The Frontside Podcast

Guest:

In this episode, Charles and Sam talk to Saron Yitbarek about her idea of mentorship, ideas for distributed learning for businesses to promote individual and company growth, and why it's important to take "digital sabbaths" on the regular.

This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC.

Transcript:

SAM: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode 110 of The Frontside Podcast. My name is Sam Keathley. I'm a developer here at the Frontside and I will be your episode host. Today, we're here with Saron Yitbarek, discussing mentoring. She is the founder of CodeNewbie and the host of the CodeNewbie Podcast. Also with me as a co-host is Charles Lowell, who is also a developer at Frontside. Welcome Saron and welcome Charles. How are you guys doing?

SARON: Thanks for having me. I'm doing pretty well.

CHARLES: Hello.

SAM: Today is going to be an interesting take on the mentoring talk. I mostly want to know first off, Saron, how do you feel about mentoring? What are your opinions on the mentor-mentee relationship or the value there?

SARON: Yeah. I have lots of opinions on this topic. I think that the traditional structure of mentorship was usually looks like someone with less experience going to someone who has a lot more experience and say, "Will you be my mentor?" kind of like the children's book, 'Are You My Mother?' like 'Are you my mentor?' and then that person, that mother figure, that mentor looks after them and checks in on them and they have regular coffees and lunches and kind of steers them in the right, usually career-related direction.

I don't think that's very realistic, to be honest. I think about why that might be. There's many different reasons. I think the fact that we're so, so, so networked and there's just so many different ways to get in contact with people and build relationships is a big reason but I think that that traditional mentorship model, that kind of one directional way of doing things is just not really needed and kind of overrated.

I think that mentorship nowadays looks more like a mutually beneficial relationship, where I might reach out to someone who has more experience than me, for example in drawing, in art, not something I want to get to do but I know a crap-ton about podcasting, so I help you, you're my mentor in this specific area, in this specific topic but then, I get to be a mentor in this other thing that I'm really good at. I think it's those types of very focused topic-oriented, ideally two-way relationships that are more accurate and frankly, a more effective way of doing mentorship.

SAM: Yeah, I actually agree with that. I am pretty new myself to development, only really been in this career for about a year now and I always kind of consider that mentoring relationship as a regression back to school days, where you have these --

SARON: Yeah, yeah.

SAM: -- considered superior over you in some way, well, that's really not true in this community of developers and no matter where you are in development, it's all about working together and pairing. Working here has really showed me that value in paring, rather than like I have to look up to someone and regress back to feeling like a teenager in high school, like this person so good at this thing and they're the only one who can teach me. I definitely share that view of mentoring.

I went to a boot camp one day when they were telling you like, "Oh, you got to find a mentor. You got to find a mentor," and I was like, "Well, but why? Why do [inaudible] together?"

SARON: It's also a huge responsibility, a huge burden on the mentor too. Having to be, in a lot of ways, responsible for someone's career and trajectory and direction, that's a big responsibility. We don't have time for that, you know? On both ends, whether it's feeling like you're back in school or feeling like you have this huge responsibility, I think the traditional model isn't really the best model for either party.

I think this idea of let's all learn together, let's be really focused on topics and problems that are very particular to what I'm doing, what I'm learning, what I'm trying to do. I think that works out. It feels healthier for both people.

SAM: Absolutely.

CHARLES: I wonder also too, it seems like it might be a little bit of a throwback to the days when people would spend 30 years in a single company or 30, 35 years in a single career where you have these people who are really these reservoirs of this intense tribal knowledge. It seems like people move around a lot more in their careers, not only in the company that they work for but also in the things that they're literally doing.

I might be podcasting one day and producing a bunch of content and then, I might move into music or writing or other things like that. The careers seem to be broken apart a little bit more is one of the reasons why older models of advancement in those careers might not be as good a fit as they once were.

SARON: Yes, absolutely. I'm obviously very biased because I'm in tech but when you think about the different roles that people have in tech, I feel like we're always wearing so many different hats. We have to, obviously code and be technical in that sense but we have to be really good communicators, a lot of us are speakers, we host podcasts, we organize conferences, we go to meetups, we're bloggers, we do so many other things, that this idea of, "I'm going to have a mentor who can help me in my role of being a developer," is just too big. You kind of meet people who are good at those individual pieces and those individual skills to get me to where I want to go.

SAM: The whole idea of mentoring to me always reminded me of that whole Mr Miyagi relationship where you have this master of something and you're trying to learn from them. But in software development, I've learned that really no one is a master of anything because it's just changing so much and everything is so different.

SARON: Yup, absolutely.

CHARLES: The question is obviously, it seems like the idea that you're going to find one person who's going to represent the ideal confluence of every single skill set that you could hope to want, to be at some point in your career. That's looking more and more ludicrous. Is there a model where you can try and distribute those things, where you single out a large range of individuals? I guess the kind of what you were hinting at the beginning is that it is a lot more broken up, a lot more distributed but how do you pursue that, even if it is in a distributed manner?

SARON: Yeah, that's a great question. One of the moments where I realize that the distributed model is really the only way that makes sense is, I think it was three years ago maybe. We thought about doing some kind of mentorship program in CodeNewbies, some type of way for people to link up and find people who can be there and guide in a way and we had people fill out this survey that basically said what do you want out of a mentor, what do you look for, what do you hope for to achieve but also asked how do you see yourself. Do you see yourself as a mentor, a mentee or both?

It was really surprising that most people checked off both, which I thought was so interesting. It was so interesting to me that the same people who said, "I need help," with the same people who also said, "I also have help to give," and to me, that was such an amazing moment because I said, "Wow, it really isn't about this idea of I am the guide and I'm going to guide you." It's really about, "I have information expertise in one area and not in others."

What I realize is there really isn't a mentor model. I think it's more of a culture of being helpful, which probably sounds really cheesy but it's true. I really think it's about saying, "I know how to do a thing. I'm going to go on Stack Overflow and answer questions. I'm going to go on Twitter and answer questions. I'm going to write blog post and share with the world."

I think the real model, the real distributed mentoring model is us as individuals saying, "I just learned how to do a thing," or, "I just figured out how to do a thing well. Let me capture that. Let me capture it in a response, in an answer, in a forum, in a post and let me share that," and the more we do that as individuals, the more we have this huge amazing aggregate of knowledge that can serve as mentorship for all of us.

SAM: I like the touch on that. That's kind of the idea behind Codeland Conference, where everybody thought they might be new to development and everyone is just sharing their knowledge. You might feel you really knew about it but you know a lot more than you think you do and you could still help.

SARON: Yup, exactly and that's the whole idea, even the Twitter chats. When we first started, I don't have all the answers, I don't claim to, I don't really want that responsibility but I know there are a lot of people who do and I know a lot of people who have resources and opinions and who can help out. One thing that people do is they'll DM us and say, "I'm having a hard time with this." Sometimes, it's a very technical problems. Sometimes, it's a general 'I'm having a hard time getting a job,' which I do like high level question and I never answer them. I always say, "Tweet us and we'll retweet it and we'll get the whole community involved and we can have a rich conversation around it," and that's really been our motto, our philosophy.

I see what they do with mentorship. If you have a mentor, you're not obligated, I guess to listen to them but the idea is kind of that you should. There is one person and you should listen to them because they know more than you. I think that's just not really fair and instead, I like to think that there are lots of different ways to do things and it's up to you to decide what's best for you and in order for you to decide, you have to have a lot of options. With Codeland, with the Twitter chats, no matter what skill level you're at, no matter how confident you feel in your coding abilities, you do have something to offer. Let's pull that out. Let's put it on the table and let's see who you can help today.

SAM: That's a perfect way of introducing someone to the idea of helping or getting help from a community, rather than an individual because you never want to take one person's word as gospel on something you just know nothing about.

SARON: Yeah, exactly.

SAM: You can sound confident talking about something and it can be the total wrong answer but if you're seen as someone superior or someone who knows what they're doing --

SARON: And you can sell it.

SAM: Yeah. You can be the best snake oil salesman in the world.

SARON: Absolutely. For the CodeNewbie podcast, we do short questions at the end of each episode and one of the questions -- my favorite question -- is what's the worst advice you've ever received. I love that question because I started by saying, I think that people love giving advice. I think people love asking for advice and the assumption again is if I give you advice, then I probably know more and you should probably listen to me but that's not always true. I want people to be comfortable making their own decisions and deciding for themselves. "This may sound like it could work and this may sound like a good idea, generally speaking, but for me, it's probably not a good fit. It's probably not what's best for me," and to be comfortable rejecting advice and that was kind of the reason why I started that question, it's my favorite question and it's so interesting how much advice is good.

It’s kind of generic but it's a good advice. It's an advice like, "Don't quit. Keep going," which maybe a good idea and maybe you do need to quit, so being open to rejecting advice, I think is really important and that one of my favorite questions.

SAM: In your experience, what is the best way to reject advice? Because when you're a new developer, when you're new at anything and you're seeking advice from a community or from a person, you don't want to come off as rude or maybe you're feeling... I don't know, not very confident but you think the advice that you were given is just bad advice. What would your advice be? I guess, what would your advice be on this advice? For your perspective, what would be a good advice to reject advice that you think is just wrong?

SARON: Number one is when I ask people for advice, I try to think about and try to know upfront, do they have the same values that I do? Do they have the same worldview? Do they have the same goals? Because that's the thing too. Oh, my God, I got so much unsolicited advice. It's amazing. I've actually stopped just saying to people my ideas or what's on my mind because I know as soon as I say, "I'm thinking about this," I'll get a whole slew of unsolicited advice and I'm like, "I didn't ask for that."

What I've learned is first to kind of figure out are we even on the same page because if my goal is to be a developer, if your goal is to be -- the only thing I could think of is a juggler, I don't know why -- a juggler and I ask you for a career advice, I'm going to go ahead and safely assume that what you have to say is probably not as applicable to me and so, number one is kind of identifying that. But number two is if they say something that just I know is not going to work or I've already tried, I'll just nod and say, "Thank you very much," and kind of go about my day.

I don't think you have to declare whether or not you going to take it. I think just acknowledging and I think the people that give advice, I think they're trying to be helpful, they have good intentions, usually. Usually it's, "I'm trying to save you from making mistakes that I made and I'm trying to help you get to learn a little faster." I always appreciate it but knowing that I can say, "Thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your perspective," but know that I don't have to go off [inaudible].

SAM: That's actually very similar to my tactic. Just not like, "Thank you. Thank you so much. Don’t talk to me ever again." No.

SARON: And disappear, yeah.

SAM: I'm like the wind. With this pressure that either new developers or seasoned veterans are feeling about the mentor relationship, because I feel like a lot of senior developers that I've spoken with or people who've been in the business for a long time, feel like they should be mentoring or they need to take on that responsibility but there's always that hint of dread in their voice when they say about like, "Oh, I should be doing this." I always feel like it's okay to not do that. I never really understood why it was so high value to have this one-on-one relationship with an individual when you're not in school because it just feels so like... Not childish but childish.

SARON: Yeah, that's one of things, frankly that I love about the tech community and also do not understand about the tech community. It's such a giving knowledge sharing community, whether you do it in a tactful way or not in a tactful way but the idea of giving back and paying it forward is just so deep. It's so, so deep that even when I've been coding for only a couple of months, I still felt this, I don't want to call pressure because pressure kind of sounds a little negative but I definitely felt this expectation that I was supposed to be blogging, supposed to be sharing and shouting and helping and doing these pay it forward type things.

I don't really know where that comes from. Maybe that comes from the culture of open source, maybe that's where it kind of penetrate. I'm not sure but there's this huge need, desire, idea that we're supposed to be giving back and for that, I am very, very, very grateful. But I think that acknowledging that if you're someone who wants to be a mentor that you can do it simply by being available, literally being available, the going to be hashtag is super, super active even when we're not doing our Twitter chats and people use it to ask for help, they used it to ask questions.

If you're feeling particularly giving or extra helpful that day, go on Twitter and check the hashtag and see what questions people are asking. Things like that or just super helpful and don't require a huge amount of time and effort. There's a lot of small ways to help out. That may not seem like a big deal to you but for the person who's asking for help, who has been banging their head against the wall, it's hugely valuable.

SAM: Yeah, absolutely. Up until I went to my first conference this year, I didn't realize how supportive and important Twitter is. You know I always kind of considered it to be like another social media platform that I don't understand because I'm 84 years old and I just don't get it. It's been so uniquely helpful and in ways like Stack Overflow or even issues in GitHub, it just aren't. You can get so many more perspectives, so many different perspectives from people.

SARON: Yeah, absolutely. Twitter has been amazing exactly for that. It's just an efficient way to crowdsource opinions and crowdsource perspectives and when you get your question answered and someone else answers it, it doesn't only benefit you the way it would if you email someone but it benefits anyone else who comes across that page, so yeah, it's hugely valuable.

CHARLES: I remember the first moment I had kind of like that, a light bulb went off in my head where I was working on some really weird project that was using some strange wiki for its content storage and I was getting frustrated and I just tweeted about it and then the CTO of that company just immediately answered my question and I was like, "What?" You know, it was years ago and definitely, I was like, sound of explosion, that is where my mind exploded. I was not seeking help. I was just literally being kind of a jerk and venting frustration and lo and behold, the answer for my problem descended from the Twitter clouds. It was incredible.

SARON: The Twitter clouds are the best clouds, usually

CHARLES: Twitter is very... What's the word? It’s very split down in the middle.

SARON: Noodie? Yeah, there you go.

SAM: There's this live feedback, so there's no buffer of emotion there, you know?

SARON: Yeah.

SAM: It's like, "Oh, this thing that you said, it made me mad. I'm going to tell you about it right now." Charles, I know that you had mentioned before that you think mentoring would be a good idea for Frontside and then, after all this discussion, have your views stayed the same? What are you feeling about that?

CHARLES: As kind of the person who's like the grizzled veteran in the software world, it's definitely something that I've kind of whipped myself over the back. It's like feeling like it's something that we should do but I think it comes from the idea that people come here and we want to make sure that they're getting access to the learning that they need and the ways, in which they can level themselves up that they need, that's the kind of the prime motivator there.

I always perceived mentorship as some vehicle through which to achieve that. It's something that I've heard. Obviously, we don't have a mentorship program at our company. It's something I felt that we should always be investigating. I've always felt maybe a little bit bad that we didn't have it but it's also something that I really struggled with in my career because I can't really say that I've ever had a mentor, so I don't really know what that relationship would look like but I do have a lot of people that I learned a lot of critical things from. I can look at it as kind of these seminal moments in my career, where like light bulbs went off and a lot of the time, they're associated with an individual and that individual and the thing that they taught me or multiple things that they taught me, are still with me.

I have those experiences, which have been phenomenal and critical to my development as a software developer, so I guess it's just part and parcel of that impulse that you're describing to pay it forward, to realize that when you walked into the building, the lights were on and the walls were standing and the air was at a comfortable climate temperature. As you live there, you realize that there are people involved in actually, doing that maintenance and providing the building for you and the space for you to become aware of your world and then, when new people walk into the building, you want to provide them the same experience that you had.

I guess that's my take on. That's the kind of thing that I would want to provide, so the question is like what does mentoring or mentoring 3.0, as we're maybe talking about in this conversation, how does that fit into that? How would you implement something like this, some sort of distributed learning in a company? I don't know. Maybe, it's not worthwhile. Maybe it is.

SAM: I think it focuses more on that pair programming because when you're thinking back and you have all these people, like you have names of people that taught you something, it's multiple names. It's not just this one guy taught me all of these things. Actually, within a company, that mentoring just comes from pairing with your coworkers, seeing what different hats everybody wears and then, trying them on every now and again but not necessarily taking that individual's word as gospel, you know?

CHARLES: Right and hopefully, that's not something that we've advocated for. Maybe, it's how do you introduce structure around that, to make sure that the proper ferment is happening, so that you have novel pairings and make sure the ideas that are flowing are flowing around the entire company and not just through certain set channels.

SARON: Yeah. The other part of that is if you create structure around what it looks like to share outside. You know, pair programming is interesting because it's kind of one-on-one and it's hopefully, I have something important or bright to say in our pairing session. Maybe, I don't. Maybe I'm having a dull day. Maybe, I'm having a bad day but this really give you the same opportunity to take a moment and say, "What do I know? What do I want to share? What do I want to put together?" It does really give you a chance to prepare and gather yourself. It's kind of in the moment.

I think having another opportunity where you can gather yourself is important and so, that might look like brown bag lunches, where everyone takes a turn and has to do a little lightning talk. That's usually the opportunity to say, "I have five minutes. I'm going to share something." Everyone has a turn, which means that the company's literally saying everyone has something to say. It's only five minutes, only a few minutes, so hopefully it won't be too terrifying if you're not big on public speaking and it's your co-worker so hopefully, it won't be terrifying because it's people you know and not total strangers. You know, a format like that, where there's structure but the company is saying, "We're going to give you time to think about what you're good at and what you know and to share that is good."

I think another way to do that is by setting time aside for blogging. If your company can say, "Thirty minutes out of the week, we're going to take some time to write down five things I learned, to write down one cool thing I learned, post it publicly, post it internally about this expectation that everyone should be writing, everyone should be sharing, which also says everyone has something to share." I think those are two ideas and two ways that we can create a culture of sharing and a culture of distributed mentorship, where everyone has an opportunity to find the thing that they're excited about and specific ways to share it.

SAM: Yeah, that's excellent.

CHARLES: I hope you're grinning as much as I am, Sam because at least in the first half, you basically described our Lunch and Learn process. It's a little bit more than five minutes but I think another thing that clicked for me there is making sure that having a variation of expectations of quality or something like that because I feel like where we do really well is in the Lunch and Learn thing. We have a process very similar to what you describe but where we're not so good is maybe with blogging. I wonder if part of that is we just hold ourselves to such a high standard of what it is.

The idea that we could throw together a blog post in 30 minutes, I love that idea but it means you really have to be willing to just say, "You know what? We’re going to get it out there and we're going to make it bite-sized and the expectation is that we're not going to be writing some gigantic essay that's going to shake the industry to its core every Friday at three o'clock." There are things and if we can, I shouldn't say a reduction in quality but maybe a reduction in scope so that you can say like, "We're going to carve out 30 minutes or an hour and we're going to pick a topic that scope-appropriately for that."

SARON: Absolutely and I think that knowing that you only have 30 minutes or maybe it's an hour -- an hour is probably a little bit more realistic -- but knowing that you only have an hour also forces scope. You can't write a book about JavaScript in an hour. You just can't, so the fact that by the end of that hour, you have to have something to turn in is a great way to force people to focus and do something really small and really bite-sized.

The other thing is I don't think that after the hour, you need to publish it publicly. It could be, you need to turn it into someone else, to edit and look over for you and give you feedback. It's not quite ready yet but it's a solid first draft and the ideas that after that first person edits it, then it's on its way to being published. I think there's different ways to manage a scope without also making this scary thing where I have to say something for the Earth to shake. There's different things that we can do around that.

CHARLES: I'm wondering what other forms of sharing that we can fit into our workday. I guess, the other baseline is just making sure that you're always... What is it? ABT -- always be tweeting. It's so easy to be write-only, not even engaging conversations but just throwing ideas out into the void.

SAM: I think holding a discussion with your coworkers like if you're in an environment where you can work face to face or are constantly online, if you're more of a remote worker, I think just having a conversation with anybody, rather than just putting your idea out there, putting it out there with someone who can actually provide real time feedback in a more friendly way, then I think some people on Twitter could be. Because they're your coworkers and they're not going to call you rude names, you know?

CHARLES: Right and you're also going to know, hopefully the whole trust and intent and 'are we on the same page?' that question is answered even before the text is written.

SAM: Right.

SARON: Yeah, absolutely and with those conversations, this actually mean [inaudible] that we do. We do like a show and tell every week and the idea is that we're both always learning random things, usually related things but sometimes, totally random but still very interesting and it will take 30 minutes to just share what we've learned. Sometimes, they'll also turn it into a blog post. Sometimes, it's just a knowledge sharing opportunity. I'm not really sure but it's a good window of opportunity to say, "We are learning and we're sharing and we have something of value to bring."

The great thing about something like a show and tell is that it doesn't necessarily have to come from my brain. It doesn't have to be like, "I have a great idea that I'm going to share." It could be, "I read about this cool idea." It can be, "I heard about this cool thing that we can try and we can apply," but I still kind of credit, you know? Like I get credit for being the value bringer but the burden isn't on me every week to come up with the idea. That's a nice balance, to kind of create space to share and to promote this knowledge share and if it comes from you, it's great but if not, you're still helping other people.

CHARLES: I have a question that may or may not be related in here. This has just kind of occurred to me because this is definitely something that I experienced, where I get into a mode where I become overwhelmed by the ideas that people are sharing and so, what's the balance? Because usually, we're out there searching for ideas and we're searching for novel things so that we can include them in our work, in the things that we want to do and accomplish, whether be that in tech or elsewhere. What's the balance of being heads down and being like, "You know what? I'm going to be closed to new ideas right now." Because they can be distracting, right? The [inaudible], that's actually a phenomenon and so, how do you protect yourself from sharing? What’s the balance?

