The Frontside Podcast

In this episode, Austin Parker, Principal Developer Advocate at Lightstep talks about the OpenTelemetry Framework, which is an observability framework for cloud-native software and a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs. You use it to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) for analysis in order to understand your software's performance and behavior.

In this episode, Puneet Lath, Director of Research and Development at Expensify, talks about the unique way Expensify is using open source with their products by not just open-sourcing software tools but also open-sourcing the front end of the product itself. They are rebuilding their products on React Native to be fully cross-platform and doing so in an open-source manner. All code is public, and anyone can see it and contribute to it.

In this episode, Steve Pereira—the founder of Visible—talks about how his unique approach to mapping helps customers get products out of the door fast and efficiently. Maps flow to build alignment, clarity, and confidence, and Steve focuses on two primary areas to drive exceptional business outcomes: Flow and value. Value stream thinking and methodologies, augmented by continuous improvement and performance.

Data is at the center of everything we do. Yet, how can we trust it in a world where more "organic" food is consumed than produced? In this episode, Jason Kelley—the Global General Manager for Blockchain Services at IBM—talks about how data trust and transparency are applied to COVID-19 vaccines.

"Java has done an excellent job at ruining types for everyone for quite a while—explains Marcel after describing the tech pub scene in London—but it's important to know there's more than one kind of type system." Along with Shane, they outline what's exciting about ReasonML and their experience with new languages and tools around types.SPECIAL GUEST:Marcel Cutts | @marcelcutts: Founder of Asgard Tech, ReasonML London OrganizerShane Wilson | @wilsonashane: Founder of Peyk Inc.SHOW NOTES00:38 - ReasonTwitter: @reasonmlDiscord03:25 - BuckleScriptOCaml06:01 - Reason + BuckleScriptTypeScript16:07 - Reason: Interoperation & AdoptionClojureScriptToolchainSyntax30:00 - Operating at the Compiler Level vs the Run-Time Levelppx (pre-processor extension)34:29 - Last thoughts on, and why use Reason?Flow44:43 - repkgsknitLerna

Monorepos are the new muse of library maintainers, but what happens when your project grows past 100 packages in the same repo? What about thousands? Rush.js was created for those cases, and Pete—who started the project while working at Microsoft—is here to tell us about it.SPECIAL GUEST:Pete Gonzalez | @octogonzDuring the day, Pete works at HBO in Seattle on their streaming media apps. Prior to that, he was at Microsoft for 9 years, and before that, he worked at various consulting companies. A long time ago he was a cofounder of Ratloop, a small company that makes video games.SHOW NOTES01:24 - Rush.js: What is it and what is it for?Rush on GitHub04:47 - Problems with Managing Large CodebasesRush Stack: provides reusable tech for running large scale monorepos for the web07:22 - How does Rush provide a solution for build orchestration?13:34 - Rush Stack Opinion: How to Lint, Bundle, etc.16:53 - Using Rush Stack: Getting StartedThe pmpm Package ManagerYarn Plug’n’Play24:27 - Getting Technical About VersionsPhantom DependenciesDoppelgangersPure Dependencies32:47 - Thoughts on Monorepos36:30 - Getting Started (Cont’d) + Efficient TypeScript Compellation43:28 - Does Rush have a size limit? Is it for bigger or smaller projects? Both?44:34 - Using pieces of Rush in non-Rush projects?

In this episode, Charles and Taras discuss "big ideas" and all the things they hope to accomplish at The Frontside over the next decade. Please join us in these conversations! If you or someone you know would be a perfect guest, please get in touch with us at [email protected]. Our goal is to get people thinking on the platform level which includes tooling, internalization, state management, routing, upgrade, and the data layer. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, a place where we talk about user interfaces and everything that you need to know to build them right. Today, we're going to talk about big ideas and the future of Frontside. TARAS: Yeah, starting with is Frontside is good idea? CHARLES: No, we're going to just talk about how do you know that an idea is good? We've touched on it a couple of times before. Like how do you, how do you go about validating a big idea, how do you discover a big idea? What do you do? TARAS: And then, even when you have big ideas like big tests, what does that mean for the world? How do you make a big idea an idea that a lot of people like and agree with and actually use on day to day. CHARLES: Yeah. It turns out that it's not easy. There's a lot of work involved with that. A lot of it crystallized around the conversations we're having about what exactly is big test and recognizing that big test isn't really a code base. It's not a toolkit. Even though it does has aspects of those things, it really is an idea. It's an approach. It's a way of going about your business, right? TARAS: Yeah. Especially when you put big test functionality in place, when you start doing big testing and then you put together things like using Mocha and Karma, big tests in that kind of test suite is really just like interactors and the idea of big testing. There's nothing else. All the interactors do is just give you an easy way to create composable like [inaudible] objects, so you don't have to write -- you have the components but you don't have to write selectors for each element in the component, especially if gets composed. But that's like a very small functionality that does a very specific thing. But big test itself, it takes a lot of work to actually -- we had this firsthand experience on the project we're working on right now. We are essentially introducing like Ember's acceptance testing but for React in a react project and having to explain to people what is it about this that actually makes it a really good idea and having people in the React world see that this is actually a really good idea. It's kind of incredible. When you actually try to sell something to somebody and convince somebody that this is a good idea is when you realize like how inadequate your understanding of the idea really is. You really have to start to break it down and understand what is it about this that is a really big idea. CHARLES: Yeah, I completely agree 100% because to be clear, we've actually been doing this now for two years almost. So, this is not the first React project where we've put these ideas in place. But I think in prior examples, we just kind of moved in and it's like we're going to do this because this is what we do. And we have firsthand knowledge of this working because we've operated in this community where this is just taken on faith that this is the way you go about your business. You have a very robust acceptance test suite. And because of that, you can experience incredible things. When you and I were talking before the show, we were kind of commenting on inside the Ember community, you can do impossible things because of the testing framework. You can upgrade from Ember 1 to Ember 3 which is a completely and totally separate framework, basically. You're completely and totally changing the underlying architecture of your application. You can do it in a deterministic way and that's actually incredible. TARAS: And what's interesting too is that the React core team kind of hinted a book at this also in their blog post about fiber or moving to fiber because one of the things that they talked about there is that knowing how the system is supposed to behave on the outside allowed them to change the internals of the free app framework, specifically about test suite for the React framework, but it allowed them to change the internals of the framework because they were testing kind of on the outside. The system kind of is a black box and that allowed them to change the internals and the test suite essentially stayed the same. So this idea of acceptance testing your thing is really fundamental to how Ember community operates. But other communities have this as a big idea as well. It's just applied in different areas. CHARLES: Right. And so applied to your actual application, this is something that's accepted in one place, but it's not an accepted practice in other places. But you can m

