The Swyx Mixtape

Listen to the Nathan Barry podcast https://nathanbarry.com/048-ali-abdaal-building-multiple-income-streams-content-creator/ (7 and 21 mins in)

Transcript

So, I started the YouTube channel in my penultimate year, so I, I, I, I done five years of med school at this point. I’d set up a few businesses. I had like two SAS products that I was using to side hustle, income, most my, my way through med school. And then in 2017, when I was in my final year, the YouTube channel actually started out as a content marketing strategy for my, my business, that business was helping other people get into med school.

It was like that standard thing. Once you do something, you then teach other people how to do the thing. and it was like, you know, the creative economy before it was really called that where

[00:07:20] Nathan:
Yeah,

[00:07:20] Ali:
You kind of follow that model. And so the YouTube channel started.

[00:07:23] Nathan:
Because you were you teaching people like test prep

[00:07:25] Ali:
Exactly. Yeah. And it’s so similar to pet Flynn story as well.

You know, he, he started off teaching people how to do some architecture exam. I started up teaching people how to do the med school admissions exams, and that’s kind of transitioned into a coaching business, which then transitioned into the YouTube channel.

[00:07:40] Nathan:
Okay. And so as the YouTube channel started to grow, like, what were some of those first milestones, you know, as you’re getting to, how long did it take for you to a thousand subscribers and then maybe, you know, 5,000 or 10,000? Like what milestones stand out.

[00:07:52] Ali:
Yeah, so I started in the summer of 2017 and it took me six months and 52 videos to get to the first thousand subscribers, six months in 52 videos. I was putting out two videos every week while preparing for med school finals and kind of neglecting my exams for the sake of YouTube, because I could see the YouTube thing was like, oh, I really want to do this.

I think the ROI on being a YouTube or is going to be higher than the ROI and getting an extra 2% in my med school finals. that was, that was the theory. Anyway, So, yeah, it took six months of the channel to get a thousand subscribers, another like four or five months for it to get up to 5,000 subscribers.

And at the point where I was at around 4,005,000 subscribers, there were two like really good things that happened. Number one was a collab with a much bigger utuber. his name is Ibz Mo. So he and I got to know each other through university and he had 60 K at the time. And so he and I did a collab which took off and helped the channel get exposure.

But also there was a video that I made my, my very first video that actually went viral, which was a video about how to study for exams. now this video is a bit weird because like I’d actually planned for it to happen like a whole year before I made it. So when I started YouTube, I, I sort of consumed the hell out of everything on the internet, around how to be a YouTuber and, Sara Dietschy and Casey Neistat had this thing whereby Casey Neistat, enormous YouTuber, Sarah DG would take YouTube who was smaller at the time.

She went from 40 cases. Over to like one through over a hundred, a hundred thousand, basically overnight because Casey Neistat shouted her out. and the way that she described that, and I, that I found in some random interview, like on the YouTube grapevine, was that you, you benefit from a collaboration with a bigger utuber, but you only benefit from it.

If there is already a backlog of really high quality content on your channel. And so I took that to heart and I knew that, okay, at some point I want to do a collab with a bigger utuber. And at some point I want to try and make specifically a video on how to study for exams, but I knew number one, I needed to have a backlog of hot, cold, high quality content because otherwise no one would care.

And secondly, I knew that it would take me about a hundred videos to get good enough at making videos to actually be able to make a decent video about exams. And so that was like my 82nd or something video, which I, I, I I’d had in the back of my mind for so long since, because since getting started button, you know, I need to get my skills up.

I need to put in the quantity so that I can actually make videos that are hopefully.

[00:10:06] Nathan:
Okay. That’s interesting. Yeah, because coming, doing a collab and coming to a channel and it’s like, okay, they have four videos. And the one that I saw in the collab is actually the best one they’ve ever done. Like it’s sort of, it doesn’t have the same ring to it as if you come in and be like, wow, this is incredible.

Like, one of my favorite bloggers, you know, it’s separate from the YouTube space, but I got him, Chris Guillebeau was an author and blogger and I followed him in the early days. And I had the experience of, he had written a guest post for Tim Ferris and I was reading Tim versus blogging. This was probably 2011, maybe.

And I was like, oh, this is really good. I love it. I think it was on actually on travel, hacking, you know, credit card points and all of that. And so I clicked over to his site and I think. Over the next, like two days, I just read the entire website, you know, Nate, it was like years worth of blog posts and all that, but that was the experience.