SARON: My solution was to move to San Diego. That was my solution to that. I actually moved from New Jersey and I worked in New York City... How long has it been? Was it only been a year? Oh, my goodness, and now, I'm in San Diego and it was so interesting because that ended up being a really nice side effect. I didn't move specifically for that reason but when you are commuting in New York City every single day, there's so much going on all the time. There's just so many ideas and events and meet ups and companies and people. It's just so much.

I think that it was a great place to be in my early 20s when I really just wanted to soak up everyone else's ideas and I didn't really have opinions of my own at that point and it's a great way to just kind of absorb and be this awesome sponge in the big city but after a while, I kind of realized, maybe I have my own ideas and my own thoughts, so moving to San Diego, which is a much, much, much quieter place, has been a really great way to reflect and sit with my own thoughts and feelings and opinions and just kind of focus on that.

I understand that everyone can move to San Diego, although I highly recommend it but I think in that way of carving out like... What do they call it? Do they call it a tech sabbath? A digital sabbath? Am I saying that right?

CHARLES: Yeah. Maybe. It sounds about right.

SARON: Yeah. I came across that term recently but this idea of one day out of the week, I'm not going to be on the interweb. I'll just not going to do it. Maybe, even the whole weekend, oh, my goodness and saying, "I'm just going to stay away from things. I'm just going to create a little space for me to think and reflect."

I think when I don't have the whole day and what I need is just like a moment, I find that writing things down is a great way -- a really, really good way of doing it -- even if I'm taking notes or from doing a strategy session or if I'm trying to make a decision. Usually, I'll start typing and what I've started to do recently is to say, "I'm not going to type. I'm going to plot in a notebook and I'm just going to write things down," and because writing is slower than typing, it forces you to just think. It forces you to be alone with your thoughts, for better or worse and it forces you to really just to think about what you're doing or what you're saying and reflect. It's a really, really great meditative exercise that I found. You know, finding little ways to build in an escape from the noise, ideally on a regular basis, I think is a really healthy thing to do.

SAM: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. My normal method of sort of closing everybody off is I just sketch out ideas because I'm an artist. I come from that sort of perspective as I can make a drawing out of feelings more so than I can write them out. If I'm feeling really overwhelmed or if I'm trying to make sense of some information that people have given me, I just sketch it out and I think that's something that doesn't really get talked about a lot in the whole community because sometimes it's always about eat, breathe, live, code, you know?

We have different skills. You have other things that you're good at that's not just code. When I was at React Rally, a lot of people were in the music and then finding a way to separate yourself from the entirety of it is definitely one of the better ways to make sense of your situation.

SARON: Yup, absolutely.

CHARLES: Yeah. Sleep? It's a great way to take a break.

SARON: Sleep is so good.

SAM: On my top three things: sleep.

CHARLES: Yeah.

SARON: Yeah. As a kid, I never ever thought I would look forward to my bedtime ever. You know, it's my favorite part of the day.

CHARLES: Yeah but like sleep, writing, drawing, I always forget. Like when I'm caught up in a problem, I always forget that engaging in some other activity -- I like to walk in the place next to my house. I like to play my ukulele. Engaging in those activities is almost on the critical path to solving the problem and I always forget it. I think we always forget it but sometimes, you can be so frustrated and you can just shut it off, be completely alone and there is some magical process that's probably going on in your brain. I don't know exactly what it is but you come back and the answer is just sitting there, waiting practically on your desk.

SARON: Absolutely. One thing, we recently moved a couple of weeks ago to a new place and it's a little bit bigger and so, I had the opportunity to unpack boxes and buy furniture that we didn't really need before or just trying to make it more of a home. I've been using it as a really great opportunity to be productive and to feel productive but not be in front of a screen.

Sometimes, I even like save tasks for myself like, "I'm going to wait till the evening to put together this shelf because I'm going to need a moment to just be away from my computer." I have a plan around it so it ended up being such that, I think about every day, there's one little home activity thing that I can do, whether it's cleaning or cooking or assembly or movie or something with the home, that allows me to, because I'm not really a hobby person. I don't really do hobbies because it just feels, like no judgment on people who do. I know people get really into their hobbies but it just feels like, "Why?" You know, like, "Why?" like, "For what?"

But when I put a shelf together, it's like, "I'm going to use this for books." You know what I mean? Like you're very purposeful, so home activities has been my way of carving out that space away from the screen but also feeling like I'm doing something productive, I'm getting things done.

SAM: Something that I would recommend to anybody who doesn't really have that, I'm going to step away from the computer and do this thing. Something that's kind of helping me was the Pomodoro Technique, which if you're not familiar with that, it's basically a time management thing where you set your timer for work like for 25 minutes, 30 minutes or whatever and then, when the timer goes off, you take an allotted break for five minutes, 10 minutes, just so you're not doing the thing that you've been doing for the last 30 minutes.

SARON: Yes, absolutely. That's a great one.

SAM: My advice is to implement that if you don't have a thing, that you use for your cleaner, I guess.

SARON: Oh, you want to hear some really terrible but effective advice?

SAM: Yes.

SARON: And this is what I found out very accidentally is if you have a really, really crappy office chair that hurts --

CHARLES: Oh, man. I'm sitting in one right now. It's literally a rocking chair from the 1800s.

SARON: That sounds awesome.

CHARLES: Yeah, it does sounds awesome.

SARON: But if you have a crappy office chair, that can be a really great way to get away from your screen because after about an hour, your thighs will hurt and your back will hurt and you will be forced to get up and walk around. It's so funny because I have a pretty crappy office chair and my back has been hurting for so long and I just thought, "That's life." That's like my [inaudible] for myself. I'm like, "That's just how life is, my backs hurt," and then it got to a point where I was like, "I need to go and talk to someone," and as soon after that, I spoke to a conference and I was basically up and down away from any type of chair for like four or five days straight and magically, my back pain went away and I was, "Oh, my God. It's that freaking chair," and ever since I realized it, I started noticing it. I would sit down and I would go, "I'm nearing the one- Oh, there are my thighs. There they go. They're in pain."

There’s another great cheap life hack: get a crappy chair, after about an hour, everything will hurt. You will be forced to go do some jumping jacks for about five, 10 minutes and there's your additional sabbath. There you go.

SAM: In Charles' case, probably a haunted office chair. Yeah, that's an excellent advice. I never really noticed that. Now, I'm going to.

CHARLES: You know what funny is, I actually didn't even notice it but I do. I never used to get up and go on walks before or spend as much of the day standing as I do and I'm actually completely and totally oblivious to it but I think, I realize like I can attribute a lot of that to the terribly, uncomfortable chair, in which I sit on every day.

SARON: I have this awesome habit of sitting cross-legged, which apparently is a very, very bad idea, my physical therapist told me, so I make it worse for myself. If you don't feel like you have enough screen time, just sit cross-legged and that will accelerate the pain process.

SAM: As you said that, I am currently sitting cross-legged in my desk chair.

SARON: Yeah!

SAM: That's just how I sit in chairs. My legs are too short to reach the floor.

SARON: Me too. I just find it so comfortable. I don't know and I'm so happy to hear that you also do this because I'm like, "Am I just weird?" because I love sitting cross-legged. It's so comfortable. It makes me really happy.

SAM: No, I verified 100%, that's how I sit in all chairs.

SARON: Yeah, the same.

CHARLES: I can do one leg.

SARON: Only one? Man, you need to work on that.

SAM: -- [inaudible]. That's going to be the end of our podcast. Again, thank you Saron for coming on and having this awesome conversation about mentoring. Definitely check out the website CodeNewbie.org.

We are the Frontside. We build software that you can stick a future on. Hit us up if you're looking for help building your next big thing and also, hit us up on Twitter. Hit Charles, myself, Frontside and Saron on Twitter.

SARON: Thank you so much for having me. This is awesome. This is fun.

SAM: Also, I want to give another thanks to Mandy, our producer for producing this lovely episode and all of our episodes. If you have any questions for us, hit us up on Twitter. Any ideas for future topics, any thoughts you have on this great conversation, let us know and we'll talk to you all later.

Guests:

In this episode, former Fronsiders, Brandon Hays and Chris Freeman join Charles and Taras to talk about the difference between a framework and a library, whether or not React + Redux a framework in itself, red flags to signal that you’re actually building a framework, attributes of a good framework, how can you tell if you created a bad framework, and how you can make a bad framework better.

Resources:

This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC.

** Transcript:**

CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast. My name is Charles. I'm a developer here at Frontside and today, we're going to be talking about the things that go into making a JavaScript framework. Because, hey, there's not enough of those in the world today, so we're going to talk about that and with me is Taras.

TARAS: Hello, hello.

CHARLES: And we've got two very special guests, who have a lot of experience with this topic. Mr Chris Freeman and Brandon Hays. Hey, guys.

CHRIS: Hi, there.

BRANDON: Hi, there. We're talking about the poofberry framework, right?

CHARLES: What's a poofberry?

BRANDON: There's a tweet that's going around right now that one of them says, "I don't know what I should be doing," and the next person says, "Oh, just use poofberry." What is that? It's like fluffnuts but the [inaudible]. Hey, dot, dot, dot. Then, it integrates with log bungler.

CHARLES: There's a reason that I'm dying laughing.

BRANDON: It's so true.

CHARLES: It's so true, laugh, cry, laugh, cry. Let's start with kind of a very basic assessment here. Because there's a lot of different things that you can use to compose the applications that you build but for some reason, some of these things are grouped and considered as libraries and some of them are considered frameworks. I don't know that the boundary is very clear like I'll know it when I see it type thing. Maybe, we can start with what is the difference between a framework and a library?

CHRIS: I have some thoughts of these. I feel like this is one of those questions that could easily just turn into an infinite bike-shed but I remember reading something a while ago that stuck with me for a long time. I'm pretty sure it's related to Java but that makes sense because if anyone is going to talking about frameworks, it's Java developers. But it was saying that the difference between a library and a framework is inversion of control and the idea is a thing that's a library is a thing where you are in control. You bring the library code into your code and it's up to you what you do with it.

In a framework, the framework code calls you as I think what it said. It's like, you call the library code, the framework code calls you and --

CHARLES: In Soviet framework.

CHRIS: Yeah, exactly. A framework says, "Here are a bunch of open spaces for you to put your code in and I will take care of the rest," versus a library is just like... I don't know, "Here's some things that you can use. It's up to you. What do you want to do with them?"

CHARLES: Right, so in kind of like [inaudible], that would be basically, a framework would be the thing that's got the main method. I think the same thing in JavaScript and when you call it, does it actually implement the main method. In JavaScript, it'll probably like in node. Under that definition, it would be like, "Are you the main scripts when you invoke node? Do you control the main script?"

If you were doing your own command line parsing, for example, you're looking at the process.rb and pulling off the command lines and doing all the things but even if you're using something like Yargs or option parser in Ruby, that's more of like a framework. I guess Yargs is a library because you're still implementing the script. You're instantiating the Yargs thing.

TARAS: React calls render to figure out what to convert to DOM. Does that make React the framework?

CHARLES: I think React as a library. That's a good question. What's the equivalent of the main method on the web?

CHRIS: I think there's a very clear distinction, especially if you look at React versus something like Ember and I'm sure Angular does this as well. In React, by default, to build a React thing, you're going to pull in React, you may write some components, you may import them elsewhere but the main method is that you have an index.html with some div in it and you are the one that has to call ReactDOM.render and you pass it like document.query selector or whatever and then, your top level component and that can be as simple as complicated as you like or you can have a webpack plugin do it or whatever else. But the onus is on you to actually take that React app and get it starting up on the page versus Ember, it's like, "There's an index.html. It's fully wired up." There is one point where you sit down and say, "Start my program here," like Ember abstracted all that away. To me, that's the main method for a frontend application.

CHARLES: Right and if you actually look at something that Ember generates, then look at index.html, they generate a script tag for you that instantiate your application and mounts it on an element. If you want to change that element, that's actually a configuration option that you can change but it still a configuration option that's consumed by the framework. In that sense, there is that inversion of control. I see what you mean like in React, you're the one who flicks off the first domino, like who's the prime mover. Is it you or is it the framework that knocks over the first domino?

BRANDON: I like Chris's explanation and I think it's elegant to say because I was thinking in terms of structure. If it imposes a structure on you but really, the structure is there, it's like one of those Ikea shelf systems for you to put stuff into. If you're trying to solve a problem, here's a shelving system for you to put stuff into, whereas a library is just the tool that you might get out to put something together. Something that's multi-purpose but doesn't impose any structure on you or a ton of structure on you. My question is what's the usefulness of distinguishing between the two?

TARAS: I think what's interesting and I had experienced this in a last couple of projects is that people, especially React when they kind of assume, because a lot of people entering to React not understanding the context within which React emerged and so, they're getting into React assuming that it has everything you need to build application that you need to build. A lot of them haven't necessarily built a single page application from scratch before and so, the jump into building something with React and then, it takes about a year for them to realize the full scope of all of the features that their application actually has and then, they kind of take a retroactive look and look like, "Okay, what do I have now?" and what emerges is that they've actually over the last year, they may be creating a framework without realizing that this is actually happening.

CHARLES: They've imposed the structure of saying, "Here's the shelving system. Books about geography go here. Books on English literature go there and so on and so forth."

BRANDON: But when you rolled your own framework, that's not how it goes. It's like, "You have to launch this balloon into the stratosphere to put a book on the shelf from geology." Taras, to your point, it sounds like the importance is setting expectations properly for people, so that they know what they're in for because kind of calling back to Ryan Florence's post a few years ago, you can't not have a framework. At some point, you will have a framework in order to ship something.

I would actually take it one step further. My friend, Kyle talks about this that library is the smallest unit that you're working within a framework but that still doesn't take your code to production and put it in a debugable state. You need a platform. It's arguable, if you're handling deployment tasks and debugging tasks and operating software in production, you now have a platform and it's fair to say that Rails crossed that threshold at one point. It's fair to say that Ember has probably crossed that threshold, if you combine Ember with CLI deploy and the CLI tooling and all of that stuff. This almost like acts as a platform if you're owning and maintaining the software in production.

CHARLES: Now, can I play devil's advocate here and say, the platform, is that necessarily predicated on a framework? Is there a pyramid where it goes library, framework, platform and one is built on top of the other? Why couldn't I have a library? Because what I'm hearing is the scope of concerns is just rendering HTML based on a state is a very small chunk. The actual scope of things that you need to do to get that code in production and have it be reliable and do all of the features that you want to do is just massive but why is that predicated on a framework?

For example, one thing you have is a bunch of libraries out there, like routing for managing the title tag, managing all these things that you have to do for managing deployment, for building your application, for compressing it. There's all these different libraries out there. What if there was one massive library that just picked a bunch of other libraries but I was still in control?

TARAS: I've actually seen this happen in the last of the projects. When people jump into building, they will eventually realize that they're building a platform but what happens before that is that they take user's requirements and they break those up by sections and then they assign them to a bunch of development teams who go and actually start to build. On one platform, they end up building five or six or 10 of siloed, packaged applications that have, in some cases, have their own dependencies, they have similar architecture, might not have similar architecture.

Each team kind of implements thing differently and there's an expectation that once you package these things as npm and then you install them into one package, to one application when you run build, it's just going to work together. That's where I think, with the framework, it does create a foundation for these verticals to be implemented using kind of common foundation. This is what a lot of times that as if you don't realize that what you're trying to set out to build, the way that the projects get managed quite often, especially for big applications, for big platforms is that, it creates this period of about two years, where there's a lot of confusion and there's a lot of duplication and then, you end up seeing code that it's hard to put in production.

CHARLES: Yeah, I agree. I'm curious then, because we'd started out talking about library and framework and talked about it takes two years to recognize that you're building a framework or you're building not a framework but a platform. Brandon, you said something very interesting. Rails for example, crossed the threshold of being more than a framework and actually, being a platform. What are the concerns of a platform that are beyond a framework? We talked about and using the kind of loose definition of a framework as being something where the framework create spaces for your code, to run your code so you can just take little dollops of code and they have one concern but the framework manages the coordination of the concerns but what's the next level?

BRANDON: For the purposes of this conversation, I may have muddied the waters a little bit because I think it's more interesting to talk about the transition and the level of which you've crossed the threshold from being a library or using libraries or collecting libraries, into maintaining a framework because it's where you're going to experience more pain more than likely, than to me, the idea from works on my machine, to deployed and supported across a lot of users, it sounds like it's more interesting but it's not where we experience most of our pain actually. From my experience, maintaining frontend single page applications most of the pain is actually getting the damn thing to work on your machine and getting the libraries to collectively work together and then, getting that to production, it kind of enters back into an area of more known unknowns.

I think that's a surprisingly a more mature ecosystem, still getting from this thing works on my machine to getting it out the door. That wasn't true when Rails was invented and so, Rails had to invent a lot of its own ecosystem around this stuff. Like I said, I don't want to muddy the waters too much.

I think to me, the interesting question is how do you know you've crossed this threshold? What pain points are exposed when you start crossing that threshold or when you're pushing the boundaries of that threshold? Because you should not be using a framework if you're using React to do a select dropdown. I think of it as, if you're using it the way to replace something you might do with a jQuery plugin five or 10 years ago, you're using React like it's a library. One of the questions that you brought up was is the combination of React and Redux is a framework and I would argue that it is but I kind of want to throw that out --

CHRIS: Oh, interesting.

CHARLES: I would say, it's two libraries stuck together to make a bigger library. It's like a monolithic library.

BRANDON: But by the time you're actually using that to do anything, maybe the third thing in there is like transitioning states when you transition routes. At what point is that threshold crossed? I didn't build most of the software that led me to some of the opinions that I have about this. This was actually Chris Freeman's, though. I may defer to you on this.

CHRIS: I think React + Redux constitutes if you look at what it does. You have like this view layer and this state layer. There's a set of opinions on there that is useful and there is the foundation for doing quite a bit but in my experience, you've already kind of alluded to this a little bit. I don't think it's a framework because as soon as you start using those two things, suddenly the next thing you hit is, "Wait. How do I handle asynchronous things?" There's a lot of different options for that. "Oh, now, I need to do routing. How do I incorporate routing into my React app but also in a way, that is amenable to state transitions in Redux but also, that is aware of the async stuff that I'm doing, that is going to possibly be triggered by my routes and by my Redux actions or by some other side of things?"

Suddenly, you are very quickly pulling out a bunch of other libraries but also, probably starting to build abstractions on top of them because you're already finding a lot of common patterns that you're repeating over and over as you incorporate more and more pieces of the stack and then, you're writing a lot of glue code. I think that's the point where suddenly, you look back and behind you is the footsteps of this framework that's been walking alongside you the whole time.

BRANDON: That is where I carried you, then dropped you, then sort of drowned you.

CHRIS: Yeah.

CHARLES: And then, kicked your core.

TARAS: I'd like to suggest a way to think about this. As you guys are talking about, it kind of occurred to me is that it seems to me that libraries concentrate on how and frameworks focus on the 'what.'

CHRIS: Oh, I love that.

TARAS: Because if you think about for example, React is how geostack efficiently update DOM, then Redux is how do you wire together state across multiple components that might be in different parts of state tree and if you look at, for example, a React router or a kind of a routing component is how do you choose which components you want to render when you navigates specific URL. Because those things by themselves are not a complete solution but when you combine them together, what you get is you have a way of saying, "When I navigate to specific URL, I'm going to load specific data, provide that data to components and then, I would have a way to navigate through a different URL when you click on a link."

From that, I think what happens when you get to the framework level is you actually have a kind of a bigger umbrella and under that umbrella, you have ways to address problems that you did not have previously. I think that's what framework does it is over time, it's a way of addressing concerns that cannot be addressed with a solution. They have to address with a collection of solutions and then, they provide a specific solution. I don't know if that's --

CHARLES: That actually sparked off a train of thought in my mind that perhaps what you really want to do is say, "I'm going to go a little bit like Lisp on you all," in the sense of every code at some point is data, that maybe every library, at some point is a framework. It's just that you can look and say, "What is the scope of the 'what' that I'm tackling." For some point, you can say like React is a framework. It creates this space where I can put my JSx, AKA the render function and I'm basically inverting control and so, what it is, it is a framework for efficiently rendering HTML or efficiently mapping an object to a fragment of DOM and then the DOM that gets generated from your render function, patching that into the HTML. You don't have to worry about that. There's that inversion of control. It creates that space but that's the only space that it creates.

