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**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, but $13 - that's horrible. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I know, but there's also a lot of people making a living on Patreon, as well. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's true, there are. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And those people that are making $13, there may be a reason for that. There may be a perception that that person is already being rewarded in some other way, or other people are actually paying for that content... I've seen people on Patreon do this, where they make content and then the people that g... |
To broaden it back out to blockchain in general, I think wherever you have transactions that you need to make transparent and you need to have some provability, there's a bunch of different use cases for that, and a bunch of different things that we can do there. |
Of course, this being the tech industry, there's been a huge flood of money from venture capital and a lot of hype from everywhere that blockchain is the solution to everything, so if you have a startup, an idea, and then you add the word "blockchain" or "AI" to it, you will just get more money right now... So it's ver... |
Let's get off of blockchain for a while, let's move on... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I'll end up by just saying my thought was that if this basic attention token is a chance to push the web in a way where your attention speaks for itself and pays for itself, so to speak, is a better direction of a model, hypothetically, than the beggar/"Will you support me?" model. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. |
**Break:** \[18:51\] to \[20:30\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We've got some robotics topics to talk about. Rachel, I understand that you're a purveyor of robotics, you like this stuff. |
**Rachel White:** I dabble. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You dabble, and sometimes you might even have fun doing it... What do you think? |
**Rachel White:** I saw the question that was asked... So the reason that I use JavaScript in robotics is because I know JavaScript; I don't know C. If I need to get into something that is a little bit more specific to C, I can work my way around it, but I can't write it from scratch. |
Basically, the reason that I think JavaScript is good for robotics and embedded hardware is because of the community that is involved that is available to the NodeBots community. The Johnny-Five site is amazing, the documentation is great... |
When I say robotics too, I don't mean like very intense, giant things... This is just like hobbies-level stuff, so like small little -- there's sumo bots that can push each other out of circles, or play soccer... We're not changing the world, inventing anything that's going to revolutionize the way that modern machiner... |
I really like the way that the tangibility of even just taking a breadboard with LEDs and hooking it up to an Arduino and being able to write JavaScript you can get stuff to happen... Not to mention using LEDs for visualizing different types of loops is really a great way to help understand it. It helped me understand ... |
In terms of performance-based stuff, obviously C is gonna be faster than Node stuff, but I feel like all of the stuff that I've built hasn't really had any issues with the runtime, or any lag whenever I do whatever "action A triggers action B." The performance differences aren't really big enough to make a difference f... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And also I think that there's a little bit of a difference between IoT and robotics, right? |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, definitely. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** A lot of the IoT stuff - like yeah, you do have these use cases where you need it to be super low power, because it's gotta be on a little battery for a year, but with robotics you're gonna be pretty high-power anyway, because you're doing these pretty big movements and moving around heavy things, so... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It would seem to me too that going the route of C versus going the route of JavaScript, one might be a higher/lower barrier to entry. You might have to have a lot of systems knowledge, maybe a lot of deeper knowledge about programming that C would require, whereas JavaScript - you can sort of run th... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[24:15\] Because I came from lower-level languages and I watched higher-level languages take over and get a lot more people using them than the lower-level languages, it's always hilarious to me when people from higher-level languages start to get into lower-level languages... Because they really ig... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, I feel like a lot of the libraries that allow people to get started with NodeBots take the mistake-making part of the process out of it. The mistakes that you're gonna make when you're doing it is more like -- they're going to be your wiring, then the programs that you're writing, because so muc... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Can we rewind a bit and talk a bit about the chasm or the difference between learning JavaScript and a single-page web application scenario, versus let's say robotics, where you mentioned interesting things around loops, and blinking lights... Why is it different? What's different about it? |
**Rachel White:** For me it's a learning style thing. Some people are okay with grasping a concept, and some people just really need to visualize what they're doing in order to understand it. |
For me, I'm a super visual learner, and I think that's why I was so taken to the JavaScript robotics stuff, because I could -- I mean, I've been programming for almost half of my life, and I'm a s\*\*\*\*y programmer; I don't know data structures, I don't understand those things... I just know what I know from repetiti... |
It's just nice when you can touch something that you've built, versus just looking at -- I guess you could touch a computer screen, but it's a little bit different. I don't know... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think a more interesting question is actually "What is similar about UI programming the browser to robotics in JavaScript?", because I think there's actually more similarities than differences. And when you look at a lot of the languages that people have built specifically for IoT, they're taking a... |
I feel like UI people actually have an easier time on-boarding than people that are used to threaded C++ programming that try to move into this evented environment. |
**Rachel White:** \[27:59\] It depends on the on-boarding, obviously. If you can set somebody up with good documentation, then yeah, that's good. I feel like even five years ago there was still not great documentation for a ton of front-end UI stuff... At least I didn't have a good time with it. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** If you're getting into JavaScript for robotics - or JavaScript hardware stuff in general - there's a lot of libraries out there, everything in npm; there's maybe even more embedded systems that support this. It's like the Atari 2600 days of computing, everybody's got their own specialized board... |
You mess with a lot of these, Rachel. What do you recommend that people pick up as a first introductory set of hardware, and what libraries would you point them to? |
**Rachel White:** I think that if you don't know anything about hardware at all and you're wanting to get started, the best thing that I would suggest is the Johnny-Five starter kit that comes with a Tessel. You can get it on SparkFun. The benefit of the Tessel versus an Arduino is -- the Arduino you're gonna have to f... |
The projects that I think it gives you to build are -- there's like a little robot one, it comes with DC motors. I honestly just get the kits now, because -- like, whenever you go to conferences and there's people giving stuff away for swag, I just break everything apart into individual components I can use later... Bu... |
The other libraries that you can use are -- Bryan Hughes has a library that allows you to use JavaScript for the Raspberry Pi... I only recently started using a Raspberry Pi. The new model 3 makes it a lot easier to be able to use it without having to plug it into your router or SSH into it, because you can use somethi... |
I actually just built this cool gallery out of a 32x32 LED matrix using a Raspberry Pi, and I'm running Node on the Pi, and I'm also running Node on a single-page app that's hosted on Azure. The way that it works is you -- so there's not a lot of good Node libraries for the LED matrix, so all I did was installed the C ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Those are the best hacks. I love that stuff! |
**Rachel White:** \[31:58\] It's like, I kind of inadvertently built the world's hackiest Node library for displaying art on a LED matrix... So you can, too. What else do we have? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So the point of an "Ask us anything" show is people asking questions, but I guess Mikeal and I might have some questions, which we've already shared a few... |
**Rachel White:** You can ask us questions not about JavaScript as long as they're safe for work... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true, yeah. |
**Rachel White:** We have many, many interests. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm taking a break from bread-making, so no bread-making questions. |
**Rachel White:** I was just gonna say "Ask Mikeal about bread." |
**Mikeal Rogers:** No... Gotta take a break from that. I can tell you all about ketosis, but I can't tell you about bread right now. \[laughter\] |
There's a question about IDEs... So I've never used IDEs, I've always used straightforward editors, but I've always been a little bit jealous of some of the features that nice IDEs have. Eventually, I made my way to Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code is great because it is an editor, but it has a lot of the feature... |
**Rachel White:** I also use Code, but I work at Microsoft, so... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Didn't you use it before you worked there? |
**Rachel White:** No, I used Sublime Text. But honestly, it doesn't really feel that different. I use Visual Studio Code with a bunch of syntax plugins for JavaScript, and Node debugging stuff... I'm on my Mac right now as I type this, so I can't even open -- well, I don't have it installed on here, because I just use ... |
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