Right. The guest posts is a collab of some kind and then coming over and you’re like, you’re just deep dive and consume everything rather than the experience of coming over and be like, oh, okay. That’s interesting. You know, and like moving along and the back catalog is what, what, drives that?

[00:11:09] Ali:
Yeah. Yeah. I had, I had that exact experience with Derek Sivers who I discovered through the Tim Ferriss show and Mr. Money mustache, but it’s coming through a temporary. I was like, all right, I’m spending the next week of my life. Just binge reading all of your blog posts that you’ve ever written for the last 20 years.

And now it’s like, I’ve got this information downloaded into my brain.

Clip 2

So in the process of building a team around, which is something I wanted to talk to you about because you’ve built a big team over time, I was speaking to Derek, you’re a director of marketing as well about building a team and he had, so he had loads of advice to share.

So that’s, that’s a challenge for me right now. It’s like, you know, two years ago, it was just me last year, this time, last year, there were three, three of us full-time well, two full-time. It was me working as a doctor and a part-time assistant, and now there’s 12 of us, but now we’re hiring another 10 people.

So by next month it’s going to be maybe like 20, 20 of us a hundred. It’s all those problems associated with scaling a team and leadership and management. And that’s the kind of stuff that, I’ve been really as sort of very much on the steep learning curve of, and that I’m very excited about getting better at,

[00:21:44] Nathan:
Yeah. what’s the reason that you’re growing the team so quickly.

[00:21:48] Ali:
Well, let’s see, because we just have a lot of money. once, once we launched our, yeah, it’s a, it’s...

Listen to Brian Clark's podcast https://unemployable.com/podcast/intersectional-positioning/ 20mins in

• https://www.nerdfitness.com/

Transcript
 

[00:00:00] Hey folks. It's Swyx so today's clip is the longest one. I'm sorry about that. Basically. It was such a good story from beginning to end and I could not cut any of it out. It covers nerd fitness, which is one of the fitness blogs I've been tracking for many years. Um, I fell off the radar. A while ago, but I still have very high opinion of it.  

Um, I have been one of the passive leaders, but I think the message definitely resonates that it finds a niche, which is nerds. And then it tries to do something to serve that niche. And I think the journey of Steve as a creator, as a writer who went through SEO, Uh, just the exploration and understanding how to do contents for living.  

And then starting to build a business on top of it, and then exploring how to productize this stuff that he did. Like don't teach me what to do, just do it for me. I think it's a very typical business journey for bootstrappers that is extremely successful. He's essentially one guy, maybe if a team of 20 something, people making millions of dollars a year. And I think. What's great about that is that it also helps people be fit so it's just one of those ideal bootstrap businesses that is just win-win. 

So my origin story. After college, I was living in San Diego and I was selling construction equipment. I was in sales because I didn't know any better. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. Both my parents were in sales, so I just figured get in, get into sales. I've lived by the beach. I worked in sales and I was terrible at it. 

So, so bad. I had very little experience with construction equipment, renting. I was renting out forklifts and boom lists. Giant downtown projects in San Diego 22 or 23 at the time. And just have no idea what I'm doing and on a particularly miserable. Day at work on my lunch break. I walked into a bookstore and I felt like the sun was shining through the window and spotlighted this book that had just come out. 

I had no idea who the author was or what it was all about, but I saw the cover and the book is called Tim Ferriss's four hour workweek. So I see this book as like, it was literally the first week it came out. So this was 2007, I think, or somewhere in there. And I picked it up and I read it and. A big part of the book was like, pick something that you're good at and a social group that you're a part of and see where you can find that overlapping, gap. 

And for myself, I was like, well, I just cracked the code for myself personally, about my health and fitness. And I was spending an inordinate amount of time playing video games. I was like, well, I don't think I could write like the best fitness website, but. I could probably help people that are beginners. 

And who else has big, is a beginner fitness. That's self-conscious and like, can think of fitness, like a video game nerds do that. It's like, all right. I Googled nerd and fitness, nothing popped up. I was like, huh. All right, let's do that. So I bought nerd fitness.com and then I did nothing with it for like two years. 

Cause I was so afraid to get started. Eventually quit. The first job started a sec or went to work at a different company. It was while I was at that second company, I got certified as a trainer. I got further education and finally worked up enough. To start writing basic articles about beginners getting started with health and fitness. 