In this episode, Charles and Taras discuss "transparent development" and why it's not only beneficial to development teams, but to their clients as well. Please join us in these conversations! If you or someone you know would be a perfect guest, please get in touch with us at [email protected]. Our goal is to get people thinking on the platform level which includes tooling, internalization, state management, routing, upgrade, and the data layer. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, the place where we talk about user interfaces and everything that you need to know to build them right. It's been a long summer and we're back. I'm actually back living in Austin, Texas again. I think there wasn't too much margin in terms of time to record anything or do much else besides kind of hang on for survival. We've been really, really busy over the last couple of months, especially on the professional side. Frontside has been doing some pretty extraordinary things, some pretty interesting things. So, we've got a lot to chew on, a lot to talk about. TARAS: There's so much stuff to talk about and it's hard to know where to start. CHARLES: So, we'll be a little bit rambly, a little bit focused. We'll call it fambly. But I think one of the key points that is crystallized in our minds, I would say over this summer, is something that binds the way that we work together. Every once in a while, you do some work, you do some work, you do some work, and then all of a sudden you realize that a theme, there's something thematic to that work and it bubbles up to the surface and you kind of organically perceive an abstraction over the way that you work. I think we've hit that. I hit one of those points at least because one of the things that's very important for us is -- and if you know us, this is things that we talk about, things that we work on -- we will go into a project and set up the deployment on the very first day. Make sure that there is an entire pipeline, making sure that there is a test suite, making sure that there are preview applications. And this is kind of the mode that we've been working in, I mean, for years and years and years. And where you say like if what it takes is spending the first month of a project setting up your entire delivery and showcasing pipeline then that's the most important work, inverting the order and saying that has to really come before any code can come before it. And I don't know that we've ever had like a kind of unifying theme for all of those practices. I mean, we've talked about it in terms of saving money, in terms of ensuring quality, in terms of making sure that something is good for five or 10 years, like this is the way to do it. And I think those are definitely the outcomes that we're looking for. But I think we've kind of identified what the actual mode is for all of that. Is that fair to say? TARAS: Yeah, I think one of the things I've always thought about for a long time is the context within which decisions are made because it's not always easy. And it's sometimes really difficult to really give it a name, like getting to a point where you have really clear understanding of what is it that is guiding all of your actions. What is it that's making you do things? Like why do we put a month of work before we even start doing any work? Why do we put this in our contract? Why do we have a conversation with every client and say, "Look, before we start doing anything, we're going to put CI in place." Why are we blocking our business on doing this piece? It's actually kind of crazy that from a business perspective, it's a little bit crazy that you be like, "Oh, so you're willing to lose a client because the client doesn't want you to set up a CI process?" Or in a case of many clients, it's like you're not willing to accept -- the client is going to say, "We want to use Jenkins." And what we've done in the past, in almost every engagement, we're like, "Actually, no. We're not going to use Jenkins because we know that it's going to take so long for you to put Jenkins in place. By the time that we finish the project, you're probably still not going to have it in place. That means that we're not going to be able to rely on our CI process and we're not going to be able to rely on testing until you're finished." We're not going to have any of those things while we're doing development. But why are we doing all this stuff? It was actually not really apparent until very recently because they didn't really had a name to describe what is it about this tooling and all of these things that makes why is it so important to us. I think that's what kind of crystallized. And the way that I know that it's crystallized because now that we're talking to our clients about it, our clients are taking on to picking up the language. We don't have to convince