From that perspective, React is a framework for generating HTML but that's all it is but it is a library for constructing applications. Does that make any sense? I think as you layer on concerns, your framework create spaces for you. You use your library code to put stuff in and so, in the same way, I think one of the key realizations, I'm going to call up like BigTest and I'm not going to take credit for this, which is actually a blog post that I read at Google. I can't remember what it is but we'll link to it in the show notes where he said, "There are no such thing as unit tests. There are no such thing as acceptance tests. There are just tests of varying scope." They're all acceptance tests. To use that one thing, they're all experiments. It's just what is the scope of the test that you're trying to accomplish and his argument was we want to make that scope as big as possible by default and then, where appropriate, you narrow down. Maybe, the framework library distinction is a little bit constructed, kind of a construction of our own minds and what really is there, there's just frameworks of varying scope.

BRANDON: Agreeing on a shared scope is actually probably the most important part of this conversation. We're referring to building end-to-end an application from data access to rendering to testing --

CHARLES: To deployment to routing.

BRANDON: Yeah.

CHARLES: To one day accessibility.

BRANDON: Yeah. Adding that into the discussion is like a baseline of what constitutes an application. It's the percentage of people that are able to actually use it, the people that are locked out from using it by ability. That's a very useful frame for the discussion. Let's agree on the scope of what an application is and then, coming back to what Taras was saying is basically, when you're talking about the 'how,' that's a decision point.

You hear a lot of people talk about decision fatigue in JavaScript and it's almost a played out trope at this point but it hasn't gone away as a problem, so what frameworks are doing is they're making a series of decisions for you that allow you to basically connect the pieces from end to end. Basically, somebody threw a rope bridge across the canyon and it doesn't have to be the best solution to get end to end but we have to solve the problem end to end.

If we agree on the places end to end and the problem is when you're building your own series of libraries, you're like, "I'm going to choose best in class of A, best in class of B, best in class of C," and that sounds really good but if you're trying to build a bridge across a canyon and you're building in 10 best of class sections, for the type of connection we're trying to make here in the middle, we're going to use the best in class here. The weak point is in the connections, so you had better be the world's foremost engineer if you're going to be the person connecting all these disparate pieces that are each best in class, in order to bridge this canyon.

That's the thing that's interesting to me and it's not even agreed in our industry that JavaScript-based web applications are a good thing or that the browser is web application runtime, those are things that are up for debate. But I think if we make that assumption, this is sort of the founding principle of where Ember came from and it executed to the best of its ability at the time and that philosophy is, I think you can prove it out in terms of results based on if you have two different applications, one of them is built by somebody trying to jam together best in class components and the other person is starting with an end to end solution with a community of people rallied around that solution. It's been interesting to watch those approaches play out over time. I know Chris has a very specific hands-on experience of having done both of these. I'm curious to get your hot take.

CHRIS: There's actually a concept that I think about a lot in relation to this question. It's something that I actually heard come up again recently so the timing was great but it's called hypocognition. The idea is hypocognition is when you either just like can't see or can't understand some kind of cognitive representation of something because you don't have the words for it. An example is in Western cultures, especially like in English speaking cultures, there are not that many words for the color blue but in a lot of other cultures, they have many, many words for the color blue. After doing a big study they found that these English speakers actually have a harder time recognizing different shades of blue, like more of them just look the same versus other cultures where their brains are actually wired to see all this variety because they actually have the linguistic representations for these ideas already.

When you were talking about maybe a library is a framework at some point, I think that's right on. I think one of the things that I think about a lot when talking about frameworks and seeing these debates happen on the internet about, "What is a framework?" but also like, "Do you even need a framework?" is obviously, there's a lot of people who absolutely... Like Ryan Florence. Ryan Florence clearly knows what a framework is. He knows what it takes to build a web application and he does not lack the words to define a framework versus a library. He's just made that choice and it's a very informed choice but I wonder if there's also a lot of people who are getting into web development for the first time and they look at something like a framework and it seems just absurd to anyone would want all of the things that like in Ember or in Angular is talking about, when they can make a basic UI with React and it's easy and fun and really cool.

But then this two-year path happens and they look back and they've learned a whole bunch and now it's like, "Ooh, you couldn't even have explained this to me before," because all of the words would have fallen on deaf ears but now suddenly, it makes a staggering amount of sense.

CHARLES: Right. I love that.

BRANDON: You have to make a bad one.

CHARLES: Just so that you can inherit the vocabulary to understand why you made a bad one. Now, you guys actually have some experience with this. Brandon, you gave a talk about it, which I think you should give more widely because it's fantastic but for those folks who may or may not be aware that they are walking this to your path, I want to talk first about what are the signs that you're walking along this path and then two, what are the consequences in terms of the cost you're paying for walking this path. Let's start with that first thing. What are the signs? How can you tell that I am building a framework?

CHRIS: I think one of the telltale signs and one of the biggest red flags that caused me and Brandon to have a very serious heart to heart about our own personal framework was when we hit the point where you could look at a set of tickets for features and all you saw was 'framework features' that you needed to write before you could build the feature itself. You know like, "Oh, we have basic routing setting and we have it set up so that if you have a route transition and you would like a data request to happen when a certain route transition happens, that will happen," but then someone would like infinite scroll and we want to use a query param. When a query param changes, I want to update the query and fetch more records, except that the glue code that we wrote to tie our router to our redux async stuff is not aware of query params. It has no concept of what a query param is or what to do when it changes. Also, it has no concept of refetching the data without a full route transition, so what do we do, this person wants infinite scroll but I first have to implement several layers of framework code before I build the UI feature that you want?

CHARLES: The basic heuristic there is ratio of direct feature code to code that supports the direct feature code and code that supports the code that supports direct feature code. It's anytime you're anywhere above that first layer on the stack.

CHRIS: Yeah, I think Taras nailed it like what's the 'what' versus the 'how.' If you're asked a question that is concerned with the 'what' and you spend more time focused on the 'how,' then you might have a framework.

BRANDON: I think people will think of building an application like a recipe. If you think of it in those terms, people think of frameworks as very restrictive but I'm a big fan of Blue Apron, a sponsor of this podcast. Thank you.

They pre-select the ingredients and they give you the instructions and you know what to do, you still have to do the effort but you know if you connect these pieces together properly that you're going to wind up having a good experience and then, it gives you a lot of freedom to experiment and be creative beyond that, should you choose to. I think one of the signs that you've done a crummy job is that you're staring down, like Chris Freeman said, you actually starting to restrict your choices like, "I can't actually build you that feature because we don't have time to take on the amount of work necessary to build the support structure, to build you that feature," or if you find yourself writing a test framework.

CHRIS: Oh, yeah we did that too.

BRANDON: You know, we were real deep in this. There are developers that are like, "I really want to feel like I'm walking into a grocery store and selecting all the things necessary for my recipe," and so it really depends on what the problem actually is. If you're working at a giant megacorp and you have a two-year timeline to deliver something and their goals are not about delivering stuff on a tight turnaround, that's usually a recipe for a software failure anyway but let's say, that you're in the 5% of those types of projects that's going to succeed, that might be a good place where you can say, "What we're trying to do here is so custom and we have such a long lead time and a long leash and such a high level of internal expertise here that we should be shopping in the grocery store and we should be selecting all these things and we should be solving these problems."

Basically, when is it time to use a framework? Well, when you don't have 10 times the time you think you do, when you don't have the ability to spend 80% to 90% of your time in the first three to four months of your project, maybe six months, debugging you're glue code in between the different libraries that you're gluing together and then coming back and realizing that you've painted yourself into a corner and you have to re-architect your whole framework, then you could be so proud of this baby, 18 months to two years from now, when you actually have delivered both a framework that took about 70% of your time and an application that took 25% or 30% of your time.

CHARLES: Yeah. I think it's important to realize that people think we'll do it and we'll build it as we go but I want to call out right there, you will be spending 80% of your time and you have to be upfront about it. Of this two years, 18 months of it is going to be spent building this framework and six months of it is going to be spent actually writing the feature code and you have to be 75% of your tickets or your issues, whoever track the work, 75% of that has to be dedicated to the framework.

BRANDON: If you're going to bake in that kind of overhead purely for the satisfaction of a single or one or two developers that like inventing things, that is literally the worst possible reason you could do that. That is almost like a guaranteed recipe for failure. It has to be for some other business reason like, "We want to be the company that owns this." There has to be business value attached in making that kind of investment. If you can't justify that at the outset, then you should probably just go ahead and lean on an existing framework and join a community of people.

CHARLES: Yeah and I think one good litmus test for that is, "Is this a 'what' for which there is currently no 'how?' One of the reasons we're writing BigTest is because for the general JavaScript community, there are a number of acceptance test frameworks out there but the market is very, very limited. When we look to actually acceptance tests, our React application, this thing does not exist. Now, we had experience with something that was very like Ember specific and so, we kind of knew what the 'what' was, we experienced the 'what' but there was no 'how' for our current situation. That's like a place where you might be called upon where makes business sense to actually invest in a framework.

I'll tell you another thing too is if you have made the decision to kind of follow the beaten path on the other areas, then when a framework is called for, you have the bandwidth. You've allowed for the buffer, for the margin, for you to write in with that framework, whereas if you're already just by default, maintaining all the glue code in every single thing, then if some unique 'what' comes along, for which there is no 'how,' you're not going to have a bandwidth to tackle it.

BRANDON: Yeah. That's a real bad situation to be in.

TARAS: There's something else that I find interesting is because there's a certain point, like this two-year mark where everyone's like, "We want to fix this now." I think what is interesting what comes next which is the three years of undoing all the stuff that you made because the biggest challenge, especially in really big projects. When your projects has to borderline into platforms and a platform threshold is when you have a multiple teams working separately to write separate modules that run, maybe in a separate Git repo and maybe, packaged in separate npm package and assembled together.

Then what happens at that point, the question arises like how do you actually make this changes in this environment. Answering that question is actually really difficult. I think if you look at frameworks like Ember, Ember has made it their business to figure out exactly how to make this happen and I think they've done it really well but it's a really challenging endeavor, especially in incorporate environments where they don't have an update. You have like upgrades are like a curse. It's like a thing that you don't really want to ever do and because most quite often, they don't have the right testing habits in place to be able to support the change if necessary.

I think what a lot of times happens is that the team that made the framework in the first place, they end up trying to maintain a fort but you won't have like 10 people and they only have machetes, you know? All you can do is run around and try to chop down little twigs but at the end of day, the trees is still going to keep growing. I think that's the really challenging part of being two years into a project, where you realize that you actually need something much more comprehensive than initially thought you needed.

CHARLES: On that, assuming that you have decided that you are going to make a framework, it's a good business decision for you. Based on the criteria of this discussion, how can you assess whether it's good? Chris, you talked about needing to integrate query params with routing and asynchronous data loading and making sure all of that coordination happened and worked together easily. What's the difference between your framework just missing features kind of having holes in it that can be filled in, versus something that's not good and it's going to cost you lots of money down the road.

CHRIS: Yeah.

TARAS: One thing, if you look at what makes a good library of any kind, it tends to be like how effectively and how much words to take the address the use cases that you need. The problem is that to build a good framework, you need to understand the use cases. This is what usually happens over time. Two years in, you've actually understood the use cases and now, it's time to change and so, I think if you want to build a good framework, you actually need to understand those use cases quite early on or account for understanding use cases over time and that's a big question -- how do you figure out how to know what you don't know.

CHRIS: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think about what you were just saying Charles and Taras like one of the things that I think has a big impact on and what this process looks like is the completeness of vision for what's your project actually is. If you have a very, very clear idea of what the entire product you're building is going to be or, at least what the key money-making feature is going to be and you can understand the ins and outs of that, then I think that's the point where you can look at what you have and say, "Have I created a good or bad framework? Does this framework have the ability to solve this one very important thing that I have to be able to do? If the framework doesn't do it, then I need to build my own but I now know what very important features I need to front load my framework with."

I kind of think of it as imagine that you're like Jeremiah Johnson, the Reverend Jeremiah Johnson and you're going to go trekking through the woods for some unknown amount of time and you have no idea yet. You don't actually know where you're going. You don't know what you're going to see. You don't even know what's out there because you haven't done the research or whatever and you need to be prepared for anything, so you bring just a hodgepodge of stuff.

If that's you at the beginning of your company or the beginning of your product and yours is kind of like... I don't know, we got to get product market fit and that means that we may have to kind of pivot once or twice or we need to be very flexible, then I would think long and hard before you commit to writing your own framework because you don't even know what framework to build and you might as well take a broad array of tools and use what you need.

There will be times where that's frustrating and there won't be exactly the right tool for the job but 80% of the time, it's going to do just fine but if you know you have to do this one very special thing and you know that a framework is going to give you a lot of stuff that you won't need and it doesn't really excel at the one thing you do need, then don't force the framework. There may be time to build your own but just know that you need to go in with a very clear idea of what you're doing before you start building the abstractions that constitute a framework, rather than just like a constellation of libraries.

CHARLES: I have a question on that then. Going back to one of the things we were talking about like React plus Redux. Your opinion, Chris that it is not a framework, so the question is does a framework actually exist for React?

CHRIS: My guess is that many frameworks exist for React.

CHARLES: Is there a public framework?

TARAS: There is one called Fusion but it's [inaudible] what you would have imagine. It is essentially Redux and React together conventionalized. They addressed a bunch of concerns around service rendering and such but it does exist.

CHRIS: How about Next? Next.js?

TARAS: I'm not familiar with its features from a single page application perspective.

CHARLES: I think it does have a router. It does bundle with Redux and this is one of the things that when you first started using Redux, it's like, "How do I even get my store to my components?" Yes, I can connect them but there's actually a lot of stuff that you have to do. First, you have to say, "I'm going to put my reducers here and then when I create my store, I'm going to fold all my reducers. If I've got a whole bunch of reducers in my application, I've got to fold them all together. I've got to pass them off to the store. When I create the store, I have to inject the middleware and then, everybody else just imports my store and then, I have to put in a provider and then, I can connect my components."

That's actually a lot of stuff that you have to do and I think that, for example, Fusion just says, "Put your reducers here and we'll take care of all that process," and so it makes that decision for you, right? It says, "For state management, you're going to use Redux. For your reducers, they're going to go here. For your actions, they're going to go here." I don't know exactly how it's laid out but I remember reading the ReadMe, it was basically layering conventions over that. That's definitely going into framework territory but that's the only one that I know of, which is really, really odd.

TARAS: There's something interesting that's happening also and this goes to what Brandon was saying earlier is that choosing the best in class, there's this 10 things but then, what if one of the best in class stops being the best in class. The fact that the creators of Redux was essentially saying that we needed to basically provide a way to do Flux that was better than 10 different options that were available, so here's Redux. We've created Redux but we don't really think it's ultimately the solution. We need to have something else in React that provides a foundation for us to be able to deliver a better state management than what Redux is, so what happens when one of the best in class is no longer the best in class? The bridge is already standing. There's people walking across the bridge already. How do you replace one of the chains in it?

CHRIS: Over the course of six months while you figure out the differences in API between Flux and Redux and all the custom route transition data loading stuff you did with your Ajax library in your state management software that you put in a case statement inside there that you now have to change over. It's easy. It's no big deal. Don't worry about it.

BRANDON: Just a simple matter of programming.

TARAS: At least 25 years of collective frontend development experience is laughing like hyenas about the simplicity of building a --

BRANDON: Yeah, I'm actually looking at some of the old code that Chris wrote for trying to glue together, Redux Saga. I've been out of the game long enough to not know whether that's been superseded by some new or best in class piece of technology and even then, it was really challenging. This is true for frameworks too, is they don't really optimize for best in class. They optimize, hopefully for best fit for purpose but the world has moved on since Ember launched obviously. A lot of things have changed and it's, at least as difficult to try to keep that up to date with evolving trends and technologies and updates for a core team at a framework level as it is for you, as an engineer on the team. The difference is you get to outsource that work to a core team for a framework.

Ember has not done a fantastic job in keeping up with. They've done a good job and they've tried their best but if there were more people working on it or if there was more effort applied to it or if it was a higher priority, you would see Ember being a more up-to-date framework using more modern tools. As a framework author, if you stay too close to the bleeding edge, all you're going to do is change out your build system. You're going to replace a Broccoli with webpack, with Rollup, whatever's after that. What's new in Packer?

CHRIS: Parcel?

CHARLES: Parcel.

BRANDON: Parcel. You should immediately go build your framework with that and have fun. I am excited by the new and interesting stuff that's happening in these ecosystems and I think it's important not to get lulled into the siren song if your goal is to actually ship a piece of software on a timetable or a budget.

TARAS: One thing, if it's a red flag, if you think this is easy, if you think your decisions can be made in this isolation without talking to somebody else and actually kind of flashing it out, then you're probably doing something wrong because a lot of these things are not trivial. There's a lot of thought, there's a lot of considerations used to go into decisions that you make, especially when you're creating something that is going to be used by more than a few people. I think that's really one of those things where it's hard to know what you don't know but if you think you know and you haven't done this before, you haven't done this a few times before, you're probably missing some pieces.

BRANDON: Yeah, I agree with that.

CHRIS: I think one of the things that's really enticing about React and Taras, you just hit on it but I've never felt as clever as when I was writing a React app. If I'm clever, I mean, clever in the same way that I felt really clever when I wrote some unbelievably convoluted Scala one-liner that six months later, neither me nor anyone else could decipher what it meant but at that time, I felt like a god of programming. That's how it felt like, "Well, a lot of the React stuff is addicting." It felt so much fun. It was so much fun until I really had to do something and it mattered for my job and there was a deadline and people were depending on me and I've realized that the clever thing I had done a month later was not the right clever thing but I can see how, if you're like what Taras was saying, where you are at the point where these decisions are easy. These decisions make sense. We're going to be fine and you haven't done it enough to kind of like know where all of the pitfalls are. That cleverness that you feel is fantastic and I can see why it takes two years before you look back and if the cleverness was finally worn off and then, you're just mortified at what you've done.

CHARLES: Pride cometh before the fall.

CHRIS: Yeah.

BRANDON: It's like being a dungeon master in Dungeons and Dragons, where you're like, "Oh, look at this fiendish world." All right, cool. Now, you actually live there though. I have to move into an apartment on Mordor.

TARAS: You know what's the funny flipside to that is that coming from Ember world where it's so normal to leverage the work of other clever people, like really smart people who've invested a lot of time to solve a particular problem, is that there's no stronger sense of being dumb than having to write it from scratch in React. That first feeling of like, "I've actually never had to implement this from scratch," and I feel like a bunch of applications before but because I've leaned on for accessibility, I've leaned on something that someone else has done and it worked really well for me and it was perfect. But now, I need to implement autocomplete from scratch in React and I have no support. I'm basically learning as I'm going on this and it's that sense of discomfort that you get from having to do it from scratch and then, comes the euphoria of having to figure it out. But if you figured it out, you figured it out in the last month. You've written it for the first time in the last month and you now understand what all the things that the Ember implementation does for you. It's an interesting psychology of doing this --

CHARLES: Yeah, it gives you a lot of perspective but you have to ask as a business owner, who may or may not be technical and this is the hardest thing for technical people who are business owners is to be able to not see things through a tactical lens. Is what you really want to pay for is to basically give your programmers this kind of a-ha moment of their own shortcomings because that what you want to be buying.

BRANDON: Yeah, you want to maximize leverage. Your goal with technology is to maximize leverage. It's like being hired as a chef and you walk in and then you're like, "I'm a terrific chef. I worked in these fancy kitchens in New York and I'm known as a great chef," and they're like, "Okay, cool. Here's some flint and steel and a spear."

CHARLES: Go hunt.

BRANDON: You're like, "Wait, what?" Yeah, yeah, yeah. Show me what you can do.

TARAS: We had a conversation in one of the previous podcast with Michael Jackson and we asked him, "What is the one thing you wish like React community would do more of?" and he's like, "I really wish React community have more conventions." All of this is to kind of say as like, there is a place for frameworks in React world. There's a very strong place for it. The question is how and what it said and how do you actually build it and when do you --?

BRANDON: So we need a framework for making framework.

TARAS: Getting really meta here.

BRANDON: I totally agree with that and that's a great observation and that was actually the point of my talk as well, which is if I could convince people just to use Ember and improve Ember, that would be great because I think it's a really great starting point. But the React community is much larger because it had such a great adoption story. The adoption of Ember was very difficult and the adoption of React was very easy and it expanded to include the scope of full end to end applications in terms of what people thought the problem spaces they were thinking of with React.

Ember was built to solve that but it was hard to get into. React was really easy to get into but it's actually hard to build applications with. I would love to see a dedicated subset of the React community, except the idea of shared solutions and the philosophies that made Ember into sort of a powerhouse of value delivery but built out of tools that satisfy the React community and a little more modular and a little more available for people to customize and built in that ecosystem.

I'd really love to see that that included all of the main components of what we accept as, "This is an application framework. It handles testing. It handles accessibility. It handles data loading," and it doesn't have to be best in class in every scenario but it does have to be a reasonable bridge across that chasm and have a group of people look at this the same way. I would love to see a collective subset of the React community dedicate themselves to this idea. I don't know if that's too culturally opposed or even orthogonal to what the value system inside the React community. I haven't been able to fish that out but I would really love to see that emerge.

this is something I would love to push for and I'd love to see other people jump in and push for as like, "What if 20 of us got together and decided we're all building our applications in similar ways, instead of one person saying, 'I'm going to use --'" Even create React app is kind of a Band-Aid on that, it isn't useful past a certain stage of life. I would love to see a group of people, though, get together that are sort of like-minded like that, the Michael Jacksons and maybe even Dan Abramov or a group of people that shared that set of values or came into React from the Ember community.

