text stringlengths 0 1.36k |
|---|
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, while you were talking, I was trying to figure out -- I am always curious to see when something like this is coming along if there's like a not-framework version of it, because I came from the tiny percentage of people who were trying to write JavaScript without using a major framework, which tur... |
**Alex Sexton:** \[32:09\] The idea of incremental rendering assumes you're doing -- maybe the reason why is because it assumes you're already using a library to do batch rendering, right? So it's kind of like a thing to undo a thing you added. |
**Tracy Hinds:** Right, and also there might just be too much going on. |
**Alex Sexton:** Honestly, if you're from the world of web components and "let the web APIs do everything" and all that stuff, where you're rendering HTML and CSS inside web components and they work before the JavaScript executes, the browsers already do rendering in this way. That would probably be your answer - don't... |
**Rachel White:** Right. We're gonna go to another break. |
**Break:** \[33:07\] |
**Rachel White:** So we're back! Next, we're gonna talk to Tracy about what it is like to work for the Node Foundation, what's going on with Node, what does she do - she's just gonna tell us all these good things about her job and the community. So tell us what it is that you do exactly for the Node Foundation. |
**Tracy Hinds:** Oh my goodness, okay. So I am the education community manager... I get to wear a bunch of different hats. It's sort of along the lines of what people -- a lot of people don't realize what the Node Foundation does or what it's like to work full-time in open source. |
A couple things I'd like to say first is that there is not as much coding as you would imagine, and sometimes that's sad... But a lot of the focus is around people, and sort of working on helping people collaborate together, especially when it's really tough for them to do so. The other part of that - the Node Foundati... |
There's the Node Project itself, which is comprised of the TSC, which is the Technical Steering Committee. Under that (I believe that's the way it's structured) is the CTC - Core Technical Committee. Those are people who are working on the codebases in different working groups for the code that makes Node run, as well ... |
Then there's the Community Committee, which is very newly chartered. That is a place that was created that I helped get chartered at the beginning of this year, after we'd worked on it for quite some time, to give voice to community. So that's really interesting, because a lot of programming foundations don't have that... |
\[36:01\] Community is a very weird, ambiguous, handwavy word because it's communities - it's a whole ecosystem of groups around the world, and it can be people who are writing npm packages, or it could be projects like Express, or... The TSC is part of the community, as well. Then you have all of these events, like No... |
When their code isn't changing a lot or we're not really hearing a lot from the core project itself, there are people who are still around the world, using this in production, and using this for fun, and they still need to learn this code, so those communities are really helping keep that there. |
That's nice, because advocation also fits in there. As we're growing the foundation -- there's also the board. The board is this group of corporate members and representatives from individual members of Node, who come together on a monthly basis and work together in between those meetings, to sort of figure out and sup... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, I was gonna say... We work together, IBM Watson, and you were trying to help shape a lot of the community stuff while we were there. And then when you had the opportunity to join the Node Foundation, it just seemed like a perfect fix. I know how much you generally - or not generally, GENUINELY -... |
So I guess touching on that, what kind of things do you do at the Node Foundation to maybe help spread the word about Node to existing developers that may not be familiar with it, and to people that are starting out? Because isn't Node the largest-growing open source community that we have right now, out of any languag... |
**Tracy Hinds:** By sheer numbers, yes. There's all these different ways to measure it. It can be like interest... Node - a lot of people are really interested in writing it, and there's like a volume of people... Just by that quantity, Node is really popular. Then there's really cool orgs like Rust, that are doing a r... |
For us, it's that we have this great opportunity and a lot of people wanna learn, but we have to make sure that -- as we've grown, we have to be more deliberate about what we're doing, because we're not just growing to grow. |
We want the codebase to be good, we want it to be stable, we want more people to wanna contribute, so that it sustains itself, and part of that is making it a better place to hang out and participate, and also making it easier to write that code. |
\[40:09\] There are concepts in Node that can get incredibly complicated and the learning curve can get steeper, but you have to know how to write JavaScript to write Node, and I don't think learning JavaScript is that difficult either, but there is definitely a lot of places that we can work and improve, both in JavaS... |
A lot of this year for me, the roadmap that I wrote out for education, is education and community. We need to work on the Getting Started. There are other programming languages I'm really envious of, because it's a huge investment. You have to spend time on multiple people working on this, on writing curriculum, on wri... |
Again, a conversation I was having this week was around supporting the community in a better way. We notice that our online chat mediums like Slack and IRC, the survey data showed us that most people don't think that it's good quality, but they don't know where else to go to have that kind of interaction to get help. S... |