Rich Harris talks about Svelte and Reactivity. Rich Harris: Graphics Editor on The New York Times investigations team. Resources: Svelte Please join us in these conversations! If you or someone you know would be a perfect guest, please get in touch with us at [email protected]. Our goal is to get people thinking on the platform level which includes tooling, internalization, state management, routing, upgrade, and the data layer. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, a place where we talk about user interfaces and everything that you need to know to build them right. TARAS: It's actually a really nice, Rich and I'm really, really happy to have a chance to actually chat with you about this because Svelte is a really fun piece technology. In many ways, it's interesting to see our technology evolve and our industry evolve through innovation, real innovation. I think Svelte 3 has really been kind of that next thought provoking technology that kind of makes you think about different ways that we can approach problems in our space. So, really excited to chat with you about this stuff. RICH: Well, thank you. Excited to be here. TARAS: I think quite a lot of people know, Rich, about your history, like how you got into what you're doing now. But I'm not sure if Charles is aware, so if you could kind of give us a little bit of a lowdown on where you kind of come from in terms of your technical background and such. RICH: Sure. I'll give you the 30-second life history. I started out as a reporter at a financial news organization. I had a Philosophy Degree and didn't know what else to do with it. So, I went into journalism. This was around the time of the great recession. And within a few weeks of me joining this company, I watched half of my colleagues get laid off and it's like, "Shit, I need to make myself more employable." And so gradually, sort of took on more and more technical responsibilities until I was writing JavaScript as part of my day job. Then from there, all these opportunities kind of opened up. And the big thing that I had in mind was building interactive pieces of journalism, data-driven, personalized, all of that sort of thing, which were being built at places like the New York Times, and The Guardian, and the BBC. That was the reason that I really wanted to get into JavaScript. And that's guided my career path ever since. CHARLES: It's interesting that this D3 and all that did come out of journalism. RICH: It's not a coincidence because when you're working under extreme time pressure and you're not building things with a view to maintain them over a long period of time, you just need to build something and get it shipped immediately. But it needs to be built in a way that is going to work across a whole range of devices. We've got native apps, we've got [inaudible], we've got our own website. And in order to do all that, you need to have tools that really guide you into the pit of success. And D3 is a perfect example of that. And a lot of people have come into JavaScript through D3. CHARLES: And so, are you still working for the same company? RICH: No. That's ancient history at this point. CHARLES: Because I'm wondering, are you actually getting to use these tools that you've been building to actually do the types of visualizations and stuff that we've been talking about? RICH: Very much so. I moved to The Guardian some years ago. And then from there, moved to Guardian US, which has an office in New York. And it was there that I started working on Svelte. I then moved to the New York Times and I'm still working on Svelte. I've used it a number of times to build things at the New York Times and the people have built things with it too. And so, yeah, it's very much informed by the demands of building high performance interactive applications on a very tight deadline. CHARLES: Okay, cool. So I've probably used, I mean, I'm an avid reader of both Guardian and the New York Times, so I've probably used a bunch of these visualizations. I had no idea what was driving them. I just assumed it was all D3. RICH: There is a lot of D3. Mike Bostock, the creator of D3, he was a linchpin at the graphics department for many years. Unfortunately we didn't overlap. He left the Times before I joined the Times, but his presence is still very much felt in the department. And a lot of people who are entering the industry, they're still becoming database practitioners by learning from D3 examples. It's been a hugely influential thing in our industry. TARAS: How long is a typical project? How long would it take to put together a visualization for an article that we typically see? RICH: It varies wildly. The graphics desk is about 50 strong and they will turn around things within a day. Like when the Notre Dame burnt down a couple of months ago, my colleagues turned around this interactive scroll driven webGL 3D rec

Philippe De Ryck joins the show to talk all things security: the importance and why you should be taking active steps, how to do it in your codebase effectively, and what can happen during a breach. Philippe De Ryck: Pragmatic Web Security Resources: OWASP Top 10 OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls Please join us in these conversations! If you or someone you know would be a perfect guest, please get in touch with us at [email protected]. Our goal is to get people thinking on the platform level which includes tooling, internalization, state management, routing, upgrade, and the data layer. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, a place where we talk about user interfaces and everything that you need to know to build them right. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at The Frontside. Joining me, also hosting today is Taras Mankovsky. Hello, Taras. TARAS: Hello, hello. CHARLES: And as always, we're going to be talking about web platforms, UI platforms, and the practices that go into them. And here to talk with us today about a pillar of the platform that I certainly don't know that much about, and so, I'm actually really happy to have this guest on to talk about it is Philippe De Ryck who owns his own company called Pragmatic Web Security. I understand you do trainings and are just generally involved in the small space. So, welcome, Philippe. PHILIPPE: Hi. Nice to meet you. CHARLES: Wow! I almost even don't even know where to start with this subject because I'm kind of like the hippie developer mindset where it's like, "LaÖlaÖlaÖlaÖlaÖ we're in this open land and nothing's ever bad going to happen and we're just going to put code out there," and nobody would ever take advantage of any holes or anything like that. And I think that a lot of developers share that mentality and that's how we end up with major, major security breaches. And so, like I said, this is something that I'm actually very eager to learn but I almost even don't know where to start. I need training, man. [Laughter] PHILIPPE: Well, that's good to hear. No, you're totally right about that. If you're not into security, it seems like this fast space for a lot is happening and you don't really know how or why and what really matters to you and should I even be worried about this. And let me start by addressing the very first thing. Yes, you should be worried because maybe you're not building something that somebody cares about but you always have something that somebody wants, even the simplest of attacks always targets a valuable resource. Just to give you a very simple idea today, cryptocurrency is all the hype and you have a taker that's just aiming to misuse your users' computers to mine crypto coins because it essentially saves them a bunch on electricity cost. So, there's always something to grab. Usually, it's data or services or worse. But even in the most minimal cases, you have hardware, you have devices, you have network capacity that somebody might want to abuse. So yes, security, I would say, always matters. CHARLES: What's the best way to get started? You said understanding that everything we do, we're holding onto resources that might be valuable, that someone might want to seize but I'm just getting started with my application. I don't know anything about security. Where do I get started on just understanding the space? And then before I even look at tools that I wantÖ PHILIPPE: You want the honest answer for that? [Laughter] PHILIPPE: The honest answer is probably hire someone who has security knowledge. I don't mean this in a bad way. I've come a very long way in my career doing what I do now. And if I look at that, if you are aiming as a developer with no knowledge about security to build a secure application, it's going to be very hard. There's a lot of things you need to know, intrinsic knowledge. These are not things you can simply read a small book in a week, you know all of these security things that you'll know what to do. So, if you have no previous experience at all, I suggest to find some help. CHARLES: Right. It's like saying, "Hey, you've never written a data layer before but you want to go out and you want to write a massively distributed system where you have all these notes talking to each other. You're not going to read the O'Reilly book 'How to Build Distributed Systems' in a week and go out and do the same thing." It's the same thing with security. You need to understand the entire context. And there's no substitute for experience. PHILIPPE: Sorry, I actually like that comparison because in a sense, you're right, it's like these other very complex topics you don't expect to learn that in a week or a month and right a functioning data layer. But the difference is if you fail at writing that data layer, your application is probably not going to work. While if you fail at securing the applicati