That’s actually one piece of advice I would give to people. You said, "How do you convince this engineer that they've built a bad framework?" Use a decent one. That's the biggest guide. Use a decent one. Build something in Ember and ship it to production and go, "Oh, I get it." If you've used a good framework, you can't go back to rolling a crappy one. Your standards have been ratcheted up.

CHRIS: I wholeheartedly agree that you should try something else and Ember is a great option but I don't want to dismiss just like, "React is cool as hell," and there's a lot of stuff in React that's really, really awesome and things that I wish that will show up in Ember and they are starting to show up in Ember but they're taking a while and it'll be nice in there but who knows when that will be but I would encourage even more so is both sides, like Ember folks who are listening to this podcast, if you have never messed around with React because you feel some kind of tribal affiliation that you can't betray, please set that aside and go do something in React because you will learn a lot about why Ember does what it does and you will see a lot of really interesting things that will probably jostle some ideas loose in your brain.

The same thing goes for React developers. You, 100% should spend a weekend building something in Ember and nothing about that means that you have to switch or it's going to change the path that you're going on at work but I guarantee you, you will go back to your React application with some new and fair useful perspective that you didn't have before and that's okay. That's great. There's no identity crisis that will come about as a result of that.

CHARLES: That is a fantastic advice, Chris. It will only stretch you.

CHRIS: Yeah.

BRANDON: I think developers have been sold this idea of a competitive landscape by authors of these frameworks because it helps sell the framework. You can build and strengthen a community by leaning into the tribalism that can surround the usage of a tool. The older I've gotten as a person who was deeply tribalistic about Ruby on Rails when I got into it and Ember when I got into it, because I love tribes, I think tribes are awesome and it's a way to make friends but when you really lean into that, the costs are too high and experimenting with other technologies and noticing flaws in your own technology is not only not a betrayal, it's actually critical to your growth as a developer. The more people that do that, like Chris was saying, the better both of those ecosystems will get.

CHARLES: Absolutely because having spent as much time in React as I have, I really appreciate the precious things about Ember. It will make you appreciate the things that you hold dear. It will make you appreciate the really, really, really special things about the tool that you're using and at the same time, it will highlight the weaknesses which you can immediately use to feedback and make your tool better. It really is a win-win situation.

TARAS: I just want to do a little plug before we close up. I think the feels of working with Ember is actually gone into microstates and we're still getting our things together to make microstates look accessible and usable by everyone but that feeling of pleasure that you get from working with Ember and just things just being there for you, like we really want to reproduce that and make that available in React community and the stuff that we do in microstates is actually really designed for that.

CHRIS: Yeah, I see that in BigTest too as well. That's definitely another place where it's like, "These people definitely used to spend time in Ember and they're now in React-land." It's cool to see that stuff getting ported over.

CHARLES: Absolutely because it fundamentally changes your taste. Working with an application that doesn't have like a bolted on testing framework is like eating water soup. You just can't enjoy your life. It really is flavored everything that we do. On that note, we can go ahead and wrap up. There actually is some pretty exciting news. We're actually going to be launching a BigTest launcher. Up until this point, you kind of had to roll your own using BigTest for your assertions but using something like Karma to actually launch the browsers and we're actually launching our own launcher. I guess we've written our own launcher and we're going to be pushing it to NDM, not to overload the word launch.

You can look for that in the next couple of weeks. There's going to be a CLI that ships with BigTest to help you do even more set up, to make it so that you can just drop BigTest right into your application, whether it's jQuery, React, Ember, you name it. That should be really, really fun. Be looking for that and with that, if anybody has any other remarks...

BRANDON: If people are coming through RubyConf this year, I'll be there talking about management stuff. That's my only near-future conference stuff coming up. Hope to see some of the more Ruby-flavored folks out there.

CHARLES: All right-y. Definitely, go to every single talk that Brandon ever gives. You won't regret it. I can base that on very dear personal experience. You won't be disappointed. You know, not to put the pressure on or anything like that but you could never put any more pressure on Brandon than he puts on himself. With that, we will say good bye. Bye Chris, bye Brandon. Thank you so much. This is a great conversation. It certainly clarified a lot in my mind --

TARAS: Yes, same here.

CHARLES: -- About these problems. With that, we will say goodbye. Thank you for listening The Frontside Podcast. Please get in touch with us at @TheFrontside on Twitter or contact at Frontside.io on email. We do a range of custom services from full stack project development to JavaScript mentoring, to as you go JavaScript help desks kind of stuff. If you need to reach out to an expert, please get in touch. Our podcast as always is produced by the inimitable, Mandy Moore. Thank you very much and we'll see you all next time.

In this episode, Kristian Freeman tells us about ByteConf React: why he decided to start the conference, unique challenges of putting an online conference together, what he expects in terms of viewership and his hope for sponsors, and supporting speakers who haven’t recorded videos or maybe haven't ever even given a talk before.

ByteConf will take place on Friday, August 31, 2018! Grab your ticket!

References:

This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC.

TRANSCRIPT:

ROBERT: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode #108 of The Frontside Podcast. I'm Robert De Luca, the president here at Frontside and I'll be your episode host. Today, we're going to be discussing ByteConf, which is an online stream conference with Kristian Freeman. Kristian is a developer at Product Hunt.

With me today as co-host is Wil Wilsman who is a software developer here at The Frontside. Before we jump into the discussion, I would like to make a little announcement. I'm going to be speaking at ByteConf and JSConf for BigTest. If you're interested in hearing about the next generation of UI testing for single page apps, you don't want to check that one out, I think. Without further ado, let's just jump into it.

Hey Kristian, how are you doing?

KRISTIAN: Hey. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

ROBERT: You recently just moved to Austin and you moved from LA. How's that thing going?

KRISTIAN: It's actually going really good. We packed all our stuff up and drove all the way across the US. I guess that's not really across the whole US but it was a good move. I've been here for about two weeks or so and I'm really happy with it so far. I have a full office and recording space now, so it's glorious. I can actually sprawl out and have mikes and all kinds of other gear out. I'm very excited.

WIL: Nice. Now, what is it you do at Product Hunt?

KRISTIAN: I'm a software developer there, kind of full stack engineer. Product Hunt is architected basically as a Rails app in the backend and then, a React app in the frontend, so I'm doing React obviously and GraphQL stuff and then Rails on the backend. It's been really cool. It's a really neat product and there's a really cool community there as well, so I'm been very happy with the transition. I've been there since the beginning of the year, so February or so.

ROBERT: That's awesome. Are those projects split so it's like the React app separate from the Rails apps or is it like a monolith?

KRISTIAN: It's a good question. I am not sure if it's planned to be split up eventually but as it stands right now, it's actually all one big application. We just have kind of that classic frontend folder where everything is dropped in and that's React related. We have some interesting stuff around server side rendering and things like that. All of that stuff was kind of there before I started working at Product Hunt but it's been really interesting coming from my previous gig where it was just very straightforward Ruby on Rails and then React like it's a totally separate thing, like they weren't really related at all as working on a couple of different projects.

Coming to this, it has been really interesting. It kind of gives me a better sense of what Rails projects might look like in 2018, if that makes sense.

ROBERT: Right, yeah. Are you using like the webpacker gem?

KRISTIAN: I don't. I mean, it's not old really, in terms of web projects overall than in terms of like a Rails app. It's still running on an older version. I think we're pretty homegrown set up. We're not using webpacker. We kind of set things up and run them as like two different processes and stuff like that. It's been really interesting. There is a bit of onboarding stuff that it took me a while because I came from doing, like I said, kind of standard Rail stuff and I would say that they are really kind of pushing what you can do with half Rails, half React set up. There's a bit of time of me kind of flailing around and figuring out what was going on but it's been really cool. I definitely feel like I leveled up in my understanding of how all that stuff can fit together over the last couple of months or so.

ROBERT: That's awesome. You're running a conference, right? You’re running an online-only conference for free and streamed on Twitch. That's pretty bold thing, right? That’s a new concept. How do that come together? I guess before we even discuss that, what is ByteConf?

KRISTIAN: I'll start with the synopsis of what it is and I can talk a little bit about history. It's actually a conference series. I have other events planned and the first of those is ByteConf React, which Robert is speaking at. It's a React in JavaScript conference that is streamed on twitch. If listeners aren't familiar with Twitch, it's a live streaming platform. Kind of the primary use for it is for gaming. There's a lot of people who will stream themselves playing like Fortnight or whatever other things. I usually just watch Fortnight.

It is primarily for gaming and in the last couple of years, they've started doing this separate section called the creative section, where there is non-gaming stuff. I've watched people paint. I've watched people play guitar or take song requests on the stream and all kinds of interesting stuff. What I can say is the idea for the conference wasn't a thing that I just came up with on the spot. I actually attended a really small conference that was streamed on Twitch. It was a game development conference.

I wish I could remember what it was called but it was really interesting. There wasn't too many people in the stream but I was impressed with the way that it was put together, especially for a topic like game development, which is I would say, I kind of took a stab at it last year and I found it to be pretty difficult to get into and fairly opaque in terms of understanding how to get started and then make that progression into a career.

I watched it and I enjoyed the format of the conference but I didn't really get learned too much from it because it was just too kind of complicated, I think unless you already were in the field. I started thinking about that and I thought it was a really interesting model and I felt like web development in particular, would be a really neat way to approach that format because web development has, I think a reputation if you want to get into programming. I don't know if I would say, entirely approachable. There's still a learning curve and there is a lot of work that you have to put into it too to get like junior dev role somewhere but I thought it was really interesting. I thought it would be interesting to take that format and apply it.

My background, besides doing straightforward full stack engineering, I've done some courses for Pluralsight. I've done some in-person technical training, so I had a background in teaching and I felt like it would be an interesting just to try it and see what would happen. So far, we're a couple of weeks out from the conference and honestly it's been pretty wild how many people are excited about the conference. I don't think I've ever done a project on my own, like a side project that has had people that just tweeting about it without me prompting it or anything like that.

I saw something on YouTube today like a Spanish YouTuber who does tech news and he was talking about the conference. I don't know Spanish. I was curious and wanted to see what he's talking about but I couldn't really understand what he's saying but I saw the logo and I was like, "What? This is crazy." I'm really excited about it and I'm sure we'll kind of get into this but there's some really interesting implications and ways that this format, I think it will be a different approach to the usual tech conference format. I'm really excited about it and I think it's going to be really neat.

ROBERT: It's awesome that it's free and available for anybody at any time.

KRISTIAN: Right and a part of that, I think when I started thinking about it like, "Can I make it free? What are the implications of that?" I think that the main thing is that when it comes to running a conference, getting the location or whatever, I would say is probably by far, the most expensive component of that. For me, I'm a remote developer and there's a lot of people that I talk to day-to-day. I think a lot of kind of my audience and people that I know online are also working remotely, so for the conference to just be online, it wasn't too crazy of an idea for me because most of the interactions I've done in development stuff like that have been through the context of remote work.

But also, for people who aren't remote workers, who are getting into the field or even just have a small interest in web development, I think it removes some barriers of being able to access this kind of stuff. You know, if we can look back at the future and say, "This sounds very ambitious," but kind of a democratizing force of anyone can view this content and get access to it regardless of their skill level or economic level or things like that.

WIL: I frequent trips sometimes and I know this is obviously, a free conference but are you expecting any donations?

KRISTIAN: That's a good question. That's kind of one of those things I haven't really figured out the best way to do yet. In Twitch, I think there's the concept like 'Bits.' Is that what they're called? They’re like microdonations. I genuinely don't know how that's going to work out. I know the plan is to take the talks after the fact and get any kind of additional slides and stuff like that. We're doing a couple of pre-conference events that I can talk about. I guess I should plug those as well before we wrap up but the way that that's going to work, I am not quite sure because I would like to sell the packages after the fact and actually, being able to pay the speakers. But in terms of little of bits and stuff like that, I'm not actually sure. I'm genuinely curious how that's going to work out. I don't know if people will do that. I guess it just kind of depends on the audience.

ROBERT: -- In my talk now.

KRISTIAN: Yeah, give me Bits please.

ROBERT: "I intended to write, don't move to the next slide."

KRISTIAN: Yeah. I use Twitch every once in a while. I said, I generally just watch like one game on Twitch but I don't watch Twitch all day, every day. I think it'll be interesting to see because this is probably a different audience than, say the average Twitch user. It'll be really interesting to see how that shakes out. I don't really have a great answer for you there.

WIL: Do you have any guests like a number of people that are going to be attending? I see on the ByteConf site, there are 1500 subscribers.

KRISTIAN: That's a good question. I guess I can talk about this stuff that we have planned before the conference. We've been building an audience for really, it hasn't been that long. It's been like four or five months since I announced it. We're using kind of dogfooding a thing that I've worked on a Project Hunt, which is this Ship product, which is for collecting emails and sending out newsletters and stuff like that.

ROBERT: I saw that get announced not too long ago.

KRISTIAN: Yeah, it's really cool. I'm really happy with the product and they have some built-in promotional tools on the site, which is pretty neat. But we have, I think like 1500 people on the mailing list. I think, we have, the last I checked, about like 4200 followers on Twitter. It's hard to convert that like how many people are actually going to attend. What we are doing and this is like A, because I think it be interesting and B, to kind of gauge this, hopefully as best we can. We're going to be doing some preconference like 'Ask me anything' interviews with some of the speakers and I'm hoping I can get a better sense of how many people will actually start attending any of the events that happen.

The way the Twitch works is you can follow and subscribe. You'll get a notification when a channel goes live. The first time that we go live will be tomorrow, actually and so, we'll see how many people will turn out and it should be interesting. But in terms of actual numbers, I genuinely am not sure. I would hope that a lot of people who are on the mailing list will be there but it's been pretty neat. I've already been hearing of people who are trying to setup like in-person events, viewing parties and stuff like that. I've tried to help coordinate that as best I can without taking over the limited amount of time I have before the conference actually happens.

Also, people in Europe and vastly in different time zones are actually kind of grilling me about, "When can I watch this? Will you do every broadcast so I can actually attend this because I don't want to see the conference at two in the morning," and I'm like, "Yeah, I know. I understand that." We're kind of figuring out those details as well. Like I said, I very much consider this like the MVP of a longer term event series so I'm excited. I think it will end up building something that a lot of people will attend multiple times and hopefully, we can expose people to new stuff as that happens.

ROBERT: You mentioned that somebody in Europe like wanting to know like, "When I can watch this?" which actually makes me wonder like that's one of the unique challenges that you have for an online-only conference because no one's going to be asking that question if the conference is in... I don't know, LA, right? Everybody knows where it's going to be because it's all co-located, so what are some other unique challenges that come with running an online conference?

KRISTIAN: That's a great question. We don't have the explicit location and time that it starts to kind of point people to. In some ways, it's a positive thing. We have a lot of people who can attend that normally wouldn't be able to. They're excluded by price, location and stuff like that but there are some things that you, I think kind of give up when you do the online format instead. One of those is just being there at the conference and running into people that may be you know or having sponsors with booths set up, where you can make a connection in that way.

Some of that, we're trying to solve by building an active community. We have a Discord server that we started a couple of weeks ago, where people are chatting about this kind of stuff. I really think of it as like there's probably many ways to solve this problem and I'm trying a couple of different ways to see what sticks. Building a community where people can continue to talk before the conference, obviously they already are doing that and then continue after the fact and build the kind of connections and relationships and community that would maybe happen organically or at least, have a chance to happen organically in an actual physical conference. Some of the stuff, I genuinely still trying to figure it out like how best to give people the sense that they are welcomed and I guess, kind of feel like they're part of a community of developers.

I remember when I started the conference, one of the first things I thought about was when I first went to a conference in San Francisco that Heroku put on and I remember being there, I was very, very junior as a developer and I remember sitting there being like, "Whoa. This is probably the first time I've ever been in a room with a bunch of other hundreds and hundreds of developers," and it was real interesting. It's one of the first times that I was like, "I actually am for real, doing this. This is pretty cool."

I'm trying to figure and imagine and we'll iterate on this in the future like how best to give people that experience. Maybe that means doing a couple of physical ByteConf events. I'm thinking about that definitely but also, how do we keep the original idea of the format but also, how people feel like they're part of a community. It's very much a work in progress.

WIL: I could see a future where you have a physical, smaller conference but you still stream it on Twitch and everybody could still attend.

KRISTIAN: Exactly, yeah. I think that's probably the format.

ROBERT: That'd be rad.

KRISTIAN: One of the things that I thought would be interesting would be to do some kind of and actually, I think about this before when I moved out to Austin, like doing some kind of West Coast tour where we go up the West Coast and do events, maybe every a couple of nights in a really small format. The same kind of conferencing they have people from that area, come and give a talk but still stream that on Twitch. It's kind of a hybrid approach that the people who are already part of the community can still attend but for people who want that physical experience, they can do that as well.

ROBERT: That's awesome and if you did that, then you wouldn't necessarily lose the whole way track. One of the things that I really love about attending conference is like the talks are great but I usually always find those online afterwards. But what I can't find online afterwards is the communication and the talk that I have with people that are there.

That's an interesting challenge to have, maybe you could have... I don't know, like not to tell you how or what to do, maybe like a channel in the Discord for a Hallway Track channel or something that encourages conversation, maybe outside of but in connection with the talk. But I would just say, maybe that's just one of the tradeoffs that you're willing to have for an online-only conference.

There are a plethora of things that you just shed by not having it out at a physical location, like a bunch of cost for one and AV setup and worrying about people connecting and getting and presenting properly --

KRISTIAN: Via conference Wi-Fi. If they have problems, that will be their house Wi-Fi.

ROBERT: Yeah, exactly.

KRISTIAN: I totally agree. I think it's not the worst problem to have because we're in a lot of ways kind of simplifying and really, it's the kind of thing that we can iterate on over time. When I was talking about the European time zone thing, I may be sounded like I was bothered by people reaching out or whatever. It's actually quite the opposite. It's really exciting and I have actively kind of sought feedback out and been like, "How can I do this better? How can I communicate this decision or that decision?" or even help me make this decision so that it's best that I do whatever works best for the community and I expect that will, as the community grows, just be more and more a factor.

I think that's the kind of thing that tying up like the Hallway Track or something like that. I'm confident that people will have opinions on that and they'll say like, "This is what would work for me best to feel like I'm part of this community," and we're going to definitely try those things and iterate on them. It's not the worst problem to have because there is really nowhere to go but up, in terms of how we do it well and stuff like that.

ROBERT: Good problems to have.

KRISTIAN: Yeah, exactly.

ROBERT: All the talks are prerecorded, right? What have you done or have you done anything to help support people who haven't recorded a video for speakers? What are you doing to kind of ease speakers into this new style?

KRISTIAN: Yeah, it's interesting because in terms of a speaking lineup, there is clearly, some people who have experience both as conference speakers, also in particular in this format. It's basically recording like a Screencast. It's more or less the same thing. It's slightly a different format, maybe condensed to a shorter, like an hour talk. There are some people: Kentcdodds, Tracy Lee, they're two of our keynote speakers, I guess you could say. They have a ton of experience. They're pretty much giving talks regularly all the time, so for them, this is this is no biggie.

But there are a couple of people I've tried to, like in terms of once we got our CFP, our call-for-paper, we were accepting talks submissions and also getting information about the speakers themselves like, "What is your experience of speaking at conferences? Do you have any experience speaking at conferences?" What I thought would be in the spirit of the conference itself and kind of our ideals and even, I would say like the ethics of how we think about this kind of stuff, I do actually think about it in that term. We want to have speakers that represent that. You know, bringing anyone from any experience level, in any location and stuff like that and having them be able to attend the conference and also speak at the conference.

There’s a couple people that just don't have a ton of experience speaking at conferences or even keep doing this kind of Screencast format and so, for those people like kind of the silly one, I've just been reaching out to them like, "If you need any help on the stuff, let me know. I've done this a couple of times, at least the Screencast part of it, I have a ton of experience with them, so if you need help, let me know of that."

Also, if someone needed it, we bought them a mike and a webcam and we sent it to them and be like, "Don't need to worry about that because that's potentially --"

ROBERT: Woah, that's awesome.

KRISTIAN: Yeah. That can be like an economic kind of thing to make people feel uncomfortable, like maybe, you can't afford a mike or something like that but we will cover you and no strings attached. That kind of stuff, I think is really important.

I think, the kind of the main thing is we just want people to feel comfortable. There is no reason that because someone hasn't given a talk at a conference before, there's no reason they can't start. Everyone has something interesting to say, I think and everyone's experiences is really interesting and brings a perspective. Especially in the conference format, I think it will bring a perspective that you're not used to seeing at a conference. Not to say that the kind of perspective of people who are super experienced and things like that. As a developer, as a conference speaker, that's obviously really useful but it's also useful to see things from the perspective of someone who is just getting into the industry.

