Software Engineering Daily

Brendan Eich created the first version of JavaScript in 10 days. Since then JavaScript has evolved, and Brendan has watched the growth of the web give rise to new and unexpected use cases.

Today Brendan Eich is still pushing the web forward across the technology stack with his involvement in the WebAssembly specification and the Brave browser.

For all of its progress, JavaScript struggles to run resource-intensive programs like complex video games. With JavaScript falling short on its charge to be the “assembly language for the web” the four major browser vendors started collaborating on the WebAssembly project to allow programming languages a faster, lower level compile target when deploying to the web.

Brendan is the CEO of Brave which aims to provide a faster and safer browsing experience by blocking ads and trackers by default in a new browser. The Brave browser is also helping publishers monetize in interesting new ways while also giving a share of ad revenue to its users.

Caleb Meredith is the host of this show. He previously guest hosted a popular episode on Inferno, a fast, React-like JavaScript framework. As we bring on more guest hosts, please send us feedback. We want to know what every host is doing well, and what we can improve on.

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Over the past few years, React has become the most popular front end JavaScript framework. As React has matured, the open source community around React has identified areas for improvement. Since React itself is too mature to refactor completely, new projects have been started to take the best aspects of React and start from scratch.

Inferno is an extremely fast, React-like JavaScript library for building modern user interfaces. Dominic Gannaway is the creator of Inferno and in this episode he joins Caleb Meredith for an interview about Inferno and other React-like JavaScript libraries.

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Netflix has a highly interactive user interface. As I move my mouse around the page, hovering over titles and inspecting movie descriptions, there is a lot going on under the hood. One component of this UI is RxJS, a library for building reactive JavaScript. Reactive programming uses the observer pattern to create objects that emit streams of events. We can compose these streams together to create elegant abstractions.

Reactive programming may seem confusing at first, but it can simplify certain patterns that may be hard to describe with imperative programming. Ben Lesh, a senior software engineer at Netflix, joins the show to explain why reactive programming is useful, and how RxJS is used at Netflix.

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Scala is a functional programming language built on the JVM. For more than a decade, this didn’t mean anything to front end web developers. More recently, ScalaJS has brought Scala to the front end. ScalaJS is a project that compiles any Scala program down to JavaScript–so that all of your Scala programs can run on the browser.

Haoyi Li has worked on ScalaJS extensively and has written an online book about ScalaJS. If you are a front end developer looking for a safer way to write your web apps, you will like this episode–or if you are a fan of functional programming.

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JavaScript programming usually is done through the use of frameworks, such as ReactJS, AngularJS, and EmberJS. These frameworks abstract away some of the messy details of JavaScript, and simplify web development so that engineers can build products at a faster pace. When we build software using JavaScript frameworks, we are missing out on some of the richness of the JavaScript language itself.

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Smart phone apps have better performance than web apps. When we have an application that we use on a regular basis, we download that application to a smart phone rather than using the browser based version on our mobile browser. Google’s Polymer Project wants to improve the gap between native app performance and mobile web app performance. The key problem with the mobile web is that we are sending huge JavaScript bundles to mobile devices, which inhibits performance. The Polymer Project is working to build more functionality into our mobile browsers so that it is easier to load these heavy web applications.

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React started as just a view layer–it was the V in MVC. React has moved down the stack, with Flux, Redux, GraphQL, and Relay providing opinions for how React applications should structure their data flow.

Jared Forsyth works at Khan Academy, which uses React on the front end. At Khan Academy, Jared has experimented with many different ways of handling data flow for a React application, and in today’s episode we not only discuss the conventional tools for React applications, but also ClojureScript, Reframe, and Om/next, which are solutions for React data handling, that are outside of the world of raw JavaScript.

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Frontend web development was simpler in the past–CSS, HTML, and JavaScript were all you needed to know. Today, we have mobile web, React, Angular, PHP, JQuery, and so much more.

Marc Grabanski focuses on what he believes is timeless–pure JavaScript. Marc is the founder of Frontend Masters, a training site for developers who want to build quality web interfaces. He joins us today to discuss the shifting nature of front end development.

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Code analysis tools can help a developer understand code. One tool for code analysis is bitHound, which provides code and dependency analysis for NodeJS applications. On today’s episode, we discuss how to use a code analysis tool–and we also talk about how to build one, by breaking down the distributed architecture of bitHound’s backend.

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