In this internal Frontside Podcast episode, Charles, Taras, and Jeffrey analyze the NativeScript Mobile Platform. Please join us in these conversations! If you or someone you know would be a perfect guest, please get in touch with us at [email protected]. Our goal is to get people thinking on the platform level which includes tooling, internalization, state management, routing, upgrade, and the data layer. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, a place where we talk about user interfaces and everything that you need to know to build them right. My name is Charles, a developer here at Frontside. With me today are Taras and Jeffrey. TARAS: Hello everyone. CHARLES: Today, we're going to be talking about NativeScript, in particular, and evaluating technologies and frameworks, kind of at the meta level. So, I'm kind of excited about it because we've been pretty heavily involved with NativeScript for the past three months or so. And so, we've gotten to look at it both from beginners' eyes being kind of totally fresh to the platform, but then actually having to start to pump up against some of the edge cases which is what always ends up happening when you actually use a framework for real. Let's get started. TARAS: All right. I think there's a lot of things that we could talk about because when we would start looking at NativeScript, the length that we were looking at NativeScript through this is that this platform that our client is going to be using for doing development of large applications. So, what does NativeScript need to have to be able to support potentially hundreds of developers building apps? We started looking at it and one things that made us consider NativeScript early on was it kind of provides a platform that allows you to encode in JavaScript and run it on mobile. And we saw this kind of emergence of Angular and Vue.js running on top of NativeScript. So, those things together is kind of exciting. CHARLES: There was also an implementation in progress of React and there were a couple of spikes of Ember also running on top of NativeScript. So, my first impression was initially very favorable. The onboarding experience is actually pretty nice because it was JavaScript and the application was interpreted, there's the ability to completely and totally dynamically change the application at runtime. So, they have essentially an application called the NativeScript Playground which lets you flash a QR code at it and then it will go in to the URL associated with that QR code and it will download all of the assets for a NativeScript application running at that URL. So, all the JavaScript, all the templates, all the whatever, it'll pull it down, it will actually start running like within that app. So, the Playground app then becomes your actual app that you want to use. There's no App Store, no TestFlight, no Google Play. There's no gatekeeping to delivering your application into a running app. And I thought that was really, really cool and really, really compelling. TARAS: We should clarify that this is specifically for preview purposes because if you're going to be shipping the application to production, you still need to go through all those things before... CHARLES: Yes. TARAS: But the onboarding process, you could just install the preview app and then you can point a QR code and it will open that app, whether it's in Angular or in Vue, that app will open up in the preview app and you have a native app that you could play around with. CHARLES: Right. JEFFREY: And that's key both for the engineers who are playing around with this and building this and also really key for the non-engineers who are part of the team to be able to really easily spin up and see what the engineers on the team are working on. CHARLES: That's exactly why we thought, "Hey, we want to be able to use this mechanism for preview apps." In the same way on the server side, you have preview apps associated with a pull request. When we saw this, what we immediately wanted to do was have a bot post a comment onto a pull request with a QR code, so that anybody could just, boom, test out this app on their phone. TARAS: We ultimately ended up setting that up but not quite that way because the original idea of being able to have something like danger bot post the QR code to the comments, you can kind of point out with your phone and open the preview app, that didn't actually pan out. Charles tried to implement that. What happened there? CHARLES: What it actually turned out was that the preview functionality was dependent on a central server, a central NativeScript server. So rather than kind of statically bundling the assets and just saying 'these assets are this URL and just pull them in and bootstrap your NativeScript application that way', it required a lot of extra stuff. So, it required you to be running a Webpack Dev Server that

Luke Melia, Aaron Chambers, and Mattia Gheda john Taras and Charles to discuss all things deployment! Luke Melia: Luke has been working with Ember since it was under early development as Sproutcore 2.0. Ember.js powers a SaaS company he co-founded, Yapp, and they funded their business for a couple of years doing Ember consulting under the Yapp Labs moniker. They’re full-time on product now, and his engineering team at Yapp (currently 3 people) maintains around 6 Ember apps. Luke helps to maintain a bunch of popular addons, including ember-cli-deploy, ember-modal-dialog, ember-wormhole, ember-tether, and more. He started the Ember NYC meetup in 2012 and continues to co-organize it today. Aaron Chambers: Aaron Chambers: Aaron is the co-author of EmberCLI Deploy and is currently an Engineer at Phorest Salon Software, helping them move their desktop product to the web platform. He's been using Ember for 5 years and maintains a number of plugins in the EmberCLI Deploy ecosystem. Aaron loves trying to work out how we can ship JS apps faster, more reliably and with more confidence. Mattia Gheda: Mattia is a Software Engineer, Ember hacker, Ruby lover and Elixir aficionado. Currently he works as Director of Development for Precision Nutrition where Ember, Ruby and Elixir power several applications. He loves meetups, organizes Ember.js Toronto and co-organizes Elixir Toronto. Resource: Immutable Web Apps Please join us in these conversations! If you or someone you know would be a perfect guest, please get in touch with us at [email protected]. Our goal is to get people thinking on the platform level which includes tooling, internalization, state management, routing, upgrade, and the data layer. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, a place where we talk about user interfaces and everything that you need to know to build them right. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at the Frontside. With me also co-hosting today is Taras Mankovsky. Hey, Taras. TARAS: Hello, everyone. CHARLES: Today, we have three special guests that we're going to be talking to. We have Aaron Chambers, Luke Melia, and Mattia Gheda who originally met collaborating on fantastic open source library that we, at the Frontside, have used many, many times that saved us countless hours, saved our clients hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more. ember-cli-deploy. We're gonna be talking not about that library in particular but around the operations that happen around UI. So, welcome you all. LUKE: Thanks, it's great to be here. CHARLES: Like I said, I actually am really excited to have you all on because when we talk about the platform that you develop your UI on, something that often gets short shrift in communities outside of the Ember community is how do I actually deliver that application into users' hands. Because obviously, we don't want it to be working just on our laptop. We want it to be delivered to our users and there are myriad ways that that can happen and it's only gotten more complex since the last time we talked which must have been like three or four years ago. I kind of just have to ask, I think that what you all were talking about then was cutting edge is still cutting edge now but there must have been some pretty incredible developments like in the last three or four years. What have been kind of the new insights that you all have? LUKE: I think that what we realized as we got started with ember-cli-deploy and a project kind of came together as a combination of a few different open source efforts, something that Aaron was working on, something that our collaborator Mike was working on. We decided to come together under one umbrella, joined forces. And what we realized pretty soon is that deployment needs vary a ton between companies. And so, we are coming from this background in Ember community where we had this attitude where nobody is a special snowflake. We all kind of have the same needs for 90% of what we do. And that's true. I really believe in a lot of that Ember [ethos]. But when it comes to deployment, you know what? A lot of companies are special snowflakes or it's at least is much more fragmented than kind of our needs around on the JavaScript side. And so, what we decided to do was to try to evolve ember-cli-deploy into a platform essentially, an ecosystem that could let people mix and match plug-ins to do in their organization without locking them into an opinion that might simply be a non-starter in their org. CHARLES: It's hard enough to have opinions just around the way that your JavaScript code is structured but when it comes to rolling out your app, it really does encompass the entire scope of your application. So, it has to take account of your server. It has to take account of your user base. It has to take account of all the different processes that might be running all over, distributed around the Inte