I think that being able to amplify those voices is really interesting and exciting to me. I'm sure there's probably ways that we could do this better in the future but for now, it's been just kind of like supporting them whenever they need it and trying to be encouraging and then any kind of small things like buying a make or something, we can provide that.

ROBERT: That's awesome. There are some tradeoffs you could make always with anything but it's almost, I want to say better, to give your first conference talk or one of your first conference talk in this way. I know I was really excited about it when I first heard about it because I get pretty nervous getting up in front of people. At JSConf, I don't know how many people. It kind of gives me anxiety but with ByteConf, it's pre-recorded so I have the ability to go back and polish everything that I want and I can remove those odds and things like, "Oh, wait. That didn't quite slow right. Let me fix that real quick," or, "I didn't really like what I said there. I can go back and fix it." It does come with the added complexity of like, "Now, I have to go and cut it together and make sure that there's this whole post-production aspect of it," but it makes me feel a lot better because I feel that I can deliver something that I feel really good about and I know because I've watched it six times and gone over it with a fine-tooth comb, you know?

KRISTIAN: Right. One of the things that I am hoping that we can do in the future is in terms of the editing and stuff like that. If someone feels comfortable like really fine-tuning their talk and stuff like that and giving almost a finished product to us, we're happy to obviously accept that but for people who just don't have that ability or needs some help in refining, I don't want to say the quality of their talk but just kind of the delivery of it, we can definitely help with that.

In terms of refining, say you're going to give the talk again in your case, I think it's really interesting also. We're trying to coordinate as with as many of the speakers as we can, kind of like time zone permitting and things like that, having them in the 'attending the conference,' or 'viewing the conference,' and also being available in the Twitch chat and not necessarily having an interview there but maybe, if something comes up or someone is like, "I don't get what this slide means," or something like that and that's both an opportunity for, we're not going to like pause the talk or anything but the speaker can be there to clarify and add that additional, I guess dimension of understanding of what's going on in the talk. I think it's actually really interesting. I'm really curious to see how it turned out.

WIL: Yeah, I'm curious too because I [inaudible] with Twitch sometimes and most videos, like you mentioned before, you want like some small conference and it was a very small chat and a lot of Twitch, for me is interacting with the person that I'm watching, through the chat. It's interesting to me that it'll be pre-recorded but the speakers are still going to be interacting through the chat, so it's going to be real cool to see.

KRISTIAN: Yeah, I'm trying to --

ROBERT: I'm pretty excited about that.

KRISTIAN: Yeah and I hope that you would be interested in being mixed. I'm sure people will have questions about that kind of stuff. I've already talked to a couple of speakers and I'm trying to reach out individually and see how many people can be there for that because it's really interesting. In your case, if there's enough people to say like, "This part kind of confused me," or, "You lost me here," that's an opportunity for you to refine the talk and get really explicit timed feedback.

I think if someone came to you after, say your JSConf talk and was like, "You know, there's this part that I don't really understand," like you don't have the immediate understanding of literally, at what point in the talk are they exactly talking about. I think that will be really interesting. That's --

ROBERT: That's absolutely could be bigger.

KRISTIAN: Yeah and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this. If you've ever been in Twitch chat before, it can get a little rowdy and I'm trying to figure out the best way to manage that because I have literally zero tolerance for whatever kind of the most toxic of Twitch chat as I have zero tolerance for that in the conference. I'm trying to figure out the best way to make that happen.

But if you're a speaker and especially, it's your first time ever giving a talk or something, if you get that kind of feedback, hopefully it's delivered in a way that doesn't suck and we're going to try and mediate that as best as we can. That's a great opportunity for really effective improvement on your presentation style and stuff like that, so I'm really excited about that.

ROBERT: It's actually interesting to think about is what kind of trolls you might run into and --

KRISTIAN: And you have people who are like, "Vue is better..."

ROBERT: Yeah or any kind of cross-trolling that might happen. That'd be interesting to see how that plays out and how you might enforce that code of conduct.

KRISTIAN: We definitely do have a code of conduct in Discord and so far, I'm happy that we haven't had to enforce that in any way or there hasn't been anyone that has brought the quality of the chat down. I've seen people answering questions about different open source projects and stuff like that. I think, Robert you wrote up a solution to someone's problem in the TypeScript channel or something. Did I see that?

ROBERT: Yeah.

KRISTIAN: Yeah, stuff like that is really cool.

ROBERT: Someone who was asking how to do radio buttons in React and I was like, "I'll just write a quick code chain box example that kind of showing this."

KRISTIAN: Yeah and if I could pick one long term goal of where I want to see the conference in the community in a year or two, I want to be able to scale that up to, say like 10x or 100x the amount of people but still keep that quality of conversation. I think that is really looking at producing a conference. That part, honestly isn't the most complicated part. It's if you can use Adobe Premiere, you can pretty much make a pre-recorded conference work. It's keeping that quality and making people feel like they are a community, especially for people who know that they want to be a web developer, maybe they have no idea where to go or how to start. If people can join the ByteConf community and feel like this is a good place, that you can call this place home, I guess online and learn in that way. That's kind of the larger goal. The conference is just one aspect of getting there.

WIL: This is all very exciting. I'm looking forward to attending.

KRISTIAN: Yeah. I am really looking forward to it as well. It's pretty wild that it's August, that it's actually happening soon. I'm really excited. It's going to be sweet.

ROBERT: Yeah and I'm seriously working on my talk right now, to try and get it together. The cool thing that I found about that, I'm talking about BigTest and Wil is a person that's writing BigTest and he's the mastermind behind it. It'd be great to have him in there and answering any questions alongside with me as the talk goes on. I didn't even consider it before you said it. It is really powerful because I'm going to be introducing something that might be foreign to a lot of people, this testing style and how you do it in single page apps. There will be a question and I know I won't be able to cover everything and hit all the bases and make sure that's not confusing because it is a complicated topic. I'm going to do my best but the added benefit of me being able to clarify things on the spot is kind of mind blowing there.

KRISTIAN: It's huge and I'm trying to figure out the best way to archive that kind of dimension of the conference. I'm really interested to see it tomorrow. We're doing an 'Ask me anything,' but I'll plug that at the end. It's going to be an interesting to see what the kind of ratio, like signal-to-noise is in the chat and if it's good, especially at the conference itself, if people are asking really good questions and that kind of stuff and the speakers are responding, that is a really valuable thing to try and save. I'm trying to figure out how to do that as well, even save the most requested questions or maybe the most detailed answers that the speakers have and making that available in some way, I think it would be really valuable to people.

WIL: Yeah, for sure.

ROBERT: The other thing I just have some of thought of too, with all this being pre-recorded, you are able to schedule this out pretty well. At a normal conference, if somebody had a 45-minute slide and they finished in, say 30, the conference organizers will then have to go and figure out what they're going to do with that spare time but with all pre-recorded, you can just kind of spot it together and have a plan going forward.

KRISTIAN: I think most of the talks, I've kind of ask people to keep them around 45, 50 minutes and we'll have some space between the talks for people to continue to ask questions in the chat or I can plug things like the Discord server in those spaces and sponsorship infos and stuff like that. But I'm also constantly thinking of these little formatic conference allows so many different little things to be tested.

One thing we're thinking about doing is like at noon, there's going to be a break, kind of a lunch break, but ideally and I need to start thinking this out, getting some lightning talk style things from people who submitted a talk and didn't get accepted or something that and those are --

ROBERT: Would those be live?

KRISTIAN: That's a good question.

ROBERT: Or pre-recorded?

KRISTIAN: That's a great question. I think the thing with live is that I would have to figure out how to get people to hop onto the stream. That might be possible but I'm not quite sure. I think we'll probably do pre-recorded, kind of across the board for this one but there's all of these little opportunities to do interesting things with the format.

One thing that, I will take you on kind of a journey here like where my mind goes and I think about stuff like this over the last year or two. This is going to seem like such a tangent but I'll tie it up, I promise. Over the last year or two, actually longer, it's probably the last couple of years, I was really into Anthony Bourdain and all of his shows and I was really interested in, again this is going to sound really bizarre but I was interested in taking that idea and applying it to conferences. For say, the keynote speakers, I was thinking like it would be cool actually to go and meet them wherever they're working and stuff like that and introduce them in that format and maybe even sit down with them and do an interview or do some kind of live coding with them and have that available as a bonus material to the conference itself. Maybe air some of it in-between talks as part of the preface for their talk. There's all these kind of interesting things.

I think that one thing that always kind of bothered me about the developer world is, I guess I always feel like it's really hard to visualize how to get started as a developer and then what is the day in the life of a developer and what do you actually do. I think I've been really interested in this idea of giving people a holistic view of how to get into this industry and to show people. At least in my opinion, there is a lot of hype and maybe, not intentional but it makes a scene a lot more difficult than it really is. That takes a lot of time but there are a lot of people who probably have been, whether that's kind of the Steve Job's worship of tech people or this other thing that no one can be like them unless you're whatever, if that makes sense.

Basically, everyone in this industry is just a normal person. Maybe, there are some crazy personalities out there who are really dominating or stuff like that but for the most part, I think especially in the web developer world, everyone is, at least in my perspective, very welcoming and just like normal people and I want the aspect of the community to be letting people into that world and say like, "This is not as impenetrable as you may think," and there's a lot of different ways to --

ROBERT: Amplify the kindness and amplify the welcoming.

KRISTIAN: Exactly, yeah.

ROBERT: I like it. You did mention like around lunch time, there would be a break. At other conference, they usually cater lunch. Is there anything offered for that or is it like go on and find your own lunch?

KRISTIAN: That's actually a really interesting question. No, there isn't anything planned but now, I wonder if I should find a company that's like... Is that DoorDash? Is that grocery delivery, is that restaurant delivery? You know what I'm talking about like --

ROBERT: Restaurant delivery.

KRISTIAN: -- Or something like that. It'd be cool to have a coupon like if they're React, they might want to sponsor the conference. That would be interesting. That's a super --

WIL: -- Delivery fee.

KRISTIAN: Yeah, that would be super cool.

ROBERT: It might be too late for that now since we're a couple of weeks out but some of those companies do used React or in the future, for the future of ByteConf series, like if it's a SwiftConf and I know you've mentioned that before, you might be able to be like, "We're doing a Swift online conference. You guys use Swift. Do you want to sponsor?"

KRISTIAN: Yeah. I think there are so many opportunities to do really cool things. That's a really cool idea. I haven't thought about that before. I'm going to write that down. That's a very cool idea.

ROBERT: Could you tell I've been thinking about like a ByteConf accessibility conference? Because I have.

KRISTIAN: Yeah. Let’s do it. For real, that would be sweet. The format, we can tweak it in so many ways. It's like a full-day conference plan but there's definitely the opportunity to do really small form, like just an evening or something like that, where you get a couple of people together. The way that I visualize it in the future is there are these longer conferences but also, it just be really neat to do kind of continuous --

WIL: Online meetup essentially.

KRISTIAN: Yeah, like broadcasting. I don't want to say like a TV channel but like this place that we're going to be airing new stuff to the people who are working on and we're going to be airing old talks from conference and stuff like that and giving people a space to constantly be learning.

ROBERT: You can do like a nightly techcast. "Tonight, in JavaScript news, there are 15 new frameworks."

KRISTIAN: Yeah. The thing is like with Twitch, they've done a lot of tools recently that I've become kind of aware of as I'm trying to figure out the best way to broadcast the conference. They have a lot of stuff around scheduling and stuff now that actually gives us the opportunity to basically run, maybe not nightly but weekly or monthly thing without having to explicitly setup... I don't know if either of you've ever done Twitch streaming but you have this broadcast software that you have to run on your computer and stuff like that.

They’re working on tools to remove that aspect of it and really just make it almost like a YouTube competitor in some ways and maybe like a more live aspect. That's stuff is really interesting to me because that totally fits in with the kind of aspect of what we want to do but there's all kinds of other opportunities too. I know there are a growing number of people who are doing live programming streams and it would be really cool to be able to share our audience --

ROBERT: Coordinate that?

KRISTIAN: -- And stuff like that, so I'm trying to figure that out as well.

ROBERT: Are you familiar with the Ember community at all?

KRISTIAN: I was familiar with the Ember community a couple years ago. It's actually is what I learned before I learned React but I think I'm pretty out of date now.

ROBERT: One of the team members here at Frontside, Taras, he started something similar like that two years ago called Global Ember Meetup and it was just an online meetup that would happen at night and people would come on and give their talks. It was actually really cool because there's a lot of engagement from all across the world, which was super neat. I would love to see that idea to continue live on.

KRISTIAN: I know for our mailing list, we have a sense of where people are located and this is the nature to advertise and stuff because I think our most of our audience is still in the US, Canada, UK and stuff like that but there is growing numbers of places like Africa and South America and stuff like that, where I'm not as exposed to that community but I would to make it available to all of those people. I genuinely just haven't been exposed to those communities as much and I would both like to understand the unique problems of being a web developer in those areas and also, do my best to adapt the format of the conference and stuff to those groups.

I imagine that people are really excited about it but I think after the conferences, really one of a lot of the interesting stuff happens because we can take a look back and say, what could we have done better to include all kinds of groups that are historically disenfranchised from attending this kind of stuff, if that makes sense.

ROBERT: Even for me, I really want to go to conferences that are in Europe but that's a big investment. It's like breaking down those barriers. I'm pretty privileged in that regard but for somebody that isn't, even just attending a conference inside the States or somewhere that even kind of close for them, just the price of the conference ticket puts them out, so I'm really excited about this idea. Why not leverage the web and make everybody available to learn in conferences and have access to that community.

KRISTIAN: Yeah. I think I actually saw that Facebook just announced. They're doing another React Conference and it was interesting speaking of ticket prices, I think a lot of you were saying it was super expensive. I don't know what the exact number was, maybe you know but I actually had some people tweet like, "This is why I'm excited for my ByteConf," and I was like, "What?"

WIL: That's awesome.

ROBERT: I don't know what their prices but when Facebook throws ReactConf, you have to enter into a lottery. You wouldn't even actually get a chance to buy a ticket. You have to enter a chance into winning a ticket for you to buy.

KRISTIAN: Yeah and that kind of stuff, I mean that won't get too deep into my politics in general but generally, that's the kind of thing that I am extremely allergic to. Even the idea of having a lottery and stuff like that, there's a lot of people who, to make the decision and say they have the opportunity to attend the conference, like if they say they get a lottery email like you have a ticket, there are some people who will be able to swing that on the spot and say, "I want to buy a ticket and start to book my flights and stuff or whatever," but there's a lot of people who that's going to be a thing they need to plan for a really long time. They don't have the opportunity to wait on the email and say, "Yes, I can go to this to what I'm being paid." That's just a different dimension of financial and I think the ticket was like $600 or something, maybe $700. It was expensive but there are much more expensive conferences.

Especially, if you don't work at a company that covers your conference costs, like I am fortunate to the both places I've been at for a longer period of time like say, two plus years, have both sponsored conferences, they allowed any of their employees to go to conferences with some budget in the thousands of dollars every year and for someone to pay that, say they want to get into web development, that's a huge financial burden if you're working minimum wage or something like that. I feel like I sounds I just came down very hard on the React Conference but it's fine. It's cool that they're going to get really cool speakers and stuff like that but I think it's something.

ROBERT: It's the job position of online-only versus co-located, right? There's talk there.

KRISTIAN: Yeah and we talked earlier, maybe there's a hybrid approach of doing ByteConf physically, I think the one thing I will never compromise on in terms of how we put on the conference is like if we're going to do a physical thing, it needs to still be available for people who can't attend it. I think even at this point, the first conference hasn't quite happened yet but I do strongly believe that's already in the DNA of the idea and kind of ideals of the conferences I want to allow people to always attend, whatever we're doing, regardless of their situation.

WIL: That's huge. I never attended a conference until last year when the company I'm currently working for, Frontside, paid for it. Before this, I had never been to a conference. It's awesome to see, they're like free [inaudible] by now.

KRISTIAN: The conference I talked about earlier, the San Francisco one, I just straight up put that on a credit card, like I could not afford it. I did it because I guess I felt like --

ROBERT: That thing --

KRISTIAN: Yeah, exactly but there are people who just straight up can't do that. By that point, I was interning at a web development place but I still was basically getting paid like minimum wage. It was like under paid but I did it because I felt like it would be an investment. I didn't actually get a job from any one of that conference or anything like that, so who can say what the actual value of that was but it was important kind of in a motivational way but I don't ever want people to go into debt to go to ByteConf. That sucks. There's no way I'll allows them to do that.

ROBERT: Yeah, because it's not only the conference ticket. Depending on what conference you're going to, I’ve seen as low as $150 and as high as $2000, just for the conference tickets and then you have to get your hotel for a week and fly out there and food. It quickly turns into a really expensive endeavor.

KRISTIAN: It is in a lot of ways. I think for people who are fortunate in tech, it's somewhat of a vacation because you get to go somewhere. Usually, the tech conferences, I think are held in pretty cool locations, unless it's some kind of indie conf that doesn't have a lot of sponsorships or something like that.

I went to a conference a couple of years ago that was at Disney World and it was very much a vacation. I went to the conference and I had a lot of fun. It was an Elixir Conference. I learned a lot of stuff there but after the conference was done, I went to like... I'm trying to think what it is called. It's like Downtown Disney, basically or whatever, so I went like --

ROBERT: Oh, they renamed it to Disney Springs.

KRISTIAN: Oh, really? Disney Springs, wow. That sounds very --

ROBERT: Yeah, I [inaudible] for two years.

KRISTIAN: Actually that does sound right. Coming from LA, I used to go Disneyland all the time. Even if the conference is just on a hotel or whatever, usually the area around it is pretty nice but that definitely limits a lot of people, unless you're fortunate enough to be making a tech salary or have a company that will cover that conference budget for you.

ROBERT: We're sending two people to JSConf Hawaii. We were able to snag the early bird tickets which are so much cheaper. Then I was shocked that the hotel cost on Waikiki Beach was cheaper than my Portland hotel, so I'm actually super jealous and it was a super awesome vacation on the beach in Hawaii for less than what probably took for me to get to Portland.

KRISTIAN: Is that where JSConf is? It's just in Portland?

ROBERT: That's JSConf Hawaii. Portland was Chain React, so shout out to React Native Conference. The JSConf US one is in San Diego which is coming up in two weeks. Oh, my God.

KRISTIAN: Nice. If you are a conference speaker and stuff, I think you get some stuff cover. I don't know. Every conference is different or whatever, so if you go in that format, if you go to conferences as a speaker, I think it's a little bit different situation but I can think of a lot of times that I looked at a conference and there's been a couple of talks that I found interesting but just the amount of money that I would spend to see one or two talks that really interested me, it wasn't worth it.

ROBERT: At least ByteConf kind of shed that and absolutely drops the barrier of entry of to nothing. I mean, nothing mean you have to have an internet connection.

KRISTIAN: Yeah but there's still a couple of things. This is why I'm trying to deal the rebroadcasting and making it available after the fact is there are some people who still can't take a day off and watch a full seven or eight-hour conference, so it's important to make it available after the fact too.

I think I mentioned, I want to sell the conference talks with the slides and with the bonus materials and stuff after the fact. There's people that are actual, like practicing React developers who would feel fine paying like $30 for those or something and that way, we can hopefully, ideally, I hope I'm not totally speaking out of this to make totally go wrong but ideally, pay the speakers to some degree. That's another kind of aspect of it that I eventually would to do well in the future. But like you said, lowering the barrier to entry to literally as close to zero as we can get is what's really important to me. Then they feel everything else, we can work back up to something, putting on the really big conference events that a lot of other people are doing but still keep those ideals that we had from the first place.

ROBERT: I love it. ByteConf sounds super awesome. I'm very excited to be selected to be a part of it. I really appreciate that. Is there anything else that you want to plug about ByteConf?

KRISTIAN: Yeah. A couple of things, tomorrow depending on when this comes out, August 10th at 5 PM PST, we have our first 'Ask me anything' with Kyle Shevlin, who is a speaker at ByteConf React this year. It's just going to be Twitch.tv/ByteConf. If you're on the mailing list or you're in the Discord server or stuff like that, you probably already know about this but I will obviously tweet about it as well.

A couple of other things. The 24th of August, we're actually doing and this hasn't been announced yet. This is the first time I'm talking about it.

ROBERT: You heard it here first.

KRISTIAN: Yay! We got an 'Ask me anything' with Kentcdodds, one of our keynote speakers. I'm very excited about that. That hasn't been announced yet but I imagine that's going to be really cool. I think people are going to be very into that. Finally of course, the conference itself. ByteConf React is August 31st. It's one day, starts at 9 AM PST. You should join the mailing list and follow us on Twitter. It's just at @ByteConf. You'll see a link to the mailing list there as well and you'll get some more information there but it starts at 9 AM. On Twitch, it's Twitch.tv/ByteConf. That's all you need to do to attend. I would love for people to follow us on Twitter and join the mailing list but if you are allergic to following the people on Twitter or getting emails, you don't have to do any of that. You can just find us that day on Twitch.

