There are two types of engineers. The "normal" ones who strive to make their day-to-day lives as easy as possible and the Robbie's of the world who strive to do everything themselves until the last line of code is sealed in a changelog. 

On that note, do you prefer conventional commits? Or the tools out there that make organization easier and, sometimes, automated? Chuck and Robbie don't see eye-to-eye on this particular topic so prepare yourself for the mildest smackdown of the century.

In this episode, Chuck and Robbie discuss the pros and cons of release-it, the beauty of working system-agnostic, why Robbie prefers the changelog, and an attempt to stay abreast of frameworks like fresh coming into focus. 

Key Takeaways

Quotes

[09:55] - "I don't dislike release-it. Let's be clear there. I just don't want to have to physically do anything beyond opening the pull request and closing the pull request." ~ @CharlesWthe3rd [https://twitter.com/CharlesWthe3rd]

[13:01] - "I'm not a big fan of conventional commits because it adds a lot of noise to your commit log." ~ @rwwagner90 [https://twitter.com/rwwagner90]

[15:06] - "I just think that you [Robbie] are different than a lot of engineers in that you're like, 'I want to touch and do all the things for all 16 jobs, I just want to do it myself and make sure it hits to the end' and other engineers are like, 'what script can I write to never do this again?'" ~ @CharlesWthe3rd [https://twitter.com/CharlesWthe3rd]

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A few years into Preston Sego's coding career, a colleague working on increasing interactivity on the company's interface chose Ember for the endeavor. Years later, when Preston began developing his own project, he took his colleague's advice and began testing the waters with Ember as well. 

In 2019, Preston noticed interesting work brewing within Ember. Realizing Ember was adaptable to modern tools, Preston decided to dive back in and start building out a chat app to test the framework. That same year, Preston spoke at EmberConf and eventually landed a job at CrowdStrike where the framework of choice was Ember.

In this episode, Preston talks with Chuck and Robbie about comparing Ember to React without angering either side, why he values Ember resources and has worked to create various libraries, what emerging tech Preston's thrilled to be working on, and what tech Preston's violently against. 

Key Takeaways

Quotes

[15:04] - "I really like clinical comparisons between things because if you have any emotion whatsoever in a comparison article, you're going to upset one of the sides and you don't wanna do that." ~ Preston Sego [https://twitter.com/nullvoxpopuli]

[23:10] - "I think the most obvious and beneficial use case [of resources] is for data loading. Just because loading anything Async is a pain." ~ Preston Sego [https://twitter.com/nullvoxpopuli]

[26:50] - "The rfc is first-class component templates and it solves the biggest complaint that new hires have at my work where people are just like, 'I don't know how to find this thing, how do you find it?'" ~ Preston Sego [https://twitter.com/nullvoxpopuli]

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In recent years, accessibility has evolved from a way to avoid legal landmines, to a specialization developers are taking a serious approach to for the sake of their companies, apps, and users. Eric Bailey has been at the forefront of this maturation, working as both an advocate and educator in the accessibility and inclusive design space. 

A user experience designer by trade, Eric developed a passion for accessibility that led him to The A11Y Project – an open source, one-stop shop for digital accessibility education. Eric helps maintain the hub while writing and speaking about the intersectionality of code, usability, and disability. 

In this episode, Eric talks with Chuck and Robbie about the challenges of improving digital inclusivity, how to work through inclusive design on a budget, what bothers Eric about developers who are afraid to take the accessibility leap, where platforms fall short, and the tools that make implementing accessibility easier. 

Key Takeaways

Quotes

[10:34] - "I used to think [accessibility] shouldn't be a job because everybody should be doing it. But the more I explore this space, the more I understand there is a need for specialization like any other kind of technical consideration." ~ @ericwbailey [https://twitter.com/ericwbailey]

[22:00] - "This is something that I try to be very cognizant of as I identify as abled but I speak with and interact with the disability community: the last thing I want to do is typecast or tokenize or suggest that this is the one true way to do things." ~ @ericwbailey [https://twitter.com/ericwbailey]

[24:16] - "Bringing people in who are daily assistive technology users and having them actually navigate through things is an incredibly compelling, incredibly eye-opening experience." ~ @ericwbailey [https://twitter.com/ericwbailey]

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Years ago, Dan Gebhardt was mapping out data needs for an app he was building. In a struggle to make sense of every requirement and apply them to other packages like Ember Data, he hit a wall. At this point, there was no option for adapting Ember Data to the complex specificities of his app's needs. 

Dan tried to rationalize a solution, deconstructing entire data universes and all aspects of a data library. The end result was Orbit, a framework-agnostic data layer with use cases beyond the obvious. Since its inception, many developers have leaned on Orbit, including those at Ship Shape. 