Joe joins the panelists to talk about pull request etiquette. Joe Leblanc: Joe first learned to code on a Zenith computer his dad brought home from work. It had this built in blue LCD monitor and ran on 5 1/4" floppy disks. He used spreadsheets for work and Joe was interested. They spent about an hour going over macros together and he took off from there. Long after the Zenith died, the open-source content management system Joomla! landed in the center of his attention. Joe found himself writing a book about Joomla programming, authoring video tutorials about Joomla for lynda.com, giving Joomla talks, and helping organize Joomla conferences. Since his time in the Joomla community, he's picked up Node, Rails, React, and other frameworks. He's currently coding at True Link Financial and working on a few hobby-projects as well. Please join us in these conversations! If you or someone you know would be a perfect guest, please get in touch with us at [email protected]. Our goal is to get people thinking on the platform level which includes tooling, internalization, state management, routing, upgrade, and the data layer. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, the place where we talk about user interfaces and everything that you need to know to build them right. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at The Frontside. And with me also is Taras. Hello, Taras. TARAS: Hello, hello. CHARLES: Today, we're going to be continuing our conversation about platforms, as always, but in particular the pillar of your platform that has to do with how you collaborate on code. It's an important one. And so, we're spending some time on it. And with us to talk about this today is Joe LeBlanc who is a senior software engineer at True Link Financial in our very own beloved Austin, Texas. Hey, Joe. JOE: Hi. CHARLES: Thanks for coming on the show. We're going to be talking about collaboration and I was thinking we could kick off the discussion talking about pull requests because that's typically one of the ways that we collaborate on code. That's really where the rubber tends to hit the road. You have particular interest in the dynamics of a pull request. What experience kind of led you to that interest? JOE: My background has been doing a lot of work as a freelancer. And when you work as a freelancer or do agency work, a lot of times you are really the only software developer that is around or you're working with maybe one or two other people. And I didn't get a lot of opportunity for pull request reviews. Mine was in that space. And then when I moved to a full time job at a place where I was one among maybe half a dozen or a dozen engineers, that's when I really began to get interested in how I could be better at giving pull request reviews and also submitting pull requests that people want to review. CHARLES: What made you notice the need for this? JOE: What would happen is someone would submit a pull request and there would suddenly be just dozens and dozens of comments coming in that were just kind of difficult to keep track of and often were maybe talking about things that didn't necessarily need to be reviewed as a part of that pull request or addressed, maybe things that could be caught by a linter. CHARLES: Right. JOE: And other tools that are a little bit easier to receive feedback from. Like it's easier to have a tool tell you your spacing is off than have me tell that to you. CHARLES: Right. And really that seems like the spacing is off, that's kind of like if you need to deliver that feedback, that's kind of like not what you want to lead with. If you don't have linting in place like after all other issues are sorted out. JOE: Yeah. CHARLES: But it sounds like what you're describing is people who have kind of swarmed over a pull request each with their own kind of pet peeve issue. JOE: Yeah. And then you're just left with this long list of comments to go back and address and you're pushing up more and more commits. And by the end of it, you could have more than 100 comments on this PR. And you thought that you were going to get this done in a day or two, and then suddenly it's the end of the sprint and it's like, "Oh fine, then I get to merge this." CHARLES: And typically, it's actually, in my opinion, an anti-pattern when you have like 10 mergers that happen on the second last day of the sprint or the last day of the sprint. There's always issues with that, right? Ideally, you are merging code throughout the course of the sprint. It kind of like defeats the purpose almost. I guess you're doing your integration in shorter periods but even so, tons of stuff is bound to break when everybody's pushing and everyone's rushing. JOE: Yup. TARAS: So, what would happen in that situation, in your experience, when you have this pull request that a lot of people are commenting on and some of the comments could be add

