Today's episode is a My JavaScript Story with Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross talked about his contributions to the JavaScript community to the decentralized web. Listen to learn more about Mike!

Feross was on episode 155 and he talked about Webtorrent. It was 2 years ago.

Toddler

Feross has always been interested in computers and technology. His mom told him a story about how when he was a toddler, he was always watching people whenever they’re using technology – the television, the microwave, or the VCR. She said that he’s trying to imitate what he saw.

HTML and Web proxies

According to Feross, he became seriously interested when he was in middle school when he learned about HTML and wanted to make a personal site. In high school, there was this class that you could take. It’s a tech team where they went around and fixed teachers’ computers because they were understaffed. Some of the computers have administrator privileges turned on for the student accounts as well because some of the software that was required for certain classes needed it. The computers always had viruses on them because people would install first-person shooters and play during class time. They actually have school-wide filtering system so students can’t access certain sites. One of the categories they blocked was downloading sites. In order to even do their job, they have to figure out web proxies to get around the filters. He ended up setting up one of those on his own server.

First website

Feross’ real programming experience was PHP. It was in his junior year of high school. He bought a book in Barnes & Noble about PHP and MySQL. He wanted to build a site to host his favorite flash animations. That project was a database-driven website where people can segment their flash animations and soundboards, prank phone calls, and other internet humor. The site was called freetoflash. That was the first website that he built.

Feross thinks JavaScript is one of those languages that you don’t actually really bother to sit down and learn. There weren’t any good resources. According to him, He really didn’t know JavaScript until he started a company right after he graduated from college. He started taking JavaScript seriously because he was learning Node.js and realized that you can build real things from it. The start-up is called PeerCDN. They’re trying to make a content delivery network that would work in the browser using WebRTC. The idea is you would add a script tag to your website and then we would try to find other people visiting your site that already has the content that you want, you’ll fetch it from them over a peer-to-peer connection to save on your hosting build to reduce your CDN bill. That was a big Node application. It also has intense front-end component. He started learning about NPM, how you build things with microservices, and how do you deploy a JavaScript application. That was in 2013.

Feross has been trying to transition Webtorrent into a distributed contribution model. It’s always been something that he would give out commit rights. If someone makes a good contribution, he’ll just add them to the Github for it. He recently made it into an organization on Github. He’s hoping to make it something that’s not completely dependent on him in order for it to continue existing. He’s going to be involved with it for the foreseeable future but he’s also trying to do new projects as well besides that. The good news is Webtorrent is mostly done in some sense. It works well. There are bugs. But if you use Webtorrent, especially if you use the desktop application to torrent things, it’s really polished and works nicely.

Feross Aboukhadijeh

Charles Max Wood