In this episode, Chuck and Robbie talk with Dan about Orbit's origin story, the best (and least obvious) ways to use Orbit, why Dan chose platform-agnostic, what he really thinks about Starbeam, his ultimate goal with Orbit, and Dan's all-time favorite power tool. 

Key Takeaways

Quotes

[13:28] - "Sometimes building for the hard case first also helps clarify the simple case and I think that Orbit really scales from the very simple to the very complex set of requirements." ~ @dgeb [https://twitter.com/dgeb]

[17:47] - "That's one of my favorite aspects of working with Orbit is using it as simply as possible to just prototype an app really quickly." ~ @dgeb [https://twitter.com/dgeb]

[33:32] - "The frameworks have too long been siloed and we are now seeing some really interesting cross framework solutions out there, whether you're talking about Starbeam or even something like Remix or Astro." ~ @dgeb [https://twitter.com/dgeb]

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In high school, Matt Johnson followed in the footsteps of his older brother, pursuing similar hobbies like sports and music. After joining a band, Matt realized they needed a website. Mirroring his brother, Matt learned to code, built a website, and changed his college major.

Following graduation, Matt dove into business ownership, buying out the company he interned for with a business partner. That once small operation has grown to a team of over 100 and as of July 1st, Matt will be Midwestern Interactive's sole owner. Like Chuck and Robbie, Matt made the switch from programmer to business owner and is committed to his role as a people and business leader. 

In this episode, Matt talks with Chuck and Robbie about learning to love coding, Matt's philosophy on tech and business, what's valuable and what's fluff with Web3, and why Matt took up golf after putting coding on the backburner.

Key Takeaways

Quotes

[14:25] - "It's pretty crazy, right? You leverage the tools for what you love to do, and then you fall in love with the tool. It's a really interesting thing. I remember the idea of telling a computer what to do was just baffling to me. I can just create my own anything." ~ Matt Johnson [https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-johnson-71a059b3/]

[18:26] - "When you are running a business you have to be able to be the right person for the job at any given moment. And you have to have that ability to change your priorities to meet the priorities of the people setting the priorities." ~ Matt Johnson [https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-johnson-71a059b3/]

[18:57] - "When you base your decisions on what's right, it's a whole lot easier to go to sleep at night. And getting good rest is very important in the progression of your business." ~ Matt Johnson [https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-johnson-71a059b3/]

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In 2022, the future of Ember is taking shape thanks to developers like Godfrey Chan. Alongside Yehuda Katz and other engineers, Godfrey's working on a new edition of Polaris. The project has three main goals: to align Ember with the modern npm packaging system, continue to invest and innovate in reactivity, and encourage universal design principles. 

Like many developers, Godfrey came to Ember from Rails. Months after chatting with Yehuda and Tom Dale at EmberConf, Godfrey was hired at Tilde and thrown into the Ember deep end. Today, Godfrey's focused on big picture developments, tackling lofty goals like developing an Ember model to navigate JavaScript classes.

In this episode, Godfrey talks with Chuck and Robbie about what's to come for Polaris, solving major developer headaches, Godfrey's philosophy on frameworks, top use cases for solutions like Starbeam, and why these innovations are necessary in 2022.

Key Takeaways

Quotes

[14:54] - "Tools like TypeScript don't automatically just understand what's up within ember app. At least one of the things for Polaris is to figure out how we can transition to a world where we don't have those little tiny differences anymore so that when you open a project in VS Code, TypeScript just knows what's up." ~ @chancancode [https://twitter.com/chancancode] 

[37:46] - "I think conceptually, a reactivity layer that is decoupled from the framework makes a lot of sense to me because there's just a lot of libraries and abstractions that you want to write that eventually, you want people to be able to use them in UI." ~ @chancancode [https://twitter.com/chancancode] 

[39:31] - "I think having something like Starbeam where you can express those reactivity concepts or those annotations without making your library only usable in React or Vue or whatever is a good thing to have in 2022." ~ @chancancode [https://twitter.com/chancancode] 

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Robbie has spent years trying to improve his experience in the terminal. Fortunately, he's learned a few things about customization along the way. Meanwhile, Chuck and Robbie have thoughts about Apple's new products, the purpose of React, plus Fig, Hyper, Warp, and everything in between. 

In this episode, Chuck and Robbie discuss everything you probably don't know about terminals, why Robbie's eyeing Redwood, what Chuck and Robbie actually paid attention to from WWDC22, why developers are so excited about Bun, and why Chuck's trip to Italy was semi-catastrophic. 