Sam joins the panelists to talk about frontend and backend team collaboration. Resources: Worse is better The Tao of Microservices by Richard Rodger Sam Joseph is a CoFounder of AgileVentures, a charity that helps groups of volunteers gather online to develop open source solutions for other charities all around the world. Sam’s been mucking about with computers since the early 80s and followed the traditional education system through to a PhD in Neural Nets. Next he went all industry, researching mobile agents at Toshiba in Japan, going freelance and then swung back to academia to research peer to peer system and collaborative systems. He now spends the majority of his time trying to make AgileVentures a sustainable charity enterprise, with occasional moonlighting as a contract programmer. Check out his blog at nonprofits.agileventures.org. Please join us in these conversations! If you or someone you know would be a perfect guest, please get in touch with us at [email protected]. Our goal is to get people thinking on the platform level which includes tooling, internalization, state management, routing, upgrade, and the data layer. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. TRANSCRIPT: CHARLES: Welcome to The Frontside Podcast, the place where we talk about user interfaces and everything that you need to know to build it right. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at the Frontside. With today also is TARAS: Mankovski. TARAS:: Hello, hello. CHARLES: Hey, TARAS:. Today we're going to be continuing our theme when we think about UI platforms and web platforms, continuing the theme of collaboration and with us to talk about this is Sam Joseph. Welcome, Sam. SAM: Hi, thanks for having me. CHARLES: We've already talked a great deal about how the way in which your team collaborates and the communication that happens between your team and between the different pieces of software, your system, form one of the pillars of the platform that you can't just take lightly. You need to actually be intentful about that. I was thinking we could kind of start today's discussion, kind of talking about some of those collaborations. One that we've probably all encountered, which is usually teams will be split into people who are focused on frontend, people who are focused on backend systems, kind of the services that make sure that all of the nodes that are running on our laptops and our desktops and stuff are running smoothly and error-free and obviously, those two groups of people can sometimes arrive with different sets of priorities and how do we resolve those priorities to make sure that that communication flows freely. TARAS:: What's interesting about these frontend and the backend teams is that our users are not seeing that separation. They only see one thing. They only touch one thing. They actually see as one group but there's tends of be this kind of split between the frontend and the backend. It's kind of interesting that how the user get into this. SAM: Yeah. Obviously in some teams, there's a very clear cut distinction between people at the backend and working with the components that are serving JSON over the API and there are some people who are very, very focused on the frontend and drilling CSS and a number of bits and pieces or even just staying explicitly on the design or UX design and there's a mythical full stack developer who is up and down the platform. It doesn't run exactly in parallel but there is this key thing which is almost how much sympathy or empathy can you have for another person who is not you, trying to use something that you set up. If there was a direct parallel, you'd say, "Obviously, all people who will be working on the frontend are more of that sort of person and perhaps, the people on the backend are not so much that sort of person," but actually, I think you can have people who are doing backend stuff and they're designing API is very, very thoughtfully or the kind of people that consumes those APIs and sometimes, you can have people who are very, very focused on the design and the aesthetics when not necessarily so plugged into how will someone else use this, how will it fits into their lifestyle, which might be very different from my own, so that's maybe another axis, if you know what I mean apart from this sort of pure technical [inaudible]. Does that makes any sense? TARAS:: Yeah. What's interesting is that everyone is trying to do a great job. Everyone is setting out to do something really good. What people's way of expressing good might be different, so if someone could be really focused on the quality of their code like they want to do their version of doing a really, really good job is doing the best code they could write. Sometimes that doesn't necessarily equate to the best user experience. I think everyone that I've met -- engineers who are writing code, almost everyone that I know is trying to do a really good job. If everyone i

Jacob joins the panelists to talk about team collaboration based on his RubyConf 2017 talk, Code Reviews: Honesty, Kindness, Inspiration: Pick Three. Jacob Stoebel is a software developer living in Berea, KY. He spends his days writing web applications in Ruby, JavaScript, and Python, working with data, and leveling up as a software engineer. He works and studies at Berea College. You can find out more about Jacob at jstoebel.com. Please join us in these conversations! If you or someone you know would be a perfect guest, please get in touch with us at [email protected]. Our goal is to get people thinking on the platform level which includes tooling, internalization, state management, routing, upgrade, and the data layer. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. TRANSCRIPT: CHARLES: Hello and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, the place where we talk about user interfaces and everything that you need to know to build it right. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer at the Frontside. With me today from Frontside also, is Taras Mankovski. TARAS: Hello, hello. CHARLES: Hello, Taras and today, we're going to be talking like we do every time about a piece of the platform that you used to develop user interfaces frontside at your company or organization or wherever it is that you build software. Today we're going to be talking about a piece of the platform that's very, very critical that often gets short shrift or is excluded entirely from what people think of when they think about their tech stack and that's how we as teams collaborate to build and maintain and produce the quality software that we can. With us today is Jacob Stoebel. Welcome, Jacob. JACOB: Hello. CHARLES: Now, what is it that you do, in your day-to-day? JACOB: I'm a full-stack developer for a little company called ePublishing and I mostly work in Rails and React. CHARLES: Rails and React and so, when we were searching for people to talk about how we collaborate these teams, Mandy suggested you because of a talk that you've given at a RubyConf, specifically about code reviews, which I think are actually a huge piece of the collaboration process because it's a major forum where team members get to interact with each other and it's the gateway for making sure code quality is maintained but more than that, I think it's a learning -- a place where we learn. I learned so much both as a reviewer and as someone who is submitting my work and so, it's actually a very important part of the software development process. You have a lot of great examples of how to not do code reviews. JACOB: Yeah, I think I may have been a little bit too indulgent in that talk. I had a lot of fun. I did some research from other people, mainly from anecdotes. I had research from talking to people about really, all the anti-patterns that come out of code reviews. It seems like every few weeks, I'll see a tweet that says something along the lines about how code reviews are broken. I don't really know about that and I have to say, I think I'm kind of lucky at my job that I think they're done in a way that really leaves me feeling pretty positive and that's certainly a good thing but I think what it comes down to -- I'm going to sort of talk about where these ideas come from in a minute -- is that we often have code reviews that for one -- and you can tell me how this is for you too -- often the code review is happening at a point so late in the process, where the feedback that you get may not be actionable. Have you experienced that? JACOB: Before I answer that question, just to kind of echo the sentiment and maybe I'm being presumptuous, I feel like the code reviews that we do are actually very positive, so I haven't got to experience firsthand. Although I have seen conversations on GitHub where it looks kind of like a Celebrity Chef, where you have someone doing the code reviews like Gordon Ramsay up there just screaming and someone has put this plate of food in front of them and kind of picking it apart. That one is extreme but this is actually something that I struggle with, what you were talking about, what is the appropriate point at which to get feedback. I agree that you want to get feedback as soon as possible and sometimes, when you've invested weeks and weeks into something or you're like at Mile 100 and they're like, "You know, at Mile 2, you were supposed to turn right," and now, you're off in the forest and you've been tracking 98 miles in the wrong direction. JACOB: Yeah and the work is due, right? This needs to get ships tomorrow. CHARLES: Right, so you've got massive pressure. This is something that I struggle with myself is when is an appropriate time to really try and be public about what it is that you're doing. JACOB: Yeah. I think that is a really good question and I think what you're getting at and I would agree is that, the sooner, the better and when you can tighten the intervals between feedback is probably bette

Here it is, folks! The first episode of our newly rebranded "Frontside Platform Podcast". In this episode, we talk about why platform? What is going to come out of these conversations over time? Our goal is to get people thinking on the platform level which includes tooling, internalization, state management, routing, upgrade, and the data layer. We also want to get people thinking categorically, rather than in the moment: Planning strategically Recognizing and knowing obstacles - matching Don't want the framework, but still have the problems Virtue is a weakness in different contexts Laziness is a virtue but also a weakness Not a question of can Shared problem Please join us in these conversations! If you or someone you know would be a perfect guest, please get in touch with us at [email protected]. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC.

