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**Tracy Hinds:** For me, honestly... In JavaScript I was trying to chat with some people today about what they were inspired by, but I'm still blow away by MDN and the process for that, because they also make it so incredibly easy to contribute back to it, which I think is incredibly important, because a lot of people ... |
You're just like, "I assume, very naively, that oh... It's the documentation, it's correct, so I must be doing something wrong." And then I found out very quickly that that wasn't the case. So that's tough, and that's in JavaScript, right? |
Django, you know... [James Socol](https://jamessocol.com/) was giving a great talk earlier this week - and he and I were both in Python before... You know, it's tough to beat that when it comes to that level of project - you've got versioning, I believe you have it in multiple languages, which I think we'll talk about ... |
**Alex Sexton:** There's also a book... There's the Django book too, right? |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah.. |
**Alex Sexton:** ...that gets updated along with the code, I think. Python has ReadTheDocs.io, right? Isn't that a thing? |
**Tracy Hinds:** Oh, yeah. |
**Alex Sexton:** Kind of like a central repository for different projects docs. I think npm kind of becomes that for a lot of JavaScript projects, because you write the readme with the docs in it, and then npm hosts it, and you end up hitting the npm homepage... But the ReadTheDocs thing is nice, because it's versioned... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, I've used ReadTheDocs at least at one company, and especially it was because the founder, Eric Holscher - we worked together at Urban Airship, so we were using that... We were dogfooding it quite a bit. It was great. I'm not super stoked about writing RST, I much prefer markdown, but in terms of ... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I agree. MDN is a really good example of just something that has persisted over time and continuously gets better. I know Janet Swisher out in Austin is, I believe, full-time on MDN. I believe there are other people that are full-time doc writers for MDN, so... Once your company gets big enough, ... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah. |
**Rachel White:** And communicating with the technical writers, not just giving them code and being like "Have fun!" \[laughs\] |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. |
**Rachel White:** ...as I say with resentment, and Tracy knows why. \[laughter\] I wanna bring up Johnny-Five as an example for a special exception to documentation... Not because I'm biased and I love NodeBots -- well, yeah, I am biased and I do love NodeBots, but I think that the reason that I love NodeBots so much i... |
\[16:26\] It touches on the API for using it, it gives you visual diagrams on how to use it, there's code examples for so many different microcontrollers... So you can come into it with so many different ways of your preferred learning style, and there's something there for everybody, and... I don't know. I think that'... |
**Alex Sexton:** I'm gonna toot Stripe's own horn a little bit, but Stripe is pretty well known for good documentation of their API, which is a little different than what we're talking about... But as a company, if you have something that people have to integrate into their software, you need pretty good documentation ... |
And one thing that Stripe does - that a lot of people still don't do, but people catch on to every once in a while - is if you have a Stripe account and you're logged into it, there's a bunch of data that you have that's specific to you, and you have your test keys and all that stuff to hit the API... So if you then go... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Wow. |
**Alex Sexton:** So it actually makes it to where all of the documentation is kind of living, in the sense that it's actually making calls - to some extent; we don't make charges every time you look at the charge page, but it really brings people into a quick, firm understanding of what they need to send and what they ... |
**Rachel White:** I encourage everyone to steal that idea, too. It would make everybody's life easier. |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, that sounds amazing. |
**Rachel White:** That's what happens when you write good documentation - it encourages people to have a good connection with your product or what you're trying to get people to use, and then they'll tell other people about how great it is to use... So there's really no excuse for having bad documentation, other than..... |
**Tracy Hinds:** It's work! \[laughter\] |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, other than that it's work. |
**Tracy Hinds:** It's a lot of work... \[laughter\] It's like whether you're doing the right thing, and you have \[unintelligible 00:19:01.19\] to do it. |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, true. |
**Tracy Hinds:** I mean, I'm saying that that's an excuse sometimes. Sometimes there's just not enough hours in the day, unfortunately. And that seems like it's often the first thing to go. |
**Alex Sexton:** It's also true that in your first iteration of your application (or business or whatever you're documenting), the documentation kind of flows out because you have such a small service area, and you don't have any -- I mean, it's kind of like greenfield in code, you just write whatever you want. But as ... |
\[20:13\] So the work actually increases over time. It feel like, "Oh, I wrote all the docs. Now I only have to do little updates in the future", but I feel like it kind of is this early big spike, and then it drops off, and then over time it far surpasses... Eventually you're a massive -- if you're successful and you ... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, the living dark situation is definitely -- I found it to be a problem that people don't make that-- or if there's a mixed, like a conflict in manage expectations, because I think there was for a time... James Snell spent an exorbitant amount of time updating a lot of the docs (I believe it was at... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, for sure. One way to try to fight against that that accidentally occurs somewhat in that thing I was talking about at Stripe where we run actual calls to code to try to generate the example output of our API endpoints is that we have to build the docs and run tests against all of the different ca... |
