few times on some touch-something, or other holograms...
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** The Pinboard guy was just talking on Twitter about how programmers don't think they can be replaced by automation. I wonder -- like, we won't be using keyboards because we aren't doing anything at all... \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Irish:** \[55:53\] I was gonna throw out a prediction along those lines, which was that more basic web design is going to be handled by our AI overlords. And especially, it makes a whole lot of sense with Wix and Squarespace etc. to be using -- whatever that startup is that I think didn't really...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it failed. It's like the AI-generated...
+
+**Paul Irish:** Was it The Hive, or something?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It was like The Grid.
+
+**Paul Irish:** The Grid, yeah. There you go. And I think that the idea is compelling and would actually work for a bunch of websites. That would work for a lot of small business and all those sorts of things, but we'll see.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It was a failed startup, but my manager - I feel like they sort of had a cool idea that maybe will work in the future. It was user testing with AI - kind of mashed those two together. So rather than writing your tests, it's like an AI knows that there's a button and that it might fill out a form and then do these things and act like a real user would act on a page...
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, that's compelling.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** So you could kind of just like give it a web page and then it would use it like a user would use it, rather than... I mean, obviously it'd probably still write other types of tests, but I thought that was kind of cool as an idea.
+
+I think my actual prediction that I was gonna say for this though is that there will be -- like, the React model of things might still be around, but I think my prediction is that it will be React-like, but the underlying technology will be Web Components. So you may author in something that's not Web Components, but I'm betting on it a little bit for performance reasons. If someone can build something with the experience of React and all that stuff, and then... Like, I know some of this already exists and you guys are all gonna send me Tweets or whatever, but something will come along that actually gets people to change their mind. I think it will happen sometime.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** I think Alex Russell just kind of took over your body there for a minute...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Oh... No, it happens for five minutes a day.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** It actually -- that happened a long time ago. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Live through me... \[laughter\] Someone asked a question, Paul, in the JS Party Slack channel, which you guys can all join (changelog.com/jsparty), and you kind of perked up, and I was a little bit interested in why you perked up so much... \[laughter\] Because the question seemed like a joke. The question was "Why is querySelectorAll() so long?" and then you also mentioned addEventListener() is also long. Why is that funny? Do you have a story about that?
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, the question seems pretty valid, because... To go back to our yayQuery roots, it is getting elements and doing things with them. And I write code with querySelectorAll() and addEventListener() every single day, so I still do feel the listener's pain... So why they're actually so long - 1) because naming is hard and 2) because standards is hard, so put those together and you always end up with really big names.
+
+But there were conversations on both of these cases, to introduce shorter APIs for them. So taking querySelectorAll() there is a published spec called Selectors Level 2 that has an element.Find and element.FindAll method, which basically are the exact same things as querySelectorAll(), but with one key fix, which is the really weird behavior where you do element.querySelectorAll() and it can actually return an element that is not a descendent of that rooted element that you're using...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** What?
+
+**Paul Irish:** ...which is really unexpected.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** I was like, "Wait, what?!" \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Irish:** \[01:00:04.02\] Yeah, you can do -- I think what it is is let's say that you have this small item container, and then you say querySelectorAll(), and then you pass it a hash ID, and then something else, and it will actually just reach out above this whole item container and return it from another place in the DOM.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** So the context doesn't matter...
+
+**Paul Irish:** Right, right.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** What if I wanted the context to matter, because that's DOM?
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, exactly. I mean, basically it was a bug in --
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Context stopped mattering a long time along now... \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Irish:** There was a bug in how they designed the feature, and it just messed it up. I think John Resig has like two blog posts around 2007-2008 saying "Hey, there's this API that's about to come out that has this massive bug", but I guess nobody decided to pay attention and fix it before every browser shipped it. So that happened... So Find and FindAll actually fixed this bug.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** But it shipped. It exists.
+
+**Paul Irish:** querySelectorAll()?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Find and FindAll.
+
+**Paul Irish:** No. Find and FindAll do not exist, other than in a spec, and they're just sitting there in the spec looking so pretty, and it was like "It would be nice to type something a little bit shorter." I was looking into it, and as far as I can tell, spec-wise it's in decently good shape, it's just browsers have not actually committed to -- they just haven't gotten around to it yet, and no one's pressured them.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** But is there a different story for Add Event listener?
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, a slightly different story there, which is that there are a lot of conversations around introducing an On method to the element prototype, which would just be nice to shorten things up. And there's some hesitation there from the editor of the DOM spec, who basically says "Yes, it's kind of nice for developer ergonomics", but if we're gonna go and introduce this new method, we might as well introduce some next generation event listening functionality into it while we're at it... So not just copy the exact same API, but handle more observable support for listening to events. So let's wait until all of those primitives exist before we introduce it. And that's kind of been the position for about like seven years, so that's just gonna hang out there for a little longer, I think. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** For sure... Sounds like it. I think some of my favorite predictions from the channel were that we wouldn't get element media queries, which have been predicted for a really long time; it's the Linux of the desktop of CSS features. For those of you who aren't familiar, you can make media queries based on the size of the entire browser window, but not based on the size of the individual elements. Does that change a little bit with Shadow DOM, does anyone know? I assume you can do media queries inside of a Shadow DOM; or is it like full -- maybe no one knows.