We're rebooting The Frontside podcast with a focus on JavaScript platforms. We'll zero-in on what it takes to build, maintain and grow web applications using popular JavaScript frameworks and tools. Join us for deep architectural conversations, interviews with fascinating speakers and stories from the the trenches of building large platforms.

Special Guest: Kris Van Houten: @krivaten | krivaten.com In this episode, we are joined by Kris Van Houten to chat about Functional CSS and Styled Components: pros and cons, the problems that they are trying to solve, and how to choose between one or the other. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: DAVID: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 116 of The Frontside Podcast. I'm David Keathley, a software developer here at Frontside and I'll be your host for today's episode. Joining me as a co-host is Jeffrey Cherewaty. JEFFREY:: Hey, there. DAVID: And we've got an amazing guest with us today, Kris Van Houten. Kris is the author of a very interesting functional CSS library called Elassus, a good friend of mine and today, we're going to be talking about how that compares with another new pattern I've been seeing everywhere recently: styled-components. Hi Kris. KRIS: Hey, how's it going? DAVID: Doing great. Let's just go ahead and jump into things. Kris, you want to give us a little introduction to your functional CSS library? KRIS: Yeah, for sure. I guess, first of all about me. I've been primarily a frontend developer for about seven or eight years now. I don't know, at some point you start losing count but over the years, I worked largely within the Ember framework but I've also worked within React and Vue. Like most of developers over the years, you tend to require an affinity towards certain areas of software development and for me, those areas tend to lean towards accessibility but also, learning how to write CSS with what I call like the future in mind. To try to keep the story as short as possible but a couple of years ago, I was working on a project and started to realize that our CSS is one of those things that just continues to grow over time along with the rest of our application but I also noticed that we tend to have a lot of areas of repetition within our CSS, like how many times are we setting text align to center, how many times are we setting the text color to the primary color or to gray or something of that nature and maybe we could create a utility library that just does all the stuff for us, similar to if you've ever worked with Bootstrap that they had utility classes that allow you to do some things like set the text alignment or the text color or font size and things of that nature. I started thinking around it but eventually, I changed jobs and that idea kind of just went to the side but then, I'd say about a year and a half or two years ago, I came across a blog post called '15kb of CSS is all you’ll ever need' and so, immediately I was intrigued. It was actually a blog post on Medium that was talking about the benefits of using something like Tachyons or base CSS, which are two different functional CSS libraries. To explain what I mean by functional CSS, it's just a whole library, a whole arsenal of these utility classes that just do one or two things that allow you to basically take any design and implement it by composing all these classes together throughout your HTML. I was looking at Tachyons, looking at base CSS and thinking, there's a couple of things I like to customize about this but at the time, when I was looking at it, I couldn't really figure out how to customize those values very easily and so, I did every developer does and just decided to make my own and that's where Elassus came into play, where it's a CSS library that is entirely made up of functions that generate your CSS based off of the value of variables in Sass. Everything is customizable, all the way down to how the class names look and the syntax that you use. If you hate what I'm doing, you can customize it very easily. A lot of people might wonder why would you want to use functional CSS, what are the benefits that you get out of it and really, one of the first two things that comes to mind for me that really attracted me to it was that your CSS files start small and they stay small. For the most part, depending on the configuration and the particular library that you're using, your entire CSS payload can be anywhere from 10 to 20 kilobytes, minified and gzipped, which is in stark contrast to some other projects I've worked on, where just one of the many CSS files you're downloading are 745 kilobytes. Dramatic improvements there, so that's why it was instantly appealing to me. But one of the other nice things you kind of get for free by default is a consistent design pattern, right out of the box. Because if you're working on a large team that has maybe multiple designers and many developers, one designer might implement something with the spacing system that's maybe based on five pixels: your padding, your margins, your widths, might be five, 10, 15, 30 pixels, 45 pixels but then maybe, another designer is implementing something based off of more material design, which is base-4 pixels, so it's like four pixels, eight pixels, 16 and so on. Over time, little differe

