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The fundamental property of the web, that everything can run on current browsers and anyone kind of agrees to that, we end up in a situation where a lot of things are optional and could be done to parts of code bases... So different teams at Stripe use Flow to different degrees and to different levels of requiredness. |
One thing that Flow and TypeScript add to your experience though is generally better editor/IDE environments - TypeScript especially, because Microsoft makes TypeScript, Facebook mostly makes Flow... So the TypeScript bindings into their Visual Studio Code editor are very strong, because Microsoft has had years and yea... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, if you look through Visual Studio Code, you basically come to these typed definitions for not just all of Node Core, but for most common npm modules, like Request or Express, and stuff like that. They define the whole API there, so that you can get all kinds of crazy, nice editor stuff. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, there's an open source project - Flow-typed, or something like that... There's ones for each of the things. So there are open source libraries that don't use the typed languages, but whenever you integrate a third-party library, you want the types for that. So all they do is they maintain a third... |
At Stripe, since we use Flow and we use some third-party things, we can also pull in someone else's third party type definitions of that, and then whenever we use that library, we get all of the niceties from it. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** There was a lot of arguments for a long time about adding types to the language, and we've pretty much given up on that. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I think that's dead because of these. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, when ES4 died, those died. |
**Alex Sexton:** I mean, it has come up several times since then, but since these have come out, people are like "This is good enough." Everyone thinks that even with TypeScript, you can actually compile down to faster than JavaScript stuff with asm.js, because sometimes you have types that you can do better than the r... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[35:55\] Yeah, so one of the arguments that VM implementers like to have about types is that they can make the VMs much faster if they know what the types are. But now we're seeing this case where actually tools are better at optimizing this kind of stuff than people are. So if you have things like ... |
**Alex Sexton:** I personally like types much better for documentation and people-related benefits, like IDEs and stuff like that, much more than I like it for safety and speed. It seems like everytime we think something about safety and speed is true with types, someone on the V8 team shows us that we're wrong. If wha... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] It's true, except sometimes it's the Firefox team; sometimes it's also the SpiderMonkey people. Okay, I think we're about ready to have another break now. Right after the break, when we come back, we're gonna get into the featured project of the week and some of our picks. We'll be right b... |
**Break:** \[37:06\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, so let's get into the featured projects. I actually cheated and I threw in two featured projects for this, because I really wanna talk about some of the lesser know - for lack of a better term - JS Standards. These aren't Standards in Standards bodies, but these are standard APIs that inside... |
Today I have two projects; one is called Abstract Blob Store, I believe... I lost my notes. \[laughs\] Yeah, Abstract Chunk Store. These are by Max Ogden and Mathias Buus, and they're building out a bunch of stuff... |
**Alex Sexton:** Wait... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah? |
**Alex Sexton:** You're talking about storage, and you lost the information? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Yes, exactly. |
**Alex Sexton:** Just double-checking... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's eventually consistent, okay? |
**Alex Sexton:** Hm... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] I can throw database jokes all day. So the idea here is that -- |
**Alex Sexton:** Let's catch that idea for now. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright... \[laughs\] Okay. Anyway, you're just way throwing me off today... I should have known not to go toe-to-toe with puns with Alex, but that was a huge mistake. Anyway, so we have these two libraries, Abstract Blob Store and Abstract Chunk Store by Mathias Buus and Max Ogden. They work on the ... |
**Alex Sexton:** They're in the Dat Project? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, they both work on the Dat Project. |
**Alex Sexton:** Explain that to me...? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Dat is a small tool -- I mean, I guess it's kind of growing in terms of ecosystem, but it's a toolchain for open scientists to share data, and to manipulate data and then share those manipulations. You can think of it like Git, but for data and for open science. To be honest, Max has been working on ... |
**Alex Sexton:** Sure. |
**Rachel White:** \[40:16\] Yeah, it wants to make people collaborate with sharing data more, too. I think they have a Knight Foundation grant too, so they do a bunch of cool stuff. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** They actually have a bunch of grants, yeah. You can go to the RFC podcast on the Changelog network and there's a podcast on Request For Commits with Max where he talks about the grants and how to get them and how to grant-fund open source. |
**Alex Sexton:** Wow, that's awesome. Max actually was clean-shaven when he started on the Dat Project and he said once people finally adopted it he would shave, and look where we are. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** He's not shaved. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yes, he's got a big beard. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Anyway, so to come back to these lesser-known Node Standards... These are really cool, really powerful stuff that developers can work with, because if you just wanna store chunks of data somewhere, you could just pick up a library for S3 for the exact kind of storage mechanism that you want, but if y... |
This is a really good way to build out an ecosystem of good modules that are storing data without locking them into a particular vendor or a local file system, even. |
**Alex Sexton:** How does it compare to something we already have, like IndexDB, or something like that? The primitives are different? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's a little bit lower level than IndexDB... Although I don't think that's the right term. It's doing a lot less than IndexDB, because it's not doing any kind of sorting, it's not actually indexing anything. |
**Alex Sexton:** Is it persistent? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes. Well, yeah, you assume that Abstract Blob Store is persistent. But there is a set and a get, and when you set something, you assume that you'll be able to get it later. |
**Alex Sexton:** How async is it? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Some of these are actually in memory as well, so they don't persist indefinitely. Some of them don't. |
**Alex Sexton:** Okay. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** But I think that there actually is a good corollary here with IndexDB. In the Node.js ecosystem and also now in the browser with stuff like PouchDB, these tools aren't built to IndexDB, they're actually built to what's called abstract LevelDOWN or LevelUP. So the whole LevelDB ecosystem built these k... |
So people wrote some in the memory, and people wrote them to work in the browser, and people wrote them to work on top of local storage, and SQLite... So eventually, PouchDB actually moved over to LevelUP... |
**Alex Sexton:** I was gonna ask... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, so they could take advantage of all those underlying data stores. Cool stuff! |
**Alex Sexton:** Have there been any cool demos, or anything like that? Or is it just mostly early days...? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think these standards end up getting buried in the things that people are actually building, right? There's some really cool IPFS demos, and IPFS uses Abstract Blob Store internally, and Abstract stuff. In fact, there's an IPFS Abstract Blob Store that they expose to everybody else too, so you can ... |
\[44:11\] I think that the biggest demo of all this stuff is probably the Dat Project and the stuff that they're building. |
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