+
+**Paul Irish:** It's not scoped to the Shadow DOM, it's still the full thing. It doesn't change with Shadow DOM.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Still full window... That's rough. Ugh!
+
+**Paul Irish:** I know that the biggest concern - we have people listening who know this better than me. I know the biggest concern with element queries was that doing height element queries can go into a recursive loop and that's a big problem. I actually sit pretty close to one of the CSS spec editors and I was like "Hey, but what if we just do with just the width element query and just ignore height? Because developers don't need it, and it's hard for you guys as spec editors to figure it out, so what about just width?" and he was like, "Yeah, but it's like..." I don't know what he said. \[laughter\] But that would be ideal.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You did not listen to his response.
+
+**Paul Irish:** \[01:04:07.20\] He said something...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I have a suggestion, Paul.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Okay.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool. We normally end the episode with picks - do you guys have picks by any chance? Did any of you do that? I gave you some homework... Anyone have one?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** If I say yes, is that gonna be pressure for other people? Or would that just give them time to...
+
+**Paul Irish:** I've got one.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Okay, cool. We're gonna do two picks - Rebecca and Paul - because we're a little bit short on time... So Rebecca, what's your pick?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** So I lied when I said I'm a JavaScript developer; I'm actually mostly a manager these days, so that's my dirty secret. But my pick is Camille Fournier's book "The Manager's Path." If you, like us, have grown up in the last few years and maybe you're taking on some more responsibilities at work - even if you're not a manager - it's a really, really awesome book about technical leadership and navigating that in organizations. So not about JavaScript, but I highly recommend it.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Cool. Paul, you said you had a pick?
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, my pick is a slide from a presentation that I've picked up on I think the WebDev Subreddit late last night, and I like this...
+
+**Alex Sexton:** This is an old joke, for what it's worth, Paul.
+
+**Paul Irish:** This is what?
+
+**Alex Sexton:** This is an old joke. Just so you know, but, I'm glad that you have never seen it, because that validates my life.
+
+**Paul Irish:** I've never seen this! Oh my god. Okay, well I'll just tell it, like... Maybe I -- oh... \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** You heard it here first! \[laughter\] Paul Irish didn't know something before someone else. It happened! \[laughter\]
+
+**Paul Irish:** It's a cheat sheet for HTTP return codes. Return codes are 100s, 200s, 300s, 400s and 500s. The 100s return codes translate essentially to "Hold on!" Straight-up 200 is the "You're all good." So, 200s is "Here you go. The 300s - "Go away!"
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Redirect.
+
+**Paul Irish:** 400s - "You f\*\*\*\*d up." and the 500s - "I f\*\*\*\*d up."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Server errors.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Yeah, yeah. Seeing it like that makes it really, really clear.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** I feel like somebody just explained a joke to me.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... \[laughs\] It made it really clear to me in 1997, remember that joke? \[laughter\]
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** We love you, Paul.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, if you're interested in some of the funnier spec stuff... A lot of people -- the joke that I think I see get made the most... The thing that's reminding me of this is the 418 "I'm a teapot" response, but the spec joke that I see made the most is that HTML should add a sarcasm element to the specification, right? You guys see that one all the time. I think GF3 had a tweet about it. It's in there, there is a sarcasm element; it's in the spec, go check it out.
+
+**Paul Irish:** It's official.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's official; a sarcasm element.
+
+**Paul Irish:** That kind of gets us into a trick though, because they did reply to GF3's tweet with "Oh yeah, we should totally add that."
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I'll find a link, or whatever. Maybe I'm wrong... Me and Paul could both be wrong at the end of an episode, or whatever. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Sontag:** If people wanna stay up to date with the freshest WebDev memes and jokes, what they should do is just follow the @IAmDevloper Twitter account. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Actually, it got shut down.
+
+**Paul Irish:** What?
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** What?!
+
+**Paul Irish:** No...
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Yeah?! Oh, man! \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** \[01:07:59.19\] Yeah, for those people wondering, there was a Twitter account called @IAmDevloper; it was like a Napoleon Dynamite...
+
+**Paul Irish:** Wait, it's there... It's up though. I see a tweet as of two days ago.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** We're just wrong left and right.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** It was gone for a while. I saw tweets like...
+
+**Adam Sontag:** I'm blocked! @IAmDevloper blocked me. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** We're all blocked. \[laughter That's funny. Yeah, someone was tweeting a celebration on that account being gone recently; I betcha they were blocked, too. \[laughter\] So never mind... This is a Twitter account that just steals jokes from other developers, and then a million more people favorite it whenever they tweet it without any attribution.
+
+**Adam Sontag:** So yeah, my pick was to pick on @IAmDevloper, you joke stealing \*beep\*. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alex Sexton:** I think we're extremely out of time, but it was lovely getting to catch up with y'all.
+
+**Rebecca Murphey:** Indeed.
+
+**Alex Sexton:** Peace out.
+
+**Paul Irish:** Peace!
+
+**Adam Sontag:** Wooh!