And that was it, but like, I didn't start it because I saw that nerd culture was going to become popular. Like, I didn't know, Disney was going to acquire star wars and Marvel and like, it was just going to become cool to be a nerd. I was just like, I'm playing 40 hours a week of EverQuest, which was like, even nerdier than world. 

Like I'm playing all of these video games and I want to talk about nerd stuff. Like let's just stick the two together and see what happens. And fortunately I didn't know any better, which is what I started at before.  

Yeah, that's amazing. Because now of course you look like a genius, like just a complete marketing guru who saw how these two things would work together because the stereotype of course, is that nerds don't work out. 

Did it well, but you were an exception, I guess. So in many ways it seems like you created this. That someone like you would want. And it just happened to also resonate with a lot of  

exactly. I, so when I was starting my fitness journey I did what most guys do. I went out and bought like muscle and fitness magazine and I followed like the bodybuilder workout programs. 

And after like three weeks, I'm like, well, I don't, I look like that guy. It's like, well, because you're not on steroids and you don't eat like that dude. And he's been training for 25 years. So I most stuff that I found. I felt either disconnected from like, I have nothing in common with this guy, or I felt almost like, I want to say ashamed, but rather like most of the fitness marketing is built around like, Hey, you're not. 

And you're not good enough, but if you buy this thing, then you will be good enough and everything will get better. And I was like, that's [00:05:00] just that's bad shame on you for doing that. And let's try to give people like actually helpful information without the hype and the nonsense. And just like, here's what you need to know. 

Here are the, all the mistakes that I made. Like let's get rid of all that. Let's do some basic stuff and get you started. And then we can also still talk about Harry Potter and star wars and talking,  

right? Yeah. The whole shredded bro aspect of fitness. They're all trying to outmatch show each other. 

And I think that turns a lot of people off it doesn't work with me at all. So I, for further, I linked to nerd fitness guides all the time, because you've got the humor you've got the pop culture references, which is something I did at Copyblogger early on. I mean, that's literally how I was able to make myself write two long articles. 

Like it's because I would go, well, how can I use a prince metaphor to explain content? So when you first started, was it was just you, right? You were  

writing about the content. It was just me a long time. And interestingly, so I guess I started really working on the blog at night while I was working the day job in 2009. 

And back at that, then. Which is the same today. Everything I read on the internet was like, you need to write short posts. You need to publish five days a week because nobody has the attention span to read long stuff. So for like six weeks, I think again, I didn't know any better. I didn't know what I was doing. 

I spent six months writing like 400 word articles. A lot of them were like very topical, but quickly out of date. Cause it was about something that happened that week and after like five months, six months, something like that, I had. I don't know, 20 subscribers. Like I don't even think I had an email list yet. 

I was just like, people could subscribe the RSS and who's like, oh man, this is cool. 20 people are reading. And then I started stumbling across Bloggers that were writing long form content. And almost overnight, I ...

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• https://www.amazon.com/Permission-marketing-fastest-growing-companies-permission-ebook/dp/B087KTYCH1

The following is my conversation with Abhi Aiyer and Ward Peeters, two lead engineers behind Gatsby Cloud and the recently announced Gatsby v4, which is at the forefront of what I think is the most significant change in the Jamstack landscape in the past 2 years.

Watch the video version here.

Links:

• Gatsby 4
• Netlify DPR
• My blogpost on Smart Clients vs Smart Servers

Timestamps: 

• [00:00:00] Cold Open 
• [00:00:28] Swyx Intro 
• [00:01:59] Call Start 
• [00:03:07] Gatsby v4 
• [00:06:23] Incremental Builds 
• [00:07:16] Cache Invalidation 
• [00:09:03] Gatsby DSG vs Netlify DPR 
• [00:09:35] Abandoning Redux for LMDB 
• [00:11:50] Parallel Queries (PQR) 
• [00:13:32] Gatsby DSG 
• [00:15:24] Netlify DPR vs Gatsby DSG 
• [00:19:19] The End of Jamstack 
• [00:22:12] Tradeoffs and Performance 
• [00:24:34] Image Processing 
• [00:27:25] Automatic DSG 
• [00:29:33] Gatsby Cloud vs Netlify 
• [00:33:34] Gatsby vs Next.js 
• [00:35:41] Gatsby and the Content Mesh 
• [00:37:19] React 18 and Gatsby 
• [00:39:45] Custom rendering page fragments with React 18 
• [00:42:10] Server Components in Limbo 
• [00:43:33] Smart Servers vs Smart Clients 
• [00:45:21] Apollo and Open Source Startup Strategy 
• [00:47:06] TMA: Too Many Acronyms 
• [00:49:16] Gatsby for Docs 