We have some more things that we're probably going to announce as kind of preconference events in between now and then but those are kind of the two or I guess three, main things. Thank you for having me on. It's been really awesome. I think it's maybe the first time I've talked about the bigger picture stuff with the conference so it's been really cool to get to talk about that. I'm excited for your talk as well. I think it's going to be really neat.

ROBERT: Awesome. Thank you for coming on. Like I said, I'm really excited for ByteConf. When I saw this pop up as an idea, I was all over it. I think I actually submitted the CFP before you officially announced that there was CFP. I'm like, "I'm in it. I'm going for it."

KRISTIAN: One more thing, I think I didn't mention just kind of organically is that all of the CFP submissions are actually reviewed by people in the community. I'm really proud to say that the talks they have selected, including Robert's were generally, because people were just super interested in them. I think that's going to really show when we air the conference. People are going to be really excited about this stuff. It's going to be super cool. I'm beyond hyped. I'm extremely nervous, extremely hyped and it's going to be great.

WIL: I'll also going to say that if you have an Amazon Prime account, you get a free Twitch subscription, so you can go ahead and subscribe to ByteConf on Twitch.

KRISTIAN: Yes. That is very true. I should do a better job of plugging that. Oh, one more thing. I guess I should be a good podcast guest and also say like, if you want to follow me on Twitter, my name is Kristian Freeman, it's at @imkmf on Twitter. For the most part, I just tweet about ByteConf stuff and Product Hunt stuff and then get mad about politics sometimes but I should do a better job of plugging my stuff. Again, thank you for having me on this. This has been really, really great and I'm looking forward to seeing you both at the conference.

ROBERT: Cool. Thank you Kristian. This is a great conversation. I'm really excited about it.

We are the Frontside. We build software that you can stake your future on. If your team needs any help with single page app testing, accessibility especially in single page apps, I'm really, really open to helping anybody. If you or your team need help in that or leveling up, be sure to reach out. We're open to pair. We're open to start a new engagement, anything that kind of helps you and your team to move forward, we're super interested in. As always, you can reach out to us [email protected] for any feedback on the podcast and thank you Mandy for producing our podcast. Thanks everyone. Have a good day.

WIL: Yup. Thanks guys. See you at ByteConf.

In the last episode, we spoke a lot about the "why?" behind microstates. This time we wanted to cover how ideas in Microstates map to different patterns used to build JavaScript applications using frameworks like React, Ember, Vue and Angular. We discussed what you need to know about Microstates if you prefer component state architecture or global store architecture like Redux, as well as how setState in React can be refactored to use Microstates. We closed off with the comments about the trade offs that component heavy frameworks make by overemphasizing the view layer at expense of other aspects of the MVC pattern.

This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC.

Upcoming Conference Talks:

Transcript:

CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #107. My name is Charles Lowell and we are going to be following up with our Episode 106 with the exciting conclusion of 'Microstates, the Podcast.' With me today to wrap this subject up, at least for the near term, obviously we're going to be talking about it a lot in the days and months to come, are David and Taras, also co-developers here at Frontside. Hello guys.

TARAS: Hello, hello.

DAVID: Hi everyone.

CHARLES: Before we get into that, we'll just make a few quick announcements. First off is here at Frontside, we are going to be having some availability at the end of August. If you or anyone on your team is looking to level up in the area of testing, especially testing single page applications, acceptance testing single page applications or if you need React or general JavaScript consulting, please get in touch. We would love to work with you and love to do some of the great things together.

Second, we finally released this and this is germane to the topic at hand. We released a major version of microstates this week that's based on a new and simpler architecture. That's really exciting. It doesn't really change the content of the conversation because the API hasn't changed that much. It just means that the library, which was already very small is even smaller. I think we shaved almost 40% of the size off and it's just much simpler and it's much more harmonious with the underlying JavaScript runtime. It's even more just simple JavaScript objects.

Unless there's any other news that you want to cover, we'll jump right into it.

TARAS: All right. Let’s do it then. Let’s do microstates.

CHARLES: I Love to talk about microstates. This is obviously the second podcast that we're doing on microstates, just because we ended up, I think it was two weeks ago and we'd been speaking for almost an hour and really, we're just laying out the problems that microstates solve -- the problems of state management and why you often run up against complexity when you have a single state management tool that doesn't account for a bunch of different use cases.

We got into microstates a little bit but we left it as kind of a cliffhanger. We talked about transactionality and laziness and immutability, ease of composition, simplicity of API, performance, memory footprint, things like this. Those were all the problems and then we're like, "Yeah, microstates. It's awesome." We're going to talk a little bit more about actual microstates proper and what is involved like the adjustments in mindset that you need to make or don't need to make when adopting a tool like microstates.

TARAS: Actually, it's been really interesting for me because I just gave a talk at Toronto JS on microstates and it was pretty cool to see. There was a panel at the end. I think the people that are representing just using component state as a way of architect implication. It was managing state and application and it's representing redux. It's really interesting to see, first of all, like how curious people were. Most of questions were directed to the discussion around microstate, simply because it is a new tool but it was also just interesting to see how curious people who really loves redux, he was like, "I really love redux but I really like that fact that you guys have types," so I was like, "Oh, that's cool."

Even though you really liked your solution, you actually found something in microstates interesting but at the same time, I think he was kind of missing that what aspects of Microstates overlap with redux. I think one of the things that we can do today is talk about what microstates has and what API does microstates provides and how similar they are to what people already know. I think that's one of the things that I was thinking about this conversation is that there are some things around microstates API like how to use microstates but the architectural concepts that power a microstates, they are already part of the development process and development architectures for most people that building single page applications.

I think we can do is try to map these ideas not what people really know and patterns that they use to ideas in microstates, just to show how close we actually are. I think that's a good way for us to go.

CHARLES: I guess we can start with, maybe one particular mode of managing state and then, how that maps to uses with microstates.

TARAS: Let's start with components state because that was kind of our starting point. One of the original starting points for microstates because so much of our work was in Ember and component state is where most of Ember development happens. I think that's a good place to start. If you're someone who uses components state, if you're using Ember or Vue without something that is redux-ish which is pretty common these days, if you use components state, then one of the features of --

CHARLES: And also, if you're using React, right? Ember, Vue and React pretty much are all the same in this regard.

TARAS: Yeah. Well, Ember and Vue are a little bit different in that behalf. Their particular pattern is you have data coming into the component, then you're doing some work with the data so that in Ember and Vue, you might use computed properties to derive state on that and then you might pass that state further down into other components. In React, you would do something a little bit different because there is no memorized computed properties by default, so you, a lot of times, write your computations that you pass into other computers that are written as expressions in JSX.

If you're using this pattern, then one of the challenges around using this pattern is the process of lifting state becomes quite complicated. Because if you have like a bunch of state that lives in the component, it's attached to your derivation of state and the properties that you can invoke are attached to a component object. In React world, it's called lifting state. In Ember world, it'd be essential refactoring it into the parent component and passing that state in.

in microstates, you're essentially moving this state into the microstate and now, what you have is this object that instead of having the state live on the component, the state now lives on the microstate object and in all frameworks, when you do that in microstates, you can use the getters to get the memorized computed properties behavior on the microstate. If you use your computed properties, computed properties are available for you on the microstate. You can do it the same way.

CHARLES: It's kind of like a wrap up of that idea, not a wrap up but a summary of that idea is that the microstate essentially is a substitute for your component properties. If you're working with a component, a component has state associated with it, so you're setting properties on a component and then using the computed properties of that component. Microstates is you have all those benefits where you can set properties directly. You can define methods that like set properties as part of a transaction and you can then have simple JavaScript getters, which are just like computed properties except there's no enumeration of dependent keys. It's just, that's all they do for you.

TARAS: Then the next question that arises is like, "Do I make like one huge microstate or a bunch of smaller microstates?" I think the question is really depends on the role of your component and what's nice thing about microstate is in microstates, there's two things that are kind of cool. One is when you represent your status in microstate, it makes it very easy. If you need to lift that state from the component up into the parent, you can lift that type. You can take that type and you can compose that type into the parent's microstate, if you have to and in that case, you would pass this new object that's created from that type. You'd pass the state for that component to the component that would otherwise have its own state. Essentially now, the parent has the state that would otherwise be in a child component and now, the parent is passing a state from the parent to the child.

There's two kind of benefits to that. One is it gives a parent a way to control the state of the child and it also gives you a really easy way to serialize and deserialize state. You start off with having ability to serialize state for a particular component and all of his children, now you can represent that serialized state as part of the components state, so you have an easy way to restore the state of the component tree at the parent component.

CHARLES: Right and that's possible because a microstate is really just encapsulating a value within a type but the value is just a simple serializable plain old JavaScript object, right?

TARAS: Yeah.

CHARLES: I'm just not trying to say like this is the feature that microstate provide, so when you're creating a microstate, you just pass it a POJO and it off to the races with that POJO and you can access that POJO at any single point.

TARAS: Yeah. This is part of the architecture that I think are helpful for people that are using components. Is there anything else for people who are using components state that we think would be helpful?

CHARLES: I think we're just realizing that you get the benefit of the laziness and immutability and the transactionality and all kind of things that we talked about last time but actually, the mental model is very similar. I think the thing to realize is that if that's the way that you used to working with state, the bridge is not too far. It's actually quite a short one.

TARAS: Yeah, that's good.

CHARLES: It feels very natural. It's not a huge mental shift. It's just more about a very small mental shift, a very small shift in mechanics for a very large payoff.

DAVID: For instance, say you're in an Ember application using component state, what I'm used to is you're going to be passing actions around between components. Whenever you're trading that out for microstates, is it more that these actions are just bundle in with the microstate as the transition?

TARAS: Yeah. One nice thing with the microstate, because the transitions that you can perform on any data type are intrinsic to the actual data type, the part of the data type, when you instantiate a microstate, you get these transitions for free. When you pass the object into a component, you can now invoke transitions on that object, that are part of that object's type. It's hard to imagine how awesome that really is because the closest pattern that you would see for that would be like, for example, if you're using Ember, you have Ember object or Ember model that you pass into a component and then, you can work a transition and because it goes through the Ember data store, your component is going to update.

With microstates, there's no observation of any kind but what you're doing is when you are invoking the transition, transitions going up to the top of the root and gives you the next microstate, which updates your component tree. You get that functionality of 'data-down, actions-up'' built into the entire system of the microstates and all of that is hooked into these transitions that you can invoke on the objects that you pass into your components.

CHARLES: Right, maybe David and Taras, you all could provide a concrete example of what that looks like. Because I think it is something that when I was giving talks on microstates at Ember meetups, one of the first things I like to show is you've got all these actions that you're writing either on your router or your controller but they're really actions manipulating the same type of data. It really comes down to like you're pushing and popping things off of arrays, you're toggling Booleans, you're incrementing counters, you're setting this property on this object. These are actions that we're writing and in the kind of microstates world, that's boilerplate. Because the transitions are intrinsic to the data type of the microstate that you're working with, maybe we could provide an example, like what's an action that you describe that you would pass around.

TARAS: I think an easier one would be like if you have a model for example, you're composing a model into your application state or you're compose a model into your components state, so you have this model type that gets instantiated and you pass it into component that represents a model. Off that model, you might have open status like is it open or not that gets consumed by the model component, to know whether the model should be visible. Then along with that is model is open state, there is a toggle transition that you can find inside your component that is going to automatically flip the visibility of open.

What will happen when you bind that transition to some kind of action handler that you invoke inside your component, when you invoke that action, it will then trigger transition at the top of that microstates and then, it will create the next state, push it through which will cause your model to change the visibility. David, that does answer the question?

DAVID: Yeah, it does and that's actually the example that I have come up with whenever asked. A very simple sort of Boolean toggle.

CHARLES: In a couple of my earlier demos, I should dust off that talk that I gave to the Austin Ember meetup where I was able to create an input with a dropdown menu with basically, some pretty advanced mouse behavior, all without having any component state or like storing it all in microstates and a lot of pushback was, "Aren't you putting logic in the template?" and the answer is, "Absolutely not."

The logic is in the models but what I'm doing is I'm composing the actions that operate on those models inside the templates but at the template level, the action is data. If you're thinking about, we always want to have, we always want to lift state and then push that state down to the application, what this is really saying is that the actions are part of the data. It is implicit to the value that you've got.

TARAS: I think that's really powerful because we do think about actions as being something that you can invoke. Like with closures, it's an action that you can invoke but considering that operation, that piece of data that invokes a transition in microstates and is derived from the type of the data, I think it's a cool concept. That's probably, one of the things that is kind of new for microstates but how you use it in your application should feel pretty much the same as you would if you were creating action handlers on your components.

CHARLES: Yeah, just like kind of bundled action handlers for free.

TARAS: Right.

CHARLES: Maybe the way that you wrap up on this one when talking about kind of what microstates has to offer for the Ember developer, the Vue developer is really, I would say someone who's used to working with like MobX. Would be another good example is when I first started using Ember back in 2012, Ember Object solved a whole lot of issues in a really profound fundamental way and I really, really was drawn to that as the best API to be working with state. What kind of became apparent was perhaps not the best implementation.

This is not like bag on Ember Object. I think it was actually amazing technology for seven years ago when most of it was written and probably, even came from before like SproutCore. It's almost 10 years old, which is incredible but it's still under heavy use in 2018 and it speaks well of how well it was constructed. I actually don't have much of a problem with Ember Object API. I just think that the way in which it's implemented that API means that there are some problems that require a different paradigm, so very much I kind of see microstates as heavily inspired by those types of APIs but with, I want to say a modern implementation but an implementation that is designed to solve the problems that have come to light over the last five years of developing single page JavaScript application.

TARAS: I want to add that, when you describe with Ember Object, it exists in every framework that uses immutability. In MobX, the observation introduces the necessity to wait for a bunch of things to resolve. In Angular zones, I saw a similar purpose to ensure that if there are kind of cascading or streams or all of that stuff gets settled in into kind of restful state before you can start to assert on what's going on and with Vue, their computed properties has something similar.

I think because of the complexity of having to track lots of objects and then recomputing things based on the result, that complexity in microstates is simplified by the fact that you describe you transitions. When you write them, you describe exactly what changes, so we don't need to wait for things to settle down. When you invoke a transition, that transition is explicit and based on the path of where that transition is invoked, we know exactly what needs to change, so we need to only perform one operation to compute the next state.

There is no other things that we need to wait. There's no other side effects that we need to resolve before we know what the final status. I think that simplicity can be applied to all the frameworks that are using immutable APIs and derived computations from those immutable APIs.

CHARLES: Uhm-mm [affirmative].

TARAS: Should we jump into talking about what microstates has to offer for people familiar with redux?

CHARLES: Yeah, okay. Let's jump right into it. For folks who are familiar with immutable APIs like Ember, like Vue, like other ecosystem using MobX, a shift to microstates might feel like what you can expect. What about people who are just using often React-land and they're just using like set state.

TARAS: Set state is a little bit tricky because it does get complicated over time and then you get this kind of funky things going on after a while where you start seeing things like, "I'm going to set state on this component and then once the change happens, I'm going to change some states some other state," so this kind of cascading state changes.

The other part that I find particularly more challenging in set state world than it is in, I think in regular components state, like what you have with Vue and Ember. I feel like the way that the transitions, the state change handlers become part of the component, I find that part particularly kind of fragile. When you start doing refactoring, when you need to lift up state, it's like --

CHARLES: What's an example of this?

TARAS: When you start off and your component owned old state and now, you need to have that state being controlled by the parent, we get into a situation where like, "What am I going to do? Am I going to do something with props as they're coming into the component or I should probably just flip that state from the child to the parent?" and now, you're refactoring the internals of a component to lift up that state so you can then combined those operation with the parent's state transitions. But then, you have this kind of added complexity of the fact that you're working with immutable data in that place.

You’ve got these three things going on: you’re refactoring your child component, you are moving these things into the parent components, you modify a parent component and now, you're also managing the complexity of forming immutable objects. I think the fact that people make it work is kind of a testament to human resilience. The people are able to solve such challenging problems and this is not a super hard one but when a component is complex enough and when stakes are high enough, these changes can become fragile.

This is what I think microstates simplifies is that by taking care of the model, it makes components much simpler and makes it possible for you to just render a lot of components that are functional components without their own state.

CHARLES: It actually reminds me and like I said, we're talking about what it's like to use them, not so much the implementation but that's the exact same sentiment that the author expressed in his book that was very helpful in writing microstates, which is Brian Marick. He has this book called 'Lenses for Mere Mortals' and he's talking about the practical use cases of using lenses, which microstates leans very heavily on. What he says right in the introduction is it gives you by abstracting the location and compose it the way in which your data structures are composed, it makes them very refactorable.

You can say, "I want to change where the state lives. I want to change the structure of this object and I want to move it somewhere else," and it's sounds weird to say this, because the structure of the object is not coupled to the structure of the object, it means that it's very malleable, so you can move and you can say, "You know what? I don't want this address to be embedded in this person. I want this address to be inside this address book and then my person has an address book entry." Being able to make those refactors make those changes is very easy because your method of accessing the data is abstracted.

It’s something that applies beyond even user interface as a component state but it's something that this is a problem that's very salient when you are authoring complex UIs and compose components. It's something that you can benefit very greatly from.

DAVID: Taras, you were telling us earlier about a friend of yours who is learning React for the first time over the past few months and he's mainly been using set state as you would just starting out in this world. You said that he didn't really get why you might have to go and learn some other way to manage your state and I think Charles said it, whenever your application starts to get more complex and you've got a lot of different moving parts, that's really where microstates will come out and shine for you.

TARAS: Yeah. My friend kind of feel bad because he's spent the last three months learning how to work with React and how to use set state, "And now, you're telling me, I need to learn something else? Like I'm going to start from scratch?" I kind of reassured him that especially when you're a beginner, when you're learning, you learn how to address very specific challenges but you don't know how complicated these things can get when your UI gets really intricate.

In those intricate scenarios is when you have to leverage your experience and you'll be able to solve these problems but if you're learning, you encounter these challenges head on and your tool does not really, like set state. Although it can be used to build really complex UIs very effectively but the complexity that over time increases as you start to manage the state, increases much more later on than does early in the beginning.

Basically, with microstates, even if you have some basic proficiency with set state, when you start working with microstate, the things that you can do with microstates, you will be able to do more sophisticated things easier when you need to use them than you might realize when you start. Because microstates API is so consistent, there are a very few concepts to actually learn and they cover a broader range of use cases so when you actually starts using it, you'll encounter these challenges. What you already know it will just work for you and always just continue to work for you. That was part of kind of fundamental design on what Charles and I have spent, a lot of time putting into place from a point when we started two years ago.

CHARLES: I think, and you touched on this and this is kind of what I was speaking to earlier is that when you're working with a simple system, it's simple, it's easy to work with and then the complexity starts to grow, it's never a good thing when you have to reach for a more complex tool to manage the complexity. It's a hallmark of a good system and that it can scale with you from a very simple and easy use cases to actually being able to handle very large and complex use cases but your API doesn't have to change and your usage doesn't have to change.

If you have a tool that can actually scale with you from a one liner to a hundred thousand liner, that reflects very well on the design of the tool. I think you see that with things like Ruby, you see it with things like Clojure. You see it with, I would say there's even people writing like Haskell, shell scripts now but not so much with like C++. I think the analogy is very similar with microstates in the sense that when I'm looking for evaluating a language, it's not the only thing I look for but I really am looking like how is this going to work for me as a one liner? How's it going to work for me as a hundred thousand liner? If the answer is pretty consistently, then that's something that is going to get a lot of bang for your buck, so to speak. If I invest the time in learning it, I'm actually able to reap the reward of having a tool that's got my back on a whole bunch of different use cases.

We talked about, in React, if I'm using set state and that's kind of a sub case of component state because I would say that in the previous systems we talked about -- Ember, Vue -- they have components state but the component state is a little bit more rich in the sense that you've got computed properties and what have you. But if we look at a system that externalize a state like redux, where you have a global state atom in your application, at least that's the way most of the redux applications that I've encountered behave, what does it look like for you?

TARAS: I think it's a little bit challenging when talking about redux is redux conflate a few different things together. I think it's helpful to split those things up, so we can talk about them separately. One of the parts is how the state is delivered to components. The way that redux does is the instance is this created so every time you use connect, you essentially wired together. You can connect through the context or... I'm not sure. I think they have an observation mechanism that's internal to redux as well but they essentially connect components to the store and then they view that to deliver the state.

It’s kind of worth pointing out that for that like microstates bindings for React actually give you something similar out of the box through context. For those who really like the ergonomics of connect, I think it would be pretty easy to make that available for microstates. Usually, we don't even know why they wouldn't be available.