In this internal episode, Charles and Wil talk about testing issues and BigTest solutions. Pieces of the testing story are discussed, such as the start and launch application, component setup and teardown, interacting with the application and component, convergent assertions, and network. Then they talk about testing issues: the fact that cross browser and device-simulated browsers are not good enough, maintainability and when and when not to DRY (RYE), slowness and why (acceptance) testing is slow, portability and why tests are coupled to the framework, and reliability. Finally, they talk about BigTest solutions: @bigtest/cli to start / launch (Karma recommended for now) @bigtest/react, @bigtest/vue, etc for setup & teardown @bigtest/interactor for interactions @bigtest/convergence for assertions @bigtest/network in the future (Mirage recommended for now) Resources: Justin Searls – Please don’t mock me This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 115. My name is Charles Lowell, this episode's host and a developer here at the Frontside. With me today to talk some shop is Mr Wil Wilsman. WIL: Hello. CHARLES: Hello, Wil. WIL: How's it going? CHARLES: It's going good. I'm actually pretty excited to get to jump into this topic because we're going to be talking about some of the big things that are happening at Frontside and some of the things that we've been developing in almost for the last year. WIL: Yeah. It's been about a year now. CHARLES: It's been about a year and we've talked about it in various podcast but we're going to be talking about it again because there's just been so much progress that we've made, I think in a lot of clarity in kind of what we're going for here when we talk about BigTest and testing big and how we want to roll out the BigTest framework. We just have a lot more experience using it on a number of different projects, so we get to talk about that today. Before we get started, I just wanted to talk a little bit about what BigTest is, both in terms of the framework and also the philosophy. Wil, you're the one who works the most on BigTest. When you think about philosophically, what does BigTest mean to you? WIL: It's the size of your test, not a physical size like size and storage but how much your task actually does. The test itself can be very small as our test are but it tests the whole application from the user interacting with it down to the network requests. That's the definition of the philosophy of a BigTest to me. It's to tests your application from the biggest point of view. CHARLES: Actually, achieving that can be surprisingly difficult, especially in a frontend JavaScript application and there are a lot of solutions out there for testing and we've talked about them. One of the questions that arises is when we talk about BigTest, what exactly are we talking about? Are we talking about a product that you can download and install? Are we talking about the philosophy that you just outlined? Or are we talking about the individual pieces of software that make that philosophy real? I think the answer is we're kind of talking about all three but we want to take this episode to talk about where we're going with the product. What we've identified is the subcomponent pieces of that product. In other words, in order to get started testing big, what are the things that you need to think about? What are the things that you need to do? And then what are the component pieces? Because one of the things that I think is very important to us is that you be able to arrive at wherever you are in your project, whatever framework you are using, whatever current testing solution and be able to begin using BigTest. That means, you might be using some of it or you might be using a lot of it but we want to meet you exactly where you are, so that you can then, get onboarded and start testing big. WIL: Yeah. Definitely an important distinction that we get confusion about is what is BigTests and people just assume like this whole test suite is BigTest but we used the parts of it ourselves like we use Mocha, which is not part of BigTest. We use Chai, which is not part of BigTest. We use Mirage which is kind of part of BigTest but definitely it originate in BigTest and Karma and things like that. BigTest isn't your testing suite. It's not one thing to go-to to grab, to start writing tests. It is a small pieces that you can use in conjunction with other small pieces, just to make it really easy and flexible to test your application. CHARLES: Exactly. Because it turns out that there's a lot going on in the application. Maybe we should talk about what some of those pieces are that you might want to start using BigTest with or that you might need to test big, I guess I should say. What's a good place to start? Let's start with talking about some of the issues that you want to do when your testin

Guest: Dillon Kearns: @dillontkearns | GitHub | Incremental Elm In this episode, Dillon Kearns joins the show to talk about techniques for experimentation with Elm, making those experiments safe, the concept of mob programming, why you would want to experiment with Elm in the first place, and how you too can begin to experiment with Elm. Resources: Grant Maki's talk on experimenting in your team "Types Without Borders" by Dillon Kearns @ Elm Conf 2018 Dillon's Elm GraphQL library How Elm Code Tends Towards Simplicity by Dillon Kearns The CSS as ByteCode Talk by Richard Feldman This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 114. My name is Charles Lowell. I'm a developer here at the Frontside. With me today as co-host on the show is David. Hello, David. DAVID: Hey, guys. CHARLES: David is also a developer here at Frontside and we are going to be talking about something that we've been talking, I guess a lot about recently and we're talking about Elm. I think we first started talking about this several years ago and then it kind of simmer down a little bit but recently, it's been top of tongue. With us to talk about Elm today is Dillon Kearns. Welcome Dillon. DILLON: Thank you so much for having me. CHARLES: I understand that you are a full time Elm consultant. You have a background as a Lean and Agile coach but have recently transitioned to doing Elm consulting full time. Now, what exactly does that mean in 2018 to be an Elm consultant. DILLON: Actually a lot of my motivation for getting into Elm consulting in the first place is I kind of realize that Elm to me is just an extension of the things that I was passionate about with Agile and software craftsmanship. I'm trying to help teams have a better experience with their code, make it more maintainable, make it easier to change, make it easier to drive things based on customer feedback and I really believe that Elm helps people do that. I used a lot of the background and experiences that I've had with Agile and Lean coaching and a lot of those same skills, in order to help organizations adopt Elm. One thing I've seen a lot of teams struggling with is trying out a lot of different frameworks. I've encountered teams that have spent months, very painfully trying out different frontend frameworks and having trouble coming to consensus about that. One of the things that I think really helps address that is having an experimental and iterative approach, that you can really use the scientific method to focus on learning, rather than getting it right the first time. I think that there's really a need to help teams through that process of introducing a new frontend framework like Elm, so that that's why I've gone into full time Elm consulting. CHARLES: That's an interesting process. It sounds like you really need to be constantly sending out spikes, doing research on whether it's Elm or some other technology to help you kind of bridge the chasm to the next generation. How do you actually do that as an organization? My guess, this kind of a question independent of Elm but maybe we can talk about how you see that play out in the context of Elm. DILLON: Right and actually, for any listeners interested in that question, I would really highly recommend Grant Maki's ElmConf talk from this year. He spoke about exactly that topic and it was at ElmConf that it's relevant whether your team is considering Elm or looking at other frameworks. I think that the key is you need to get good at experimenting in a way that's low risk and in a way that you can be constantly learning and seeing how these different technologies fit in your codebase and fit for your team. There's a quote that I really like from Woody Zuill. Have you guys heard of mob programming before? CHARLES: I heard of mob programming from a paper by Richard Garfield a long, long time ago, almost 20... I don't know if it's the same concept. DILLON: Yes. It gained a lot of momentum these days. Mob programming is essentially pair programming but with more people involved. I've really enjoyed that process actually. I think it's actually a great way to experiment with different technologies because you get all of the minds together and it's a very good way to kind of transfer knowledge and explore things together but Woody Zuill talks about mob programming and he likes to ask the question, "Why did we begin doing mob programming for the team at Hunter Industries that originally started mob programming?" People would give answers like, "Because it cuts out code review from the process because you have lots of eyeballs on it in real time," or, "Because it reduces bugs," or, "Because it gives you better quality code. It gives all the best ideas into the product in real time," and all those things are valid points that are really good benefits of mob programming. But he