Transcript
 

[00:00:00] Cold Open 
 

[00:00:00] Abhi Aiyer: And so with LMDB in place, right? We have workers that can read and write to LMDB, which allows us to run parallel queries. So PQR was a huge advancement for us. I think we saw up to like 40% reduction in query running time. And build times went down. We had a goal, I think it was like, we'd try to look for at least 20% reduction in build times and I think we hit 26%, so all cool wins, you know? 

[00:00:28] Swyx Intro 
 

[00:00:28] swyx: The following is my conversation with Abhi Aiyer, and Ward Peeters, two lead engineers behind Gatsby Cloud, and the recently announced Gatsby V4, which is at the forefront of what I think is the most significant change in the JAMstack landscape in the past two years. We discussed how parallel query writing PQR and deferred static generation DSG are achieving 40% faster queries and 300% faster overall builds. 

[00:00:53] And they did a wonderful job handling the most impolite questions I could think of, including whether it Gatsby Cloud is a Netlify clone or the Gatsby should just be a data layer on top of Next.js and how they're dealing with TMA too many acronyms in web development. This conversation should be viewed together with my past discussions, with Sunil Pai and Misko Hevery in considering the cutting-edge of web development today. Online discussions often present a binary split in that your technical choices either have to optimize for developer experience or user experience. 

[00:01:25] But I find that it is builders like Abhi and Ward and Misko and Sunil who are constantly trying to improve the experience of developers in building great user experiences by default. I hope you enjoy these long form conversations I'm trying to produce with amazing developers. I still don't have a name for it. 

[00:01:41] And I still don't know what the plan is. I just know that I really enjoy it. And the feedback from you guys have been really great. So if you like this, share with a friend, if you have other requests for guests, tag them on social media, I basically like to make this a space where passionate builders and doers can talk about their craft and where things are going. 

[00:01:58] So here's the interview.  

[00:01:59] Call Start 
 

[00:01:59] Abhi Aiyer: I'm Abhi Aiyer. I'm a principal engineer at Gatsby. Thanks for having us.  

[00:02:05] Ward Peeters: My name is Ward Peeters. I'm a staff software engineer at Gatsby and I'm from Belgium. And I've been working mostly on the open source side.  

[00:02:15] Abhi Aiyer: I forgot to say where I'm from. I'm from Los Angeles, you know, Hollywood,  

[00:02:21] swyx: I'm actually heading down to LA,  

[00:02:22] Abhi Aiyer: in a couple of weeks, there's,  

[00:02:24] swyx: I'm going to Kubecon, which is like a very interesting thing for a front end engineer to end up at. But that's where my career has taken me.  

[00:02:34] So this conversation started because I had a chat with Sunil, on this podcast that I accidentally launched. I don't think we did Gatsby much, a good favor. 

[00:02:45] Like we both saw the new updates and I didn't get to say the nice things that I thought about Gatsby. I should also say that I used to have my blog on Gatsby and I no longer do. I used to work at Netlify and I no longer do. There's a lot of history here for me with Gatsby. It's been a while since I caught up, and I'm curious to see or get the latest. 

[00:03:07] Gatsby v4 
 

[00:03:07] swyx: Maybe we should start off with like a quick summary of what's new with Gatsby with Gatsby V4, right?  

[00:03:13] Abhi Aiyer: Is that a good place to start? Yeah, I think so. 

[00:03:17] swyx: So first of all, I think the marketing was really nice. Gatsby camp, it seems like a really big push and qualitatively very different from Gatsby 3. Tell me about what the behind the scenes was like. 

[00:03:30] Abhi Aiyer: Yeah, it was, we're getting better at the marketing side of what we're doing these days and Gatsby 4 was a big push. It really changed how we approach the framework as a whole.  

[00:03:43] For those who don't know, traditionally Gatsby was a static site generator, purely static. We hold ourselves high on our connections to a content management system. 

