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• Concurrency and non-blocking rendering for faster animations |
• RequestAnimationFrame API for 60 fps animation |
• React Fiber and concurrent rendering engines for improved performance |
• Incremental rendering packages (limited availability) |
• Web components as an alternative to frameworks for incremental rendering |
• Node Foundation's role in supporting the JavaScript community and open source projects |
• The Node Foundation's role in protecting individual contributors from liability |
• Advocation efforts to maintain community involvement |
• Board responsibilities, including legal protection and administrative tasks |
• Growing the community through education and job creation |
• Challenges in documentation and onboarding for new contributors |
• Need for more diverse skills, such as technical writing, project management, and design |
• Encouraging contribution from non-coders, including translators and designers |
• Strategies for improving documentation and user experience |
• Node certification process |
• Creating resources for beginners to learn Node |
• Informal education in programming |
• Code formatter Prettier |
• Free Code Camp online bootcamp |
• Increment digital magazine publication from Stripe |
**Rachel White:** Hello! Welcome to JS Party. I'm Rachel White, and we have a special guest for you this week with us. I'll let her introduce herself. |
**Tracy Hinds:** Hey, I'm Tracy... I'm here with y'all today. Thank you for having me. |
**Rachel White:** And then obviously, Mikeal's not here, and we also have Alex. |
**Alex Sexton:** Alex Sexton, Virgo... Um, this is probably not true; I have no idea what my sign is. |
**Rachel White:** Cool! We have a lot of cool, fun things -- I don't know cool, we have exciting... Semi-exciting, semi-cool, semi-fun things to talk to you about today. We're gonna talk about documentation, what makes for good documentation, non-blocking UI rendering, and then we're gonna talk to Tracy about the curre... |
Cool, let's jump right into the documentation. We're gonna talk about what makes good documentation to you; how do you prefer to go about adding documentation to your projects, what are some best practices, what are projects that you like...? Who wants to start? |
**Tracy Hinds:** I'll jump into it a little bit, because this is something that's just been this wonderful, sort of serendipitous week of hearing a lot about documentation. I was doing research for learning Node and kind of looking at the survey stuff that we had gotten from last winter's survey... As I was reading thr... |
What I found out when I dug into it was that they weren't referring to the Node API doc. They were referring to docs from authors with npm packages. |
**Rachel White:** Oh... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, so it was just this really interesting -- like, I knew that the documentation has been a struggle for us in Node, and so when they said that, I was like "Oh my god, that makes so much sense", because a number of prolific authors in the community early on were contributing to Node itself, so they ... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah. |
**Tracy Hinds:** But part of that was -- it kind of brought into the question for me, because when I started writing Node, I remember like "Wow, these API docs don't make any sense to me. They make all of these assumptions", because a lot of the people who had written them had written other programming languages prior,... |
**Rachel White:** So basically the community poll gave you results that a ton of people weren't actually using the documentation that you wanted them to? |
**Tracy Hinds:** \[laughs\] Yeah. |
**Rachel White:** \[04:00\] I feel like whenever I'm writing or working with a new language or project and I'm jumping in, if there's good documentation (which we'll talk about later) then it's super helpful, but I think that something else that people don't take into consideration is people have different learning sty... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah. |
**Rachel White:** Or if there's sites that have -- this is kind of dumb and a little ridiculous, but I know that often when I was doing more frontend stuff and I needed to know CSS or HTML questions, you always get... I feel like the worst results come up first on Google. You're gonna get those W3Schools and the Stack ... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, that was my first -- I think Mikeal and I talked about this a while back, and our data definitely backed it up. It's sort of this -- like, if you don't write good documentation, then you don't get to choose where people are going to get the information to understand your project. So I don't know ... |
What's really interesting about that is a lot of our collaborators aren't the ones answering questions on Stack Overflow. |
**Rachel White:** That's true. |
**Tracy Hinds:** So then it's even more so -- like, if you're seeing a bunch of people who are sort of talking about good practices in writing Node, they are not necessarily... Like, we're not leading that effort in Stack Overflow; it's whoever has the energy to be answering questions in Stack Overflow, which is super ... |
**Rachel White:** Well, Stack Overflow also has that difficult to attain barrier of entry where you're not able to contribute until you've participated a certain amount of time, and vice versa. It's like one of those weird situations where you can't be a part of a thing until you're a part of a thing, but how do you ge... |
Now I'm actually wondering... Do you think that there's a responsibility of maintainers to not only write good documentation but to also maybe -- if you see somebody in the community that is stepping up and taking part, to be able to build upon the good work that you've already done - do you think that there's a respon... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Well, Myles Borins and I were talking about this yesterday, and we were talking about like -- something that I struggle with for resources and education is there are so many ways to learn, even just online, not even in person... It's going to people who write blog posts, they're googling for it, Stack ... |
\[07:52\] For me, it's like I want there to be one source of truth. Also, having started in Python, I find that it's really easy for new learners, if they don't -- they're not inundated with so many places that they have to look at... But in Node, at this point, I don't think we get to choose that. So instead of trying... |
That's great, but as I've said, Stack Overflow is the number one place people are asking questions for Node, and it's kind of built for that. So that's great, but then maybe we should be encouraging people - what we consider subject matter experts - to be contributing there. |
**Rachel White:** Yeah. So aside from just finding the good documentation and the places that people can go, now I'm starting to think about the actual process of writing the documentation, and what are good practices that people can use while writing their code in order to make it easier on them in the long run. |
I know personally previously I've used DocBlock type stuff while I'm writing to describe the actual things that are in the code, but I think Alex writes a lot more code than you and I do nowadays, so maybe he can give us some better insight into this... |
**Alex Sexton:** I'm not sure I can. \[laughter\] Specifically what are you looking for more insight in? |
**Rachel White:** So do you do anything while you're in the regular dev process of working on a feature or a codebase, in order to make it easier for documentation at the end? |
**Alex Sexton:** To be written? |
**Rachel White:** Yeah. |
**Alex Sexton:** Okay, sorry, I was misunderstanding... So documentation has levels, you know? The minimum documentation I feel are publicly documenting the function signatures of the public API of any software, right? So it's like "Here are all the functions and their names, and here are the arguments that they take, ... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah. |
**Alex Sexton:** That's the minimum viable documentation, I think. Anything below that is useless; you have to just read the code, it's not longer documentation. So one thing that's become more popular in the past six months to a year is typing JavaScript. So for JavaScript-specific stuff, if you use Flow or if you use... |
Stripe uses types as like a build step and builds them out. We don't gain a lot of built time error checking, because a lot of it is too nebulous -- there's not a ton of third-party library support for this stuff... But the thing to gain from it is just automatic documentation for every API signature across all of our ... |
So I think that something like that can be really useful for getting -- automatically updating documentation when code changes is a pretty important thing, I've found, because documentation becoming outdated is actually maybe worse than something not being documented at all. So when you have types built directly into t... |
But then on top of that, you kind of have to have -- then it becomes a cultural thing. It's like, "Are you allowed to ship something without writing words about why it works the way it works and how you might use it, or examples of how you might use it together?" At Stripe we actually have (I think we call it) a fronte... |
\[12:30\] A new developer at Stripe can go to this page and say, "I need a menu over here that I have to do... Let me look at these menus. Do I need to write a new one? Can I look at these?" So that's fully cultural, past the mandatory typing though. I think it's a good culture to build, it's extremely important. |
**Rachel White:** I agree. Tracy, or I guess either of you... What are some codebases that you've used that you are increasingly impressed by how they handle their documentation? |
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