CHARLES: But I do think that connect can be problematic like you can encourage you to not make components that are reusable and have isolated state. It's very easy to hitch yourself to the redux store and now, you don't have components that are shareable.

TARAS: I think I would personally prefer to pass microstates instances through props because of the stability that's built into microstates and structural sharing, you can get some free optimizations and allow it to use functional components in more cases like out of the box but some people who are really like redux, they really like connect. Although it might be my personal preference, there's no reason why that wouldn't work if somebody wants me to connect function and make it available for people.

CHARLES: Right and I think, there's a happy medium there too, right?

TARAS: Yeah, I think --

CHARLES: -- You can connect components and then fan out that state to a set of functional components that are not connected.

TARAS: There are some places where microstates and redux are very similar. When you're using in redux, you have this dispatch mechanism, where you essential saying, "I'm going to dispatch this action and your action creator is going to create an action for you with the payload," and then you're going to match that action to a reducer.

One of the things that I kind of hear redux people really enjoy about redux is the one with data flow that dispatch the action and then, it reduces this next state and pushes that through and you have this kind of ingress point where everything is going through this one point. I think what's really interesting with microstates is you essentially get that. That's exactly how microstates works, in a way. The only difference is that the API is different. Any action that you invoke is going to go through a single entry point, which is going for you. Because we know the structure of the data, we know how to transition that state for you, so you don't need to reducers, so you're just defining your transitions or use the built-in transitions and then when you invoke them, we know the path.

We’re essentially forming for you. The path where you invoke the transition, conceptually, it kind of forms the name of the action that you are invoking. The path refers to a place where the state is going to be transitioned, then you have your transition, which is the actual reducer for that part but it's contextualize, so you don't have to think about how you need to transition that state in a great, global redux state.

CHARLES: There's no matching. The matching is automatic.

TARAS: Yeah, the matching is automatic, so you get that same single ingress and one directional dataflow. You get those mechanics except the APIs that you use, instead of writing the actions yourself. Instead of writing, we just use yourself. You get to use microstate types.

I've heard some people who use redux who are like, "I really love the fact that microstates has types," but other people don't like types for whatever reason. Microstates comes with 'from,' which allows you to take a POJO and from that POJO, it creates a microstate and then you can invoke transitions the same way as if you had a type microstate. The only thing you don't get is you don't get to create your own transitions. You have to use the transitions that are provided for the primitive types.

CHARLES: I think that there's a couple of benefits that you'll realize for free. There's laziness, reducers by default, or eager. When you dispatch an action, it will run against every reducer in the store. If the reducer matches, you're going to run the computation that's associated with that reducer.

Microstates by contrast is lazy. Basically, until you try and read the property that is affected by that reducer, the reducer won't run. There's some ways that you can get around this. When you're using redux and first of all, you can actually have your reducers return objects that have getters on them. You can realize some of that laziness but again, it's work that you have to explicitly put in.

I think, didn't you actually say that there is a package of plugins? There are plugins. There's basically a set of libraries that you could bundle together, which would give us an experience similar to using microstates.

TARAS: Yeah. If you wanted to combine redux and reselect and immutable JS together, you can get some of the benefits, except this benefits are not integrated that well because they're still separate systems that you are essentially using together. Also, like microstates, it's four times smaller than redux and reselect and immutable JS combined together. If size matters to you and ergonomics matter to you, you actually can get a lot of ease out of using microstates while still maintaining the benefits of having redux.

CHARLES: But if those things, those packages, like reselect and immutable JS, are things that are familiar and you naturally gravitate for it, then you'll probably absolutely love microstates. Because honestly, one of the ways that I think about microstates is like, what if you could have immutable JS, if there was no cost for composing the types like list and record. Immutable JS has come a long way since I've last used it or it's evolved since I've last used it but I think there's still only about four or five basic types and actually, making your own new immutable structure, your own custom type with its own custom methods that still get the benefits of structural sharing and laziness that you have on immutable JS is not something that you can do. But you could think one way to think about microstates is an immutable JS where you can make any type that you want. You're not just constrained to the record types and to their list types and set types or map types.

TARAS: It's worth pointing out that at the moment, microstates doesn't map perfectly to immutable JS simply because immutable JS has certain optimizations for managing lists that kind of a great value of immutable JS and microstates doesn't have some of those pieces but --

CHARLES: They're definitely on the road map.

TARAS: Yeah. Because microstates is abstracted high enough, that we can actually change internals and some people who are using microstates now, they will get benefits of ergonomics and there's already performance benefits from the stability that microstates offers but there will be a time when by upgrading to newer versions, you will not basically, need to change anything in your op but you will get the benefit of improvements to performance that we will introduce over time. Some of those improvements might come from what we will learn from immutable JS.

CHARLES: Right. I have a couple of thoughts before we wrap up. What are the ramifications no matter who you are? What kind of development background, some of the benefits that you'll experience with microstates that might be a pain point or something you hadn't thought about where you are currently? A couple of things that I have jotted down is first, and this is what brought it to mind is talking about stability. Something that you see in a bunch of frameworks is having to manually track the keys that are associated with data. If I've got a list or I've got an object, being able to say, if that object changes, then I need to actually have some sort of key object, which effectively amounts to a hashing function to say, "Did it really change?" Because no matter what system you're in, you need to know how you're going to re-render. If the reference to this object changes, then the default thing needs to be, "I need to re-render it," right?

You see this in Ember, in Vue. In React, there's this ability to pass a key or ask the question, "Should this component actually update?" and with microstates, that's much less of an issue because basically, it keeps the key tracking instability for you. If you are using a model with microstates, if you think of an object as a graph of nodes, no node in the graph will change unless it absolutely has to, at least that's the goal. We still actually have some work to do when you're running queries against the state of a microstate. We can cover that later but that's most largely the way it is now and definitely, the way it's going to be going forward is you don't have to do any extra work as a programmer to figure out what has actually changed.

TARAS: That opens up some interesting opportunities. Imagine if you had a rendering engine that did not expect side effects to be significant and you could just say, "If I know whence they'd changes, I will then re-render that." That will be really interesting exercise, seeing like what would that look like for a performance perspective, if you have a very clear picture of what has actually changed and what part of the DOM as a result, need to be updated without having to do diffing. The [inaudible] you could actually do a diffing at much higher up. Actually, [inaudible] to diffing because you know what's changed but you can push a lot of assumptions higher up on the architecture stack.

CHARLES: Right. That's actually one of my favorite thing about microstates and one of the unwritten values is like triple equals used to work everywhere and by and large, it does. It's usually simplifying but when you don't have to manually tell the computer what equivalence looks like, you can just say, "Look, are they the same object? They’re not the same. If not, then they're not," and keeping that consistent is huge.

TARAS: I think this is a good segue for us to kind of bring this conversation to a close and also, kind of set up potentially a third full-on conversation, which we could talk about actual architecture of microstates and design decisions because for people who just want to use microstates, they don't need to know all these details but for people who are curious, they might actually want to understand what are the considerations that remain when we were designing microstates, so maybe in a next conversation about microstates, it could be about architecture and the pieces in microstates today and then where we are going with microstates and what it could give us long term.

CHARLES: Yeah, I like that idea. It is a plannable subject that we've been talking about internally for the past two years, so it makes sense that there would be plenty to speak about on the podcast. There is one other thing that I did want to bring up and that is, I think enabling to have a state solution that is composable because it allows you to think about your state first. Because really, if you do have a functional UI, where your view is a pure function of the model, that your view follows the model and so, if the view follows the model, then really, the thing that you should be thinking about first is the model that's going to be required to drive your view. I shouldn't drive. I should say derive your view because that's the primary artifact of which the view is nothing more than a function. It's a reflection onto a surface.

I don't think that we have a state management solution yet, that enables that mode of thought, where I'm thinking about my prime artifact first and working forward rather than thinking about my secondary artifact and trying to kind of wishy-washy way, work backwards and reconstruct the primary artifact. I think that we've talked about all the development ergonomics and I think there's a mechanic of thought there that's enabled by this that I hope to see in more and more applications.

TARAS: I think that's a really well put. I think that's something that I've been thinking about as well, as how do you convey this shift that microstates allows in terms of how we're thinking about architects and the application. For some people that value, the model, like they'll find that shift easier but regardless, I think that making that shift has a potential of simplifying your view dramatically and I'm very excited about exploring this further and having more conversations about this.

CHARLES: Yeah, that's where we really kind of open up the conversation about state machines, which is also central to the conceit of microstates and using state machines as an incredible design tool but anyway, we can all get into that later. You heard it here folks, Episode 3 is coming out, although probably not for a while. We're going to be mixing up and we will be talking about microstates at least for a while. I understand that next time, we actually teased it but we based on how much material there was on microstates, we ended up packing in a second episode. We teased it last time, we're going to be talking next time about running an online conference with Twitch, so definitely look for that.

Thank you, Taras. Thank you, David.

TARAS: Thank you.

DAVID: Yeah, it's been great.

CHARLES: This is a wonderful conversation and as always, we are Frontside. As I mentioned at the top of the show, we have availability coming in August, so if working with us is something that you would like to do, we have a range of services, please get in touch. You can get in touch with us at @TheFrontside on Twitter or [email protected].

That's it for now. I guess we should also mention that Taras that you are going to be giving a talk on microstates at ManhattanJS. When is that?

TARAS: On August 8th.

CHARLES: I will be giving a talk on microstates at ReactJS Austin on Monday, the 6th, so that is right around the corner. I'm excited about both of those talks, especially following so closely on the heels of the TorontoJS meetup talk, which I understand is... Is that posted online yet?

TARAS: It's recorded but it should be coming out soon. We'll definitely tweet it out.

CHARLES: Okay. All right. Look for that and we will see you next time.

In part I of The Frontside's microstates series, Charles Lowell, Taras Mankovski, and David Keathley talk about state management that’s easy and fun and transactionality.

This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC.

Upcoming Conference Talks:

Transcript:

CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 106. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at Frontside and I'm going to be hosting today's episode and we're going to be talking about microstates with fellow Frontside developers, David Keathley and Taras Mankovski. Welcome you all.

DAVID: Hello.

TARAS: Hello, hello.

CHARLES: I'm really, really excited that we finally get to talk about this but before we jump into this, just wanted to let everybody know that last week, we published our roadmap for Big Test, which is a JavaScript acceptance testing framework that we've been building right here, in-house at Frontside, which can work with both Ember applications and React applications, Vue applications. It's in alpha phase and we're looking for feedback but we're really excited about it, so we're going to leave a link to that in the show notes and please go check it out.

All right. Finally, the moment has come that we actually get to talk about this publicly. We've been publishing things about microstates for a while now but we feel that it's ready to share with the world and that's really, really exciting. We should probably like wind the clock back a few years because that's about how long we've been working on this and talk about, kind of the why and the what of what microstates are. It's kind of a weird word. What are we doing here?

TARAS: Yes. That's interesting question because we were working for so long and after all this time, what is this specifically we're working on. I can speak personally from my personal motivations because we have conversations over the last two years to why we were doing this and I think for me personally, it's always been that I've been mentoring building complex applications for almost five years now and one of the things that I find consistently is that there are patterns for how to build complex stateful UIs that the required solutions, that are fairly reliably consistent.

I can teach people certain patterns and then they can use patterns to build complex applications and those patterns scale really well, the challenge is that, there's not an easy way to express them and it's different for every framework. The way that I would teach somebody how to do it, for example in Ember versus how they would do it in React, even though the pattern itself is the same but the implementation of the pattern is different but it's different in such a way that it's very difficult to see where the consistency is, what is the same about these two patterns.

It shows me that there is room for improvement. In the same way that if there is an opportunity that in the future, components will get unified under one umbrella or what component spec. The fact that we do states differently across every implementation, across every opinion, it suggests that what we might be missing is something that would unify across frameworks, how we actually do statement management.

CHARLES: Yeah, that makes sense because as much as people try to buck the trend of MVC, it can't keep coming back in the rear view. Hopefully, not like a horror villain but like a caring friend, like a reliable pattern. I remember when I was in writing Java applications back in the day, the most important thing when you were writing a swing application was making sure that you had your models right. If you were modeling either a form or a dialogue or a set of pages, the most important thing was to have those models.

Back in the day, we modeled those things with event listeners, very similar to where the way like a Backbone application used to work or if you're familiar with Ember Object, the way that it worked basically, adding observers to some model so that when that model change, you were able to react to that. Your representation was able to be 100% dependent on this model. That was like a Java Swing Application, which was then inherited from this pattern from Smalltalk but we keep on seeing this again and again and again. There is this piece, this state, that if you're going to be representing something, then you need to be able to get at the meat of it. That's ultimately what the model is in the MVC pattern.

I remember when React first came out, everybody was like, "Oh, MVC is dead," but now in terms of state management and all of the state management solutions that we see, what that really is, is the model trying to reassert itself. Because it's such an important piece of your application, it's going to rear its head and you cannot escape it. I make it sound like a problem. I guess, it is a problem but there's a proliferation of solutions out there that are attacking the problem in order to represent something you have to know what that something is.

DAVID: I think when you only work with the one framework, your perspective might be very much shaded by your experience. If you're really good at building React applications and you have subscribed to POJO is king and you don't need anything beyond that, then you're going to get good at handling POJOs and you might not realize that there is actually limitations to what you're doing. I think the same applies to people who use Ember and they're using Ember Object and they have computer properties and now, in Angular, there is observables and subscribing to streams.

What was really interesting with the work that we've been doing with microstates is that and one of things that have notice with other state management solutions is that a lot of them emerge as, "Oh, I had this insight. I spend a couple of days working on it. Here's my proposal, in a way, for managing state." I think that's great because insight and understanding is really important but sometimes, taking the time to design something can be really helpful. I think that one of the things that are really interesting with microstates is that because we've been iterating on it for so long, they've been testing it for so long, we've been able to do something in microstates that's really difficult to do when you have a production application that you're like, "I want something different. Something is not enough but I don't have the time to really make it better," or, "I have an idea. I want to release this thing but I don't have any other collaborators that I can talk to and really flush out these ideas," so what you get is a solution but it doesn't always touch on a lot of the angles that you want to touch on.

It's really interesting when you think about --

CHARLES: I'd say, we should talk about those angles, like what are some of those angles?

DAVID: Yes. You could think about this from a few different perspectives. I would say, from Ember perspective because that's been my personal starting point. For anyone who was listening. Ember and Vue, for all intents and purposes, in this scenario are very similar because they have the same primitive, which is the computer property. The computer property in Ember, the computer property in Vue is almost identical from the way that you actually consume.

In Ember, you would use computer properties and in Vue, it's just computer properties to create derived state from data that's passed into the component and then, you would use is derived state to basically, decorate information that comes with the props, so you could present it in your component. This pattern is very nice. This pattern is being used to build LinkedIn, to build applications at Apple. There are huge implications being built by Ember community using this patterns and I'm sure something similar has happening now with Vue but this pattern doesn't really exist in React in the same way.

You might opt in to start using this pattern if you start using [inaudible] but it's not quite the same. Writing computer properties in Ember and in Vue is essentially free because it's so effortless, where in React, if you're using [inaudible] to create cache computer properties and memorize computer properties, you are really opting into doing a particular way of computing this properties and writing selectors that's not trivial. I think that's one thing that is available in Vue and Ember and it's a really effective pattern and you can do it in React but it's actually not possible in Angular, unless you're using, I'm guessing something like ngrx, where you can do similar things to what you would do if with redux in React.

Creating derived state that you can consume in your component is one of the things that is possible but it's not possible consistently across all frameworks. That's just one of the things.

CHARLES: I agree. I think that was one of the things that drew me to Ember at first coming from Backbone as I did and honestly, from the models in Java was that, in order to compute anything, you had to install a listener and then eagerly make that computation and store it somewhere, where as those frameworks, it made you feel effortless where you can just decorate some state and derive it and the information is there, the computation is there when you need to reach for it but you don't have to do expend any extra effort aside from say, "This state is derived off this other state."

I think another case that I came across was immutability. Immutability is a means but the end is to have consistency inside your application. I first really started running up against this when I was working with forms and since then, I've realized that actually, a lot of the pain that I was feeling was because things were not being immutable but this is where the fact that things weren't immutable ended up causing me a lot of pain and headaches and I was having the code into being a lot more complex.

Essentially, when I wanted to make something transactional if you're editing a form or something like that, then you need to essentially store off a copy of your current state. If you're editing some object, I want to say, open up a dialogue and I'm going to edit it and then I'm going to commit the changes back to that dialogue. What I'm modeling there is a transaction so I kind of need to shave off a copy or make a Xerox copy of the object and then make the changes inside to that object and then somehow, try and merge those changes upstream and then, get them back into the main lines. Really, like a very Git-like operation.

It wasn't just at the object level. When you're doing things like dirty checking, you need to make what is the original value of a field versus what does the input currently have. I might be doing any number of transformations in between the actual physical representation of the field, maybe it's a date but the user interacts with it in as a string, so there has to be this kind of parsing serialize thing sitting in between that value and you need to basically, keep a copy of that field as a mini transaction within your macro transaction because you want to say like, "Is it dirty? is it really the same object?" because if you can just do an object comparison, you have to get into all that hairy like equality checking and it gets really complex really fast but it turns out that a very clean solution to this is if you just never actually make the changes in place and whenever you are making changes, you're generating new information without destroying the old information because when a form is the case where we really come up against this, where we're modeling the same object over time, so a form explicitly models the change of an object.

Change is part of what it is and so, the definition of change is being able to compare something in its prior state to be able to compare it to its current state. If you're making that change by destroying the prior state, then you're going to run into a lot of trouble. It just turns out that when you're working with forms and it turns out there are a lot of use cases like this but this was the one where I first really just couldn't even... Without immutability, you want to model your change as always rolling forward and not ever destroying prior states but being able to pick and choose and can always be able to look back to where you were and compare where you are now to where you were.

That's where immutability comes when you're modeling change. It's actually much easier to model change when you have explicit states that represents what was and what is. But when you start doing that, then things get a little bit messy. You have to do the compromise. There's a tradeoff, like when I say, "Set this property on this object," that is easy and that's something that I think that we can all understand. We're not idiots. That's why immutable models are very conceptually easy to grasp, to wrap your head around.

If I'm modeling myself and I'm saying, "Set hand position two feet up in the air and now I'm raising my hand." That's easy to understand and it turns out that when you're changing a data structure immutably, then you have to, for example model a simple set operation as duplicate and swap. Or if say like you're swapping out one property in an array, you actually model that as a map, where you swap out the one element at that index, rather than just saying, "Just set the thing at that index," or if I'm changing a property of an object, I want to copy over all the fields except for that one which I'm going to change. If you start to do that then, you realize the benefit of always being able to look backwards but you've now introduced overhead and complexity in your code, so you've made a tradeoff. I think that's a lot of people look at saying, "I want this to be immutable," then they actually have to come to the grips with the complexity that's going to introduce.

There are libraries like Immutable.js that do make that a lot better but even they have the problems. I can talk about those but one of the cases is like being able to reason about a series of states for your object, rather than just only having one copy of it ever and being stuck with having to deal with it as it is.

DAVID: Yeah and I think that really important too is being able to mentally track where you've been because in my experience on other large Ember applications, I've run into so many different bugs that I could really track down to people or rather, places in the code where things are just reaching in and mutating your model, where it wouldn't make sense, so as you're writing your code, you're in a completely different state than you might have expected.

CHARLES: Yes and it's easy, right? But essentially, when you have some model, you've basically got a global object. There's a lot of recomputations that needs to happen when those things change. As a result, if you look at the actual code that supports computer properties in Ember and I'm sure other frameworks as well, some of the most hairy and complex. If you look at the chain watchers and the chain nodes and all the stuff that's required to support things like computer properties, it's amazing that it works as well as it does. I've tried to actually open that up and understand that code on a number of occasions and every single time, I had to walk away in defeat.

TARAS: This problem exists in React applications and Angular applications because if you think of the challenges of working with set state, I think one of the problems with working with set state in React is that your complexity increases very quickly. It starts off kind of simple when you're using immutability with set state in React. They're kind of very light and then, as you start to add features, your complexity starts to grow very quickly in a way that you really start to run into limitations. You start to confront your personal limitations of your abilities to work with immutability, so you're limited to doing immutable structures that only a few levels deep because your ability to use destructuring to create new immutable object is limited by expressiveness of JavaScript. It's gotten a lot better with the destructuring but if you do it a few levels deep, I think everybody's familiar with what happens. It starts to get really hairy. You kind of loose track of where you are.

CHARLES: Yeah. The signal-to-noise ratio increases because after probably, two or three levels, the majority of your code has to do with destructuring and restructuring and very little of the actual change that you want to make.

TARAS: And this is kind of interesting because people talk about declarativeness versus imperativeness but at certain point when you have a complex immutable state change, if you're doing with destructuring your code, even though it looks declarative but there is so much processing that you're doing, it's actually kind of losing the benefit of its declarativeness. It's actually starts to look more like imperative code than it does what you would expect a declarative system to look like.