[00:03:55] And we provide a really good data layer there, that takes all those requests that you would normally make to a content manager system, turns them into a, like a store of data that you can then use and query from graph QL. And the big thing that we were hitting before gas before was. Company was growing. 

[00:04:17] And as more customers were using Gatsby cloud, we started realizing that we couldn't scale to really large sites and large sites is like a misnomer. Like you could be, you could be a 50,000 page site and be considered large given the data that you may have. But we're talking like hundreds of thousands of pages. 

[00:04:38] And the thing that we kind of realized is not all pages are created equal on your site. Especially the ones from like 20, 15, 20 14, where, you know, no one's looking at that people, those pieces of content, if you're a site with a huge archive o...

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• https://www.musicalityvocal.com/
• If you like the Greatest Showman also check out their cover of This Is Me

2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmrDjvv_ENQ
2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcqloQezOUg
GitLab IPOed for $15b valuation today.

Listen to a16z live: https://a16z-live.simplecast.com/episodes/one-on-one-with-a-and-z-11-how-much-rare-knowledge-is-there-4aF0UbP7

- rarely wrong just early
- pets.com, diapers.com
- hadoop -> databricks
- Nycira -> central control plane - 2b revenue company
- rare knowledge - what do you believe that nobody else believes
- 2 kinds - super secret, or in plain sight
- airbnb - history of hotels
- new ideas nobody else has
- take seriously things that nobody else believes
- history gets rewritten to be both obvious and inevitable
- bill gates the road ahead

Transcript
 

[00:00:00] Hey everyone today, I'm sharing a clip from the Andreessen Horowitz podcast from both Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Which is them talking about rare knowledge basically the secrets that you believe that no one else does as well as how to develop a view of the future which is important obviously for vcs but i think generally important as well 

[00:00:19] Marc Andreesen: How much rare knowledge is there in the world in your experience or concretely, how often does it happen that there are less than 10 people you can think of? No. I could do something and you'd be skeptical you can find anybody else that can, and then a huge, no asks. How can I develop a view for the future, which I think is actually a very related question.  

[00:00:38] Ben Horowitz: So way more than you would think. There's a lot of very knowledge and, mark and I like experienced this on our job. Every single day. There's just, the world is really dynamic. Now, in fact, it's probably never been more dynamic, I think, by any measure. And so what we see all the time is the old conventional wisdom just ceases to be true. 

[00:01:02] And we've seen this here. One of our favorite examples is just. All the dot bombs that everybody made, hysterical fun of during the early two thousands, all the idiotic ridiculous, stupid ideas that people had for the future, which were just so obviously. All eventually worked. And and it was a matter of the underpinnings of the internet and other things changing to the point where those really bad ideas, Pets.com or diapers.com or any of these kinds of things, they all work fantastically later, as world changed. And that all was super rare knowledge because the conventional knowledge was of course, those things are all the stupidest things ever, and you'd have to be some kind of moron to leave your high-paying consulting job to do that. 

[00:01:54] But we continually see this and in the firm, we even have kind of a rule. Which is, if you know too much about something you got to back off, because you know what, particularly, if historically what did not work that can be dangerous knowledge in our business because you can miss it the next time when it actually does work. 

[00:02:14] And w we just hit all the time on. Favorite investments that I've made was it was common knowledge in Silicon valley that Hadoop had one big data, like architecturally, like that was the thing. It had one open source that had hearts and minds, blah, blah, blah. It was going to be the. 

[00:02:30] And I think, probably the best, for sure one of the best investments I ever made was that wasn't true. And so it's just like a small piece of rare investing knowledge, but a big piece of rare knowledge for the entrepreneurs who invented spark. And then, later turned that into Databricks. 

[00:02:46] Marc Andreesen: Yeah. Ben, do you remember? So for we invested in a company called Nycira early on in the life of the firm, like nine, 2010. And then do you remember the we shouldn't name him, but we had a meeting with a a I believe the CTO of one of the really big networking companies at the time in our diligence literally said it was  

[00:03:01] Ben Horowitz: against the laws of physics. 

[00:03:02] It wasn't possible. They had already like steady. At length this very large, important networking company and you could not have a central control plane and the way that the Sierra proposed to do. And of course, now in the Sierra inside, VMware is like a $2 billion a year revenue. 

[00:03:21] Marc Andreesen: Yup. Yup. And then of course, a classic essence on the consumer side of course, is that everybody knew right up until 2004, that consumers would never put their real identities online. That was the one thing that would never happen. Never. And then of course Facebook like completely blew that open. 