All documentation should have an example and it should have a known output, and you should run all of those examples as tests, and if that output no longer matches, then you need to update the docs and the tests should fail. So that can be not insanely difficult. As long as you can extract out the examples from the doc... |
**Rachel White:** Alright, I think it's time for a break. When we come back, we'll be talking about non-blocking UI rendering. |
**Break:** \[22:57\] |
**Alex Sexton:** And we're back. During this next section, we're going to be talking a little bit about maybe a segment light about concurrency in the UI thread, or non-blocking rendering techniques to make the browser not lag whenever you try to do things or render things (render other things) or scroll. |
\[24:00\] We've talked a lot in the past about maybe network performance, and we talked somewhat last week about _Isomorphic JavaScript_. As a refresher, _Isomorphic JavaScript_ is a name that was given to code that renders on the server and the client by [Spike Brehm](https://www.linkedin.com/in/spikebrehm) at Airbnb ... |
So you have a server side render, you get SEO, you get fast rendering. You might not get fast thing to work, so if your JavaScript still takes a really long time to parse and execute then none of your buttons work yet, but maybe your links do, or something like that; it'd be cool. |
The last section of that is more along the lines of in-app... Like, during the execution of the application and the use of the application, we still do a lot of rendering and re-rendering. And React was pretty big -- so in the Backbone days you would say "There was a change in my view. Let me kill off the HTML" -- or l... |
In the React world, the whole magic was the virtual DOM. You did a DOM diff on the virtual DOM - the previous state, the new state, and then you'd only re-render the parts that changed, and that was a pretty big deal. |
But we still are in a world where a lot of times you're switching pages, right? You click on the menu button and the URL changes, and you render a totally different page with almost -- like, only the menus match. DOM diffing doesn't do much for you there, because the whole DOM is a diff. Actually, in early React, in ea... |
So where I think we're headed in this interesting space that is coming out of the need for faster, lighter-weight, cooler animations and all sorts of stuff is concurrency and non-blocking, and piecemeal rendering. So we have the native little API in the browser called requestAnimationFrame. requestAnimationFrame is a t... |
When we're talking about rendering, much like you want to fit any animation you're doing inside of the requestAnimationFrame 12-millisecond block, you wanna fit any rendering that you're doing in your page inside that block as well, otherwise you're going to stop that requestAnimationFrame from being able to be called.... |
\[28:13\] In React, a lot of times we have DOM diffs and things like that and re-renders that take a lot more than 12 milliseconds. So even though we have this fast, cool virtual DOM diffing thing, we're in a situation where we're lagging the browser and we're causing jank and all that kind of stuff because of the rend... |
So the future here, I think, is in concurrent or non-blocking rendering engines. React has been working for a long time on this - it's called React Fiber. Other engines are also working on this... There's Ember Concurrency, which is not only for rendering; it can be doing other things. You're doing less than the UI thr... |
The first version will be completely backwards-compatible, and then in the future they'll kind of like start adding more primitives for deferred updates. You can also imagine, you wanna update something that takes longer than a frame of time to do, and then you wanna update it again before it's even done, so you actual... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, I enjoy the "Is Fiber Ready Yet?" (isfiberreadyyet.com) This is like the most helpful site for a technology that's going to be available soon but isn't, because it shows you all of the things that have been done already for passing tests, and then the ones that are close. |
Oh god, there's children crying. Sorry... |
Then there's also the failing ones, so if people were involved in it and wanted to fix it, they probably could. That's pretty neat. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. And kind of harkening back to the documentation thing, the site IsSomethingReadyYet - it goes back all the way to AreWeFastYet (probably the first one), and it was Firefox trying to catch up their rendering engine to V8 and Safari and stuff like that, I think... Or any of the SpiderMonkey versus ... |
But then there was one for docs too, right? Do you remember? In order to get MDN listed above the W3Schools sites, it's like AreWeFirstYet -- that was it... AreWeFastYet and then AreWeFirstYet, and then there was kind of an explosion of AreWeSomethingYet. IsFiberReadyYet is a good one, too. Anyway, that was a tangent. |
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