I think this touches on the other aspect. It kind of compromise that when you work immutably, when it compromises, you make a serialization. Your ability to represent your state as a POJO becomes restricted by the fact that you have this complex system that's wired together and you have systems like zones in Angular and in Ember Object that are able to keep track of changes in these objects but you don't have a way to restore those objects. You don't have a way to do more sophisticated things that you might want to do, especially in situations where if a service feeding you, what do UIs going to look like. In that situation, it's really helpful to be able to say, "Here's a POJO that I got from the server. I'm going to use this POJO to build this component tree that the user is going to interact with and then, as the user interacts with it, I'm going to then, capture that state, serialize it and put it back in the server."

When you're using something like Ember Object or if you're doing this kind of stuff in Angular or even if you're doing this stuff with React but without using something like redux, you essentially end up doing so much wiring to accomplish that. By the time you finished writing your application, you've written a ton of code just to handle this particular use case and if you have to do this again in another application, you just rewritten that kind of code in a new application as well.

CHARLES: It reminds me of the concept of a Smalltalk image, like there's no way to really get at the state of a Smalltalk thing. It's almost like you're dealing in docker containers and not actually being able to write that state down into JSON or something like that.

I'm trying to casting about for an appropriate analogy. Maybe that's not a good one but what's actually happening cannot be made orthogonal. It can only exist in that one run time that you're currently running. If something wrong manifests itself, reproducing it can be extraordinarily difficult, right?

TARAS: Yeah.

CHARLES: Imagine if there's some render cycle that's making a bunch of mutations and there's this process that you stood up and it runs in completion, some signal comes in and those effects are like ripple through the system, there's no way at any point to have any other representation of that system than the running system itself.

TARAS: There's another element to this, which I find really interesting. When you're thinking about how to architect complex UIs, it's actually helpful to get really clear about what kind of changes are happening. A lot of times when I want to see beginners are writing, especially if you task someone who is a fairly junior at building a single page applications, a lot of times what will happen is because they don't have a clear mental model of what is going on in regards to state. They end up setting a lot of properties. Every operation, every time you have an event handler because they don't have a clear model of what's going on, they end up setting like five or six or seven properties.

That kind of signals that they don't have a clear picture but what that also does is a lot of times, they usually comes together with cascading state changes. Usually they're not representing a single operation as a single state change because there might actually be a bunch of things that are happening because what they're doing is they're massaging the system into submission. Not like they're not in control of the state transitions, so they use, essentially time and their dedication to kind of sort it out and make it work and eventually, would that ends up looking like that if it works for most of the cases that they are able to test for or that they able to manually see. But then they AR, not accounting for problems that they're not able to understand right now, they become discovered by users when users start to interact with the system and with the components or with that application and the application is there to get into some funky states.

The tools that we have, they don't prevent that from happening. They just --

CHARLES: Right. They don't force you. I think what you're saying is that ideally, you want to model your UI as a set of transactions on your state, that you want transactionality to your state so that I basically am saying, "I'm not going around and setting seven properties in reaction to this one event." I'm saying, "This event triggers this transaction and that transaction clearly bundles up every single operation that needs to happen and the tools don't enforce that." Is that a fair --?

TARAS: Yeah and then, the problem is we're working with component trees. You start off with having a set of requirements and over time, the requirements change. As the business unit understands your application better, they give you more direction of how accounting should work and then you find out that there's more interconnect at stake but then what's happening now is that the cost of refactoring those state that spread throughout the components, whether that be with set state, whether that be with the actions in Ember or even in Angular.

What you end up doing is you start to change the system but change is not trivial because the actual process of changing where that state lives is not linear. It depends on the complexity of the code that you wrote and it just gets really hairy very quickly. That's where companies end up losing a lot of time. A developer could start off with a requirement, you build something and then a new requirement comes in and instead of it being a simple change, it turns into a week or two weeks refactor because you now understand the state ownership should be different. The state that you have should be in a different place. You have to manually make that change. You have no obstruction to help you express that in an easy way.

CHARLES: Another thing, because we are doing a kind of a roundup of all the things that you need to account for when you actually embark on managing your state. Another is actually constraining the amount of computation that happens. If your system is based on listeners and large chain reactions of things where it's like, "This property changes so I need to notify these other 10 dependent properties that change." You can do a lot of unnecessary computation, especially if nobody is going to render.

That's kind of the thing that you have to do if you're going to be immutable. You have to eagerly walk those change to see which objects are affected so that you can then invalidate those caches. A system like Ember Object, I don't know exactly how Vue works, it mitigates this somewhat by the fact that the computer properties are lazy but you still have to walk all of those chains. That can actually get out of hand. They're eager, not lazy.

Then the other concern that you have, where you normally have to make a trade off around is around composability. One of the things that's really nice about immutable systems is they're very composable. If I've got some object that does one thing, I can then just set that object onto another object just by mutating one of its properties and I've effectively composed them.

I can then install listeners onto that thing or I can compute properties off of that property and they can post pretty well. That's something that you get but then of course, you're losing all of the benefits of immutability, so things like Immutable.js don't really compose very well or redux doesn’t really compose very well. The concept of taking a redux store and embedding it into another redux store, you just don't see that. I would never distribute and I think ultimately, the litmus test there is would I be able to share it on something like npm. Nobody shares an npm package that's just a redux store that you can dispatch actions to and observe and use it with your other redux stores.

When it comes to a system like Immutable.js, that does make transitions a little bit easier over lists and arrays and maps but you still run into the exact same set of problems that you have when you have lists of maps of records and you don't really get any help there, so you have to make this tradeoff between immutability and composability, whereas a system like MobX or Ember object actually quite composable.

Before we start talking about microstates, I want to say that you just throw those in there because there is just a lot of concerns out there, a lot of edge cases that actually build up but through the course of a real application, you will encounter them all. You might be making tradeoffs at the beginning that you're not realizing that you're going to need or are going to get you into trouble later on.

DAVID: This actually happens in the Angular community as well because there's something really great that's happening with observables in the Angular community. I think everyone's embracing them wholeheartedly and I think that's really been pretty great to see but observable streams of composable, but objects that have on them observable stream providers of some kind, like if you have something that you can subscribe to and that is part of a property in a class, composing multiple classes together and consuming properties from those classes, there is no mechanism for composing that. That kind of composition has to be done manually.

Again, you're kind of manually wiring together a bunch of objects and the big challenge is that you are manually subscribing to all those streams and unlike what you have with components. Components have lifecycle hooks. When your components is being torn down, you know you can perform some operations. If you need to remove an event listener, you have a hook where you can do that when you have a class instances like JavaScript class instances that have on them properties that have observables that you subscribe to. There are no tear down hooks for class instances, so there are no obstructions from managing unsubscribing from those streams.

You essentially end up having the foundation that you can use to build complex reactive systems and you can subscribe in there really fast but wiring those things together at a bigger scale is simply not there. It's something that you have to create and enforce yourself.

CHARLES: Right and I think that's probably a perfect segue into talking about microstates, which is the project that we've been alluding to for the past 30 minutes, that is I think in attempts to solve these problems and make sure that you don't actually have to compromise on those things, so you can reason about things locally but have those things be composed into a greater state. But also have them be immutable so that you can look at past states and reason over a data structure over time as opposed to just in one instance.

Also, have an intuitive interface that when you're making these changes, doesn't look like half of your code is unpacking some data structure, flipping some bit in it and then repackaging it back up again. That's the context. Should we start talking about what microstates is and how it addresses those?

TARAS: That's a good next step and when I start working in the ReadMe, I end up actually, I think I wrote about 40 pages. One thing that's interesting about microstates is that and this was part of the design of microstates from the work that we've done is that we intentionally wanted to make the number of ideas that you haven't microstates very little, so when you use microstates, the number of concepts that you need to remember in your mind is very few.

It is a conceptually a different way of thinking about organizing your state in the same way that shifting from managing DOM elements directly to having an obstruction like component that declaratively applies changes to your DOM tree. In a same way, microstates is kind of an abstraction that allows you to declaratively describe how your state will change and it will manage the transitions for you and allows you to give the state transitions names and it allows you to give your states names as well, so you can actually name things. You don't get a POJO that has a shape but has no name. You actually get to give things names.

CHARLES: So, why don't we start? I have a list in my mind. I should probably write it down of the things that we just talked about but I think the things that we talked about are ease of representation, like conceptually easy, transactional, basically serializable and immutable, lazy and composable. Those are like five or six things. But I think there are kind of aligning principle around which we gathers that the state management should feel easy. It should feel fun.

One of the things that is awesome about working with components, whether you're using web components or React components or Ember components is when you get it right, you're just snapping these things to feel together and it feels great. It's like I'm just passing properties and render blocks down the tree and the framework is just doing all of the grunt work for me and I'm just operating at a very high level. That's what organizing principle with microstates as it needs to feel easy. Maybe we should start there and just say, how does that easy and fun line up with each one of those kind of unique problems around which we typically have to make tradeoffs? We could start with the interface of making a change.

TARAS: I'll go back to the starting point. I remember what got me first interested in microstates is Charles, when you said that, when you have a number, there are certain operations that a number can do. We really don't need to be writing an increment operation for every... Like if you a have a number, you can increment it and decrement it.

CHARLES: Honestly, every time I see state management tutorial and they tell you how to increment and decrement a number with it and you write the increment code and you track the thing and you store it back into the store, at this point I'm still annoyed with those tutorials because I'm like, "It's a number. We know we can increment it. Just show me where to plug in the code. I should not have to be writing an increment method."

TARAS: Yes. And that's the kind of starting point. There are certain operations that you can perform with the primitive types. If you need to add a number or if you increment a number, we already know how to increment the number. It's part of microstates. But that in itself is nice but that's not that important. I think what's really important is that when you need to put a number into another data structure, let's say you have a nap and you're like, "I need to..." I don't know --

CHARLES: Let's say, like a click tracker that has a number of clicks.

TARAS: Right. By itself, you can increment the click tracker but if you need to put a quick tracker into another app, essentially you can compose it in and you don't need to figure out how to wire the actual mechanism of how to make sure that you can update the property, like it's part of another class, for example, you don't need the way you would increment the number. When it's a part of another class versus how you would do it when you're working with it by itself is an approximately the same. The amount of work that you need to do to actually perform that operation is the same. Your complexity doesn't increase as you compose one data structure into another.

CHARLES: Right. You can just say, "This is an app. It's got a click tracker and this property is a click tracker and I have to do nothing else. I can register clicks on that thing. It doesn't increase the complexity of application at all."

TARAS: There's no wiring. Now, you added some new state, that state is very explicit and it's really clear that it is not impacting other parts of the state. You can operate with this thing. If you change it, it's going to work properly with all the other things that are in the type that you are adding this counter to. Those things are just going to fit well together and it's not going to break if you need to transition one more thing. All of the other transitions will work the same way. I think that kind of consistency is really meaningful, over time especially when you start to increase the amount of state that you manage in your application.

CHARLES: Just the ability to work with types and just have kind of those implicit operations and have those things compose, kind of indefinitely. Moving down, we talked about easy and the other thing I would put on that is that the way in which you express those transitions, for example if microstates comes bundled with numbers and Booleans and strings and arrays and objects and kind of the stable of types that you would expect in any JavaScript application but those types are expressed using this way for expressing types, essentially.

When you actually do make a transition, it feels very object-oriented, I would say, even though it's not. It feels like you're mutating but you're actually doing a transition. Does that make sense?

TARAS: I think for anyone who is familiar with what it's like to write queries for GraphQL, if you're not familiar with it, it's fine. You can get a sense of that from microstates but if you're familiar with the ease of just writing a query and if your backend knows how to retrieve the data, then your queries will just give you the data that you want. That feeling is really powerful and just being able to write the query and just gives you what you want. Microstates is kind of like that. Actually, the inspiration came from experiences with GraphQL, which is that sense of ease is what we wanted to have in microstates and so you get that seems sense of like, "I can just do what I want and it just going to work and with this other thing and it just going to work," and you're just like flying through, like adding states to your application and it's just working for you and working for you and working for you and you don't have to do monkey work like gluing things together. It'll change how you are working before because you have a way of opt working with these things at a higher level.

CHARLES: Right. Let’s talk about transactionally or should we talk about immutability? How does this make immutability easy and fun?

TARAS: I think one thing is that you don't have to write reducers and you don't have to do destructuring by hand. I think you have a way of expressing. Thinking about this, if you have a component tree and let's say you have redux and then a bunch of components like your parent component, your root component has some state using sets date and then components further down the tree also have state. You could actually express that as a microstate.

What you would do is, essentially the parent component state would be the root and then the children's component states would be composed into it. The nice things about doing that is that at the root level, you have access to transition state of the children declaratively. You know where the states for those children is on the route type and you can write transitions that are going to declaratively perform multiple operations on the children state and I suppose it'll restructure to what happens with components but if you don't use this, you might have multiple sets date operations.

The process of wiring data from the root down to the children is kind of complicated, where here, you have a way to represent that and perform a lot of transitions in the way that is going to be just easy at whatever level you need to operate at.

CHARLES: Right. I think, for people familiar with redux, in redux you act globally and then you react locally, if that makes sense, so you dispatch an action to the entire store and every single reducer can see that action. There's ways to manage that but effectively, you have this one atom and then you have the reducers that kind of act on local state, whereas with microstates, you're basically acting locally. You're reacting locally but the effect is global.

TARAS: You're participating globally.

CHARLES: Yeah, participating globally but you never have to consider the context that is above your own, so you never have to be mindful or cognizant of the context in which you're enclosed because from your perspective, it just doesn't exist.

DAVID: Every microstate has a set transition which is the basic transition that you can invoke, essentially in any type, so what's interesting is that it's amazing how powerful --

CHARLES: So, we should break it down really simple. Basically, when you create a microstate, with a type, you say like, "I want to create a number with the value five," and then I can just say, "That returns a microstate," and I can say, "microstate.set 10," and that will return a new microstate who's also a number but the value is 10 and that's available on all microstates.

DAVID: Yes. If you have a tree of components and your state is presented by a microstate at the root level, then what you can do is you can invoke the transitions on any part of the microstate and it will just know how to properly create the next microstate for you. The example that Charles you gave of one number so that number can be inside of a class that represents state for a particular component and then that can be a part of another class or represents a state for another component but then, when you invoke a transition on one of the leaf nodes, an equal sets state on one of the leaf nodes or equal set on one leaf nodes, it will respond locally but it will actually reflect the changes globally. At the root level you're going to get a new object that causes the components to update.

CHARLES: You know what? I have another concern that actually just popped into my head, which is something that I've certainly struggled with in every single application of notable complexity is stability of value. We should put that on the list. We're almost out of time to talk about this. We spend too much time... Well, not too much time, of the issues of state management, which I think you can't spend enough time talking about but I did want to pile one more on there is when you're making that transition, where you're acting locally but you're participating globally.

For things that are unaffected by your action, remain unchanged. That is a super power. It's actually very hard to do with a lot of state management, especially when you're cloning a bunch of stuff, being very judicious about what you don't want to clone. Where this really comes into play is if I want to re-render something. A lot of times you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to tell, did my model really change or did only referentially change? With microstates, when you make that local change, if you're embedded in a very large graph of objects, obviously all of the objects above you are going to be changed but what about things that are off to the side of your siblings. They're outside of that scope of that change. They shouldn't be cloned. They shouldn't be copied over. They should remain the same.

If you're doing a re-rendering based on the changes that are happening, that's going to be a key feature because you're not going to have to write, basically any hooks to say, should I have to re-render my component. You can always rely on triple equals.

DAVID: This quality is going to describe the structural sharing and some of the other tools that are available but I think that's how it's accomplished. I think one thing that's a little bit different with microstates is that when it comes to structural sharing, it's not that difficult to do if you just do structural sharing and value. Meaning that you can do structural sharing on a value using something like lenses and not a lot of people are familiar with lenses in JavaScript but it's actually only three functions that you can use and it can give structural sharing on complex POJOs. It's pretty easy to use relative to how little people know about it but what that doesn't do is it doesn't allow you to graph of objects that have their own operation that you can invoke and that will perform structural sharing. That part, I know that is not available in any solution, I think at the level of completeness and luxury that microstate provides when you write things.

CHARLES: Right because every piece of the tree kind of comes bundled with its own things that you can do with it.

DAVID: I don't think you should jam everything into this podcast because there's a lot to talk about it. I think one of the things and we've talked about this a lot, which what we want to do is create an implementation for an idea of what it would look like. What would it be like if we had a composable state primitive that we could use to describe state and share state solutions in the same way that we share components like react-virtualized or whatever your particular frameworks or popular component may be. What it would look like if we had solutions to state problems that we could share and we could --

CHARLES: I think the litmus test of an awesome solution is like you look at this current crop of MVC frameworks and what's so awesome about it is they're sharing. That can happen, right? If I'm writing a React component, I can publish it on npm and other people can use it. If I have an Ember add-on, I can publish it and people can use it. They can consume those components. That's awesome and I think it's the hallmark of a great system.

What would it look like if I wrote just the state piece of a file upload and I could publish it npm and then anybody, in any framework, could actually use it with their framework without paying any penalty. What would it look like if there was some transactional data store that could be built and shared and the hooks into any framework were minimal. The possibilities are really exciting around that idea, whether it is realizes microstates or not. But clearly, we feel this is something you should be able to do.

DAVID: I'll add one more use kind of use case that I personally find really motivating is that there's a lot of companies that are investing into building single page applications and a lot of times, what you see happening is they're building a very similar application to what they had before because their business hasn't changed. The technology has moved on so solutions have improved. The demands for better user experience have increased but the actual business and how the things that people have to do on day to day within their company hasn't changed.

What we're seeing right now is we're seeing the same, like whatever was written before in jQuery or an AngularJS is now being rewritten in React or Angular or whatever you might Choose. But whatever you like to see is it has a situation where the domain specific logic of your business is represented as a data structure that knows how to, potentially, in the future talk to the server and retrieve data from the API because that's likely not going to change.

But you can use that like that's been tested and published as an npm module within your enterprise and then you can then consumed that in any framework and it's actually easier to do it this way, than to implement it in a framework-specific version of their state management. That's the part that I find the most exciting.

I think one of the things, just to connect to the goal is that, we would like to keep this conversation going. If you're interested and I think this is a kind of a call to our audience that if you're interested in this, we would love to have in our podcast to talk about these things because I think there's a lot of things that microstates really is a beginning of a conversation. It's not meant to be a statement. It's meant to be a proposal that we can just talk about this.

CHARLES: I agree and that's one of the reasons we're keeping it very small at this point. The core library of microstates is not setting out to accomplish too much. In the core library, there aren't even any side effects. It's actually impossible to have side effects. It means that it cannot be used for anything except for the model but that's very liberating and it let us focus on what would a system like this actually look like.

DAVID: It's really exciting because this has been the biggest metric but we have microstates in the JavaScript weekly and that was great and then it got circled around when people know and it's like 800 stars now, which is not a really big deal. It's funny because somebody commented like, "How can you put something in production that only had 100 stars?"

CHARLES: I think it's just important to realize that this really is the beginning of a conversation. There's a really exciting set of things to come. We haven't even talked about how we're going to model side effects, although we're going to use microstates to do it. We haven't even talked about what the various framework integrations will look like and what are the best practices for using this to organize state in your application. We've had some lively discussions internally about what that looks like. There's still a lot of questions but it's going to be a really, really exciting and edifying experience to get to answer them.

DAVID: Yeah, it's pretty exciting. I'm excited too. There's been a lot of interest from people in microstates, so it's going to really great. I'm looking forward to meeting people and having conversations about how we can use microstates because I'd love to have someone create a really great solution that I could just take off the shelf and just use and not have to implement them myself.

CHARLES: All right. Well, I think we could talk about microstates for at least the next three hours but we have to give everybody an opportunity to, at least like go to the bathroom or something. Microstates will return but if you're interested in learning more about microstates and you happen to be in one of the many places on which we’re going to be presenting on microstates in the future, who knows? Maybe you can come in and join the conversation in person.

Taras is going to be speaking at Toronto.js on July 30th. He's also going to be presenting at Manhattan.js on August 8th and then, yours truly will be presenting on microstates at React.js Austin on the 6th of August. Come out and see us. We'll drop those in the show notes and it's guaranteed to be a good time and we'll have that conversation.

Until then, we are the Frontside. We lead with the why, the how and then the what, if you're interested in working with us and that helps us that we guarantee the lowest total cost of ownership for your application. We're always looking for feedback. If you have news items that you'd like to see at the head of the show or just any feedback or questions, we would be happy to answer them.

Thanks today to Mandy Moore for producing our show and next time, we'll be talking with Kristian Freeman about what it's like to run an online conference with Twitch, so I'll be looking forward to that. Bye David. Bye Taras.

DAVID: Yeah, thanks for having us.

TARAS: Bye.

CHARLES: Yup, and bye everybody. See you next time.

Next Time:

Running An Online-Only, Free Conference on Twitch with Kristian Freeman