Software Engineering Daily

Content websites are supported by advertising. Most of the advertisements around the internet are dynamic ad slots that change depending on the user who visits the site. Those dynamic ad slots are available to a variety of different bidders. For each ad slot, an auction occurs. The highest bidder gets to serve an ad for that slot.

Praneet Sharma is the co-founder of Method Media Intelligence, which he founded with Shailin Dhar, who has been on the show several times to discuss his investigations into the world of ad fraud. I wanted to have his partner Praneet on the show to get his perspective on ad fraud and how to clean up the advertising ecosystem.

One advance in dynamic advertising that we discussed is header bidding, and an open source library called PrebidJS.

When an ad-supported website gets delivered to your web browser, the HTML begins to load and the JavaScript on the page begins to execute. Some of that JavaScript is calling out to advertising networks looking for the highest bidder. Until the page receives a callback for what to put in the ad slots on the page, the page will not finish loading. Sites that do not manage their ad requests appropriately suffer performance issues.

Header bidding is a technique to wrap all of the requests to different advertising exchanges in a single serialized blob of code at the top of the page.

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GatsbyJS is a framework for building web applications for JavaScript. Gatsby’s original goal was to allow users to create super fast static web sites that could be hosted and served efficiently at a low cost. Most web pages have components from a framework like React or Angular that need to render after the user requests them. This rendering can sometimes require additional requests to external data sources, causing the page to take longer to load.

Gatsby uses GraphQL to pull in data at build time and pre-render as much of a site as possible using React’s server side rendering. When a page built with Gatsby is served to a user, as much of the page has been rendered as possible, so that the browser can quickly load everything on the page without additional network requests.

Kyle Mathews is the creator of GatsbyJS. He joins the show to describe why he created Gatsby–the high level goals and low level engineering decisions. We also discuss how Kyle intends to take Gatsby beyond just an open source project and turn it into a business.

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Slack is an application for team communication. Users chat across mobile devices, web browsers, and a desktop application, which means Slack has three places to deploy on rather than two. And the desktop apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux are not identical, so Slack has even more places to deploy.

With so many different runtime environments, Slack needs to make technology choices that reduce the chance of errors. TypeScript allows for static typing of JavaScript. The extra compilation step checks the types of variables being passed between different places–so the errors will be discovered at compile time. In an untyped world, those errors might occur at runtime. TypeScript also unlocks the ability to put JavaScript code in an IDE, allowing for more efficient development.

Felix Rieseberg is a desktop engineer at Slack, and in today’s episode he explains the unique challenges of building Slack, and why the team moved from JavaScript to TypeScript.

TypeScript at Slack – engineering blog

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Animations make an application more fun and engaging. For most apps, animation is an afterthought. Developers are concerned with getting the functionality right, and designers have enough work to do simply getting icons, text formatting, and page layout correct.

There is also the issue of cross-device compatibility. iOS, Android, and web have different ways of doing animation, with no unifying standard–except gifs, and gifs are not interactive, they simply play from start to finish.

Airbnb’s emphasis on design makes it the right company to work on the problem of cross-device, interactive animations. Brandon Withrow and Gabriel Peal are engineers who work on Lottie, a library for animations in iOS, Android, web, and React Native.

This episode is about how and why Lottie was built, and how Lottie gets used within Airbnb.

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JavaScript is moving so fast. It’s not easy to keep up with all of the frameworks, build tools, and packages. No other language spans frontend to backend, mobile to web to server.

Sacha Greif is an independent designer and developer most prominent in his roles as co-author of Discover Meteor and community builder at Sidebar.io, a design newsletter with over 35,000 subscribers, and Hacker News Kansai. He is currently best known in the Javascript community as the maintainer of VulcanJS, and for his annual State of Javascript survey which is now open for 2017.

In this episode, Shawn Wang guests hosts a discussion about both projects and Sacha’s thoughts on independent web design and development.

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Airbnb is a company that is driven by design. New user interfaces are dreamed up by designers and implemented for web, iOS, and Android. This implementation process takes a lot of resources, but it used to take even more before the company started using React Native. React Native allows Airbnb to reuse components effectively.

React Native works by presenting a consistent model for the user interface regardless of the underlying platform, and emitting a log of changes to that user interface. The underlying platform translates those changes into platform specific code.

Leland Richardson is an engineer at Airbnb. In today’s episode, he explains how Airbnb uses React Native, how React Native works, and the future of the platform.

Check out our new topic feeds, in iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. We’ve sorted all 500 of our old episodes into categories like business, blockchain, cloud engineering, JavaScript, machine learning, and greatest hits. Whatever specific area of software you are curious about, we have a feed for you. Check the show notes for more details.

React Europe Talk 

Airbnb article on react-sketchapp

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React Native allows developers to reuse components from one user interface on multiple platforms. React Native was introduced by Facebook to reduce the pain of teams who were rewriting their user interfaces for web, iOS, and Android.

Nader Dabit hosts React Native Radio, a podcast about React Native. Nader also trains companies to use React Native through his company React Native Training. In this episode, we explore what a developer can and cannot do with React Native, when a developer needs to use native APIs, and some speculation on the future of React Native.

This episode is a good preface for tomorrow’s episode about React Native Interfaces with Leland Richardson of Airbnb. In that episode we will dive deeper into how React Native works and just how big of a change it could be for cross-platform developers.

Check out our new topic feeds, in iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. We’ve sorted all 500 of our old episodes into categories like business, blockchain, cloud engineering, JavaScript, machine learning, and greatest hits. Whatever specific area of software you are curious about, we have a feed for you. Check the show notes for more details.

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React Native has unlocked native mobile development to web engineers who may now apply their skills to build iOS and Android applications in JavaScript. For the first time, cross platform JavaScript-based applications feel as if they were written in the native language of choice for the platforms.

Businesses who choose to adopt React Native for their native app development also see great benefits such as the ability to push new JavaScript code without going through the app store review process, and the ability to share code and business behaviors across the iOS and Android platforms.

Expo is building a cross-platform native runtime for React Native. Expo brings the benefits of deployment and iterative development to native without sacrificing any user experience costs. Expo plans to do this with their native SDK, custom development environment, and tools built in collaboration with Facebook like create-react-native-app.

React Native has the incredible potential to revolutionize all user interface development with its core set of cross-platform UI primitives, and React’s popular declarative rendering pattern. So in this episode Brent Vatne and Adam Perry join Caleb Meredith to first discuss Expo and the future of React Native to try and answer the question: can React Native become the one UI framework to rule them all?

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