[00:03:32] So the twist that I want, there's a couple of twists that I wanted to put on. This are circuit aspects of this very important question that I want it to get a little deeper into. For those of you who like, think about these things you will have, some of you will have at least read Peter Teal's kind of famous book zero to one, he talks a lot in that book about, what he calls the secret, which is this idea of the were knowledge that other people don't use. And then he has this famous question that he asks he had kind of dinner parties where he asked this question of what, what is the thing that, that nobody else knows. Or he asks a, there's a sort of a related verse and the question is just, what do you believe that nobody else believes? 

[00:04:03] And of course what's interesting is those are not necessarily the same thing. And then on top of that there's this question of okay, it's the rare knowledge, something that is actually not known. Like it's actually a piece of information that's like invisible. And so for example, rare knowledge, let's take a hypothetical case, rare knowledge of a chemical. 

[00:04:20] That has been invented in a lab and only the people who worked in that lab know that formula exists and only they know what the formula is, right. Or maybe the formula for KFC seasoning might be something that's, a formula it's literally locked  

[00:04:34] Ben Horowitz: 11 herbs and spices, but we do not know what they are. 

[00:04:38] Marc Andreesen: We do not know which one. So there's literally the rare knowledge is any knowledge, literally like you can't get to it. There's this other kind of rare knowledge which goes to the second version of Peter's question of what do you believe that nobody else believes her fear that people believe, which is like the rare knowledge of something that is actually like a fact that is actually completely like, basically in, in public view. 

[00:04:59] It's like a thing that anybody can walk up to or learn about or read about, or read on the internet and tout, or read an academic paper about or whatever. But it's just people just simply don't believe it. Like they just don't buy it. Like they're not having it. 

[00:05:11] They just, they, they found some reason to rule it out, by the way, they're often a ridiculing it. And so Ben, the question I always think about on this is. How many of the secrets, right? Or how much of the rare knowledge in the world, how much of it is literally the 11 herbs and spices that you can't go find out versus how much of it is the thing that's there in plain sight that everybody's just making fun of? 

[00:05:30] Yeah. The  

[00:05:30] Ben Horowitz: plane tech definitely seems much bigger. At least in, in artwork we see many more of the plain sight ones. One...

Listen to the Ship It! podcast: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/ship-it-devops/its-crazy-and-impossible-Q3tD0SVWCh1/ (45 mins in)

Steve Jobs anecdote - $50m fumble https://twitter.com/apartovi/status/1447251334814523392?s=20

Video: https://youtu.be/Cxaf8E00GMM
Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sJSqNy-t-kVxzrWlqMTp_03nI7Zo8Znr7k0f0C6L9ig/edit?usp=sharing

Timestamps:

[00:00:00] Intro
[00:02:17] Part 1 - Components: Code Organization for Real Apps
[00:04:26] What we learned from React
[00:07:46] Part 2 - Architecture: Choreography vs Orchestration
[00:13:05] Retries and Timeouts
[00:14:37] Part 3 - Time: React vs Temporal
[00:16:34] Elevator Pitch
[00:17:13] Programming Model
[00:18:44] Comparing React and Temporal Principles
[00:19:11] Live Demo: Amazon One Click Button
[00:23:49] Talk Recap
[00:24:16] React and Temporal Full Comparison
[00:24:42] Conclusion: Enablement

Transcript
 

[00:00:00] Once again, I want to thank you all for tuning in and joining, React New York 2021 without further ado, I'll pass it on to Shawn. 

All right, so hi everyone. 

Hello, React new York. It is my home town in the U S and I miss everyone back in New York. I am currently based in Seattle, but I'm here to talk about React for the Backend. In 2020 I actually thought that I had given my last React talk because I was all tapped out. I had said everything I wanted to say, and then React New York came by and said, do you want to speak? 

And I was like, oh, I really wanted to speak for React New York. So here's my presentation about what I've been working on and what I think the parallels have been for React. And I think there's some generalizable lessons, even if you don't end up using Temporal. So, the inspiration for this talk came from Guillermo Rauch, the creator of Next.js. 

And he was the first person to point out that Temporal.io, does to backend and infra what React did to frontend. Temporal engine is quite complex, much like React, but the surface exposed to developers a beautiful render function and I'm a bit upset because he realized there's before me and I have been working on Temporal for a few months now. 