Key Takeaways

Quotes

[15:23] - "Bash hasn't innovated at all. It's the same thing it's always been. It does its job but I don't need to remember all that stuff. Give me some auto-complete and some nice color themes and cool stuff." ~ @rwwagner90 [https://twitter.com/rwwagner90]

[29:11] - "I know Next. I don't even have to know Next and I know it because it's a good framework. React by itself is just a huge learning curve. Because it's like, 'ok we're going to do all this stuff that looks nothing like anything anyone else is doing.'" ~ @rwwagner90 [https://twitter.com/rwwagner90]

[29:54] - "React is becoming more opinionated as its user base continues to grow and becomes more opinionated." ~ @CharlesWthe3rd [https://twitter.com/CharlesWthe3rd]

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It's not often that a blog post sets the internet on fire. But a recent post by Cory Brown about async/await led to an uproar and even messages of pity from Hacker News. Who knew a simple post about pattern preferences would cause such controversy? 

Today, Cory's here to explain his side of the story for those happily using async/await in various concurrency patterns. Luckily, Cory believes, to each their own, and even welcomes responses from developers like Eric Elliott and Robbie as important food for thought. So which universe do you prefer? Object-oriented or functional?

In this episode, Cory talks with Chuck and Robbie about why he prefers promise to async/await, his response to Robbie's weekly rant on classes, what really makes an engineer "senior", how every tech team should operate, and why Cory recently chose to learn Scottish Gaelic.

Key Takeaways

Quotes

[26:27] - "I've already seen ideas from the object-oriented world come in and benefit the functional world. And vice versa — the functional world come in and really benefit the object-oriented world. So I don't want to see either of them go away even as I choose to essentially wholly live on one side." ~ Cory Brown [https://twitter.com/uniqname]

[37:10] - "If you have any hope of going to whatever your next job is and entering a codebase that is at all reasonable, then we need to start training our junior engineers. And unfortunately, businesses are not investing in that for whatever reason so it's on us to do that." ~ Cory Brown [https://twitter.com/uniqname]

[40:24] - "A large chunk of the last several years of my career has been a diminished focus on producing stuff directly and more in enabling others to produce more quickly." ~ Cory Brown [https://twitter.com/uniqname]

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In 2017, James C. Davis moved to Charlottesville, Virginia to work at a non-profit tech company that used Ember in their original Saas platform. While James had dabbled in Ember previously, an ask to reimplement the front-end in Ember, this time using TypeScript, proved challenging. 

At the time, a few engineers were using TypeScript in Ember, but the open source framework James worked on became the de-facto reference point for projects in Ember types. And the unofficial group of engineers collaborating on the project has become the official Ember TypeScript Core Team.

Today, James works at e-commerce company Salsify with a front-end all in Ember TypeScript. Although setting the standard for using TypeScript in Ember, James believes there's a time and a place for types. Plus, he may have a solution for Robbie's monorepo grievances. 

In this episode, James talks with Chuck and Robbie about his struggles and triumphs perfecting Ember TypeScript, his real thoughts on monorepos and functional programming, keeping APIs private, and why developing Glint was a type checking necessity.

Key Takeaways

Quotes

[17:58] - "One of the cool things about the way TypeScript is done now with Babel is we can write stuff in TypeScript and we can use Babel to basically strip out all of the type annotations and just produce JavaScript." ~ @jamscdavis [https://twitter.com/jamscdavis]

[19:38] - "Basically at this point, the only really useful thing that you need inside ember-cli-typescript is its blueprint which is different from the blueprints that generate components and Ember things." ~ @jamscdavis [https://twitter.com/jamscdavis]

[21:53] - "The bigger and more complex your project is, the more that [TypeScript] helps you." ~ @jamscdavis [https://twitter.com/jamscdavis]

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They say if it's not broken, don't fix it. So why are we running tests on tests on tests that aren't business-critical? There's an art to testing beyond just striving to get 100% coverage. In fact, over-testing can actually hamper your progress more than help it. Meanwhile, Chuck's wondering why it's not possible to have a union of enums in GraphQL.

In this episode, Chuck and Robbie discuss some tech frustrations, lessons for the React community, why Ship Shape implemented spam traps, and a whatnot on all things alcohol, sports, Friends, and Robbie's (seemingly endless) truck saga. 

Key Takeaways

Quotes

[26:52] - "There are things that warrant tests and things that don't and there are good best practices for writing them." ~ @rwwagner90 [https://twitter.com/rwwagner90]

[33:44] - "Sometimes people will just chase the goal of as close to 100% coverage as possible and then you end up with a bunch of egregious tests along the way." ~ @CharlesWthe3rd [https://twitter.com/CharlesWthe3rd]

[34:00] - "You need to test what's business-critical. You can do the other tests if you have the time. But there were a lot of tests that really didn't even check anything. And it's kind of arbitrary — you got that coverage, but you weren't doing anything." ~ @rwwagner90 [https://twitter.com/rwwagner90]

[36:32] - "Cypress is a great example of having integration testing in context where you can get visual progression testing too so [you] have some understanding there." ~ @CharlesWthe3rd [https://twitter.com/CharlesWthe3rd]

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