So important caveats before I start this talk. What I'm presenting to you is alpha for TypeScript. Temporal is typically a goal or Java based application, but we're developing TypeScript and hopefully launching it soon. And then finally "React for the backend" is an analogy, not a design goal. 

 The way I treat this is like, it's a, it's basically like crabs. And one of the most entertaining facts that I've ever found is that nature has apparently tried to evolve crabs five independent times. And in fact, there's a word in evolutionary biology for it called Carcinization. And of course, this is really good for a lot of memes. So tired convergent evolution is not uncommon, especially when species have similar selecting pressures in their environments, wired. 

Everything is Crab. And perhaps everything is React, because we have similar design space problems. So I'll tell a little bit of the story through three parts there's Components, and we'll tell it through the story of Uber, talk about architecture, we'll talk through the story of YouTube, and Time will tell you through the story of Amazon. 

So a lot to cover, I'm going to try to go really fast. Don't worry. I'll share the slides on my Twitter later on. Okay.  

[00:02:17] Part 1 - Components: Code Organization for Real Apps 
 

So part one is about components. You see this a lot on YouTube. Probably you're watching now on YouTube or live streaming. And yeah, you know, like three hour live stream and that's it. 

Very cool. I think we, we know how to break things down and React has really helped us be more productive by being able to break things down into the components and knowing how to compose them together in a predictable way. But there's a lot of things unanswered in things like this in, in full stack, clones of major well-known apps, which is the hard parts. 

What like a typical Uber trip, we'll have all these steps like search pricing match. Pick-up drop-off rating tipping, payment, email, uh, and so on and so forth. And typically the naive way of organizing all this is basically one after the other, right? Like this is search goes to pricing, goes to matching, goes to pick upgoes to dropoff goes to rating goes to tipping goes to payment, goes to email, imagine that these are all managed by separate teams and scaled independently. 

Then you realize, like, this is only the happy path. Then you have to throw in a whole bunch of things that can happen along the way. An Uber trip is basically a long running process with humans in the loop and humans are very, very messy by nature. So how would you write an Uber clone? good luck with a lot of data technologies that you would typically reach for just naively, because you will have to discover all these systems and all these use cases and edge cases along the way. 

So when people say full stack, they often really mean like this half drawn horse meme. I think this is particularly funny so I take every opportunity I can get to show it, but to be honest, a lot of us front end developers are probably the other way the half-drawn Dragon where we're frontend a very good and in the backend, we'll just like, you know, stick some stuff on Firebase and something. 

And in reality, if you look at the backend systems, most companies, especially at scale, go towards some form of very complex micro service, system. I don't have the chart for Uber, but Hail-0 is probably a good comparison. Netflix, Twitter, and It's not really avoidable. If you want to scale a company to any significant size, you probably have to break them up into independent services because you're going to ship your org chart anyway. 

[00:04:26] What we learned from React 
 

The thing I realized as a React developer, as a front end developer, is that actually we had a pretty good run in the past seven, eight years of React in terms of the fact that front end developers know how to organize code at least in terms of the component level. So we moved from the jQuery era where everything was just kind of spaghetti all over the place to at least something more organized where event handlers are strongly tied, locally tied with renders, but essentially managed by React's runtime.  

So a few key lessons from React that I personally draw [00:05:00] is that you want to have a component and a renderer model. Like, so essentially the user or the developer writes components. And then the react core team writes the render and that handles a lot of the boilerplate that you might typically forget. 

And this is everything to do with on mounting or having local states. And it gives you a very nice, non-leaky abstraction that you can write. Second, you can also guarantee work and correctness, which is originally what drew Jordan walk to make something like React because he was working on Facebook messenger and there was a lot of inconsistent state within Facebook manager because of the spaghetti code. 

So correctness, meaning that we embrace functional programming to produce a virtual DOM view is a pure function of state. If you look at the old enough React talks, you will see a lot of v = f(d), so view as a pure function of data. And finally the programming model. We like to say that it's just JavaScript. 

There's no custom syntax ...

• Squid Game OST: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADyazK7btX4
• Trumpet Concerto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYA2RRJpS6k
• Blue Danube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEGdn0OZ22Q
• https://www.thefocus.news/tv/squid-game-what-is-the-classical-music-played-before-the-game/