**Rachel White:** That is a good point. I think that it's interesting to point out too that you can be a contributor to shape the Node ecosystem without contributing code. One thing that I have always appreciated with what the Node community does is they just want everybody to help; they want people that can be technic... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, this is something that we -- everyone talks about like "We need better docs." Well, there's only so many hours in the day, and a lot of times the people who need to be writing those docs are the people who are also writing that code. The person writing that documentation needs to understand what ... |
Technical writing is a really special skill, and we need more of that. We could also use project managers, we could also use designers, because design is a better user experience. It's also aesthetically more pleasing to people, and it can attract people to a project, it can also help display information in a different... |
\[44:28\] You need to start approaching it from the point that of course developers are important to the project, they're writing code, but maybe we've ignored the other roles for a bit. So it's nice to be able to have this making space for everyone there, and saying that "We need all of you." |
**Rachel White:** Definitely. |
**Alex Sexton:** Node can be a little bit difficult to jump right in, even if you wanna write docs and you're a good technical writer, but maybe a good advice is that there's a long tail of projects, and Node's documentation is better than, let's say, 99.5% of them, or something like that. There is a project that you u... |
But it's so helpful when other people come and help on your project. So if you have projects - even multi-thousand star GitHub projects have some lacking documentation, and it's pretty rare for someone to just say like "No, I don't want more information on how to use this." So get your feet wet there, and then work you... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, I mean the first thing that I look for when people are asking to help out with education is - and that's a little secret - I go and look at their repos and see if they've documented anything, and see how they're writing that out. I can just tell so much more about your project if you've documente... |
**Rachel White:** I was talking on muted, but I said "Definitely." So what is in your future for the rest of the year? Other than all of the things that we've just talked about, are you gonna be going to conferences to try and help out? Because I know you were doing a lot with that last year. What are you gonna be invo... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Well, the big focus right now - my world is very much centered around shipping the Node certification. This sounds a little backwards, but after that it's going to be focusing more on Getting Started in Node, and making sure that these resources for people to get to the point where they feel like they'... |
Informal education is how most people have learned Node up until this point, and there are exceptions to that, such as training, but community colleges, universities - they're not really teaching it. There is a very small subset of code schools who are teaching Node as well. I love JavaScript, I love full-stack JavaScr... |
**Rachel White:** \[48:18\] Cool, alright. Well, I think that's gonna be all that we're gonna talk about for our segments, and now we're gonna move on over to our picks of the week. Alex, do you wanna go first? |
**Alex Sexton:** I'd love to go first. My pick this week is called Prettier. It's by James Long (JLongster). He put out Prettier a little while ago... It is a code formatter. Much to everyone's surprise, there are a lot of code format checkers, ESLint and stuff like that, or there used to be JSCS, and JSHint would do s... |
There's some prior art with GoFormat and ReFormat - that's from Rust, or something... Anyways, it is a code formatter, and it just went 1.0. It's actually already in use by a bunch of very important -- let's see: React, Jest, immutable-js, Haul, Oculus, Cloudflare, I think Facebook uses it... A ton of people already us... |
**Rachel White:** Tracy, you can go next. |
**Tracy Hinds:** Sure, okay. My pick is Free Code Camp, and I think at this point a lot of people have run into it in some way or another. They're producing so much content which I find really helpful, they have really great blog posts... But in itself, it's sort of an online bootcamp and it has a ridiculous amount of ... |
\[50:58\] Once you've met all of those hours - and this is free, as far as I can tell; I've not experienced a paywall of any sort - you get to move on to working on real-world projects, pair-programming with somebody else who's at the same point that you are. And this includes - you get agile user stories, so you have ... |
I love how it covers the full range of skills and challenges that you would face as a programmer getting started, so I think this is really powerful. |
**Rachel White:** Alright, my pick of the week is actually from Stripe, and it's not me sucking up to Alex. They are starting this new digital magazine publication called Increment, and the editor-in-chief is Susan Fowler, who we know left Uber and is now going to be working on this publication that is essentially goin... |
I think that it is going to be really interesting and really insightful to people that may stick to their one siloed team and don't necessarily interact with other teams, to get a really insightful and exciting way to find out how good, effective teams are structured and can work together successfully. |
That's it for this week, we're done! |
• Node.js version 8 release |
• N-API (Native API) for stable native add-on development |
• Async hooks API stability |
• WHATWG URL implementation |
• util.promisify() function for Promise-enabled APIs |
• Domain-aware native Promises |
• Uncaught rejection handling and warning emissions |
• Promises model limitations and potential false positives in Node.js |
• V8 TurboFan+Ignition compiler pipeline and its impact on performance and new language features |
• Breaking changes and deprecations in Node.js, including Buffer zero filling and error message changes |
• Performance implications of TurboFan and Crankshaft optimizers for highly optimized code |
• Async/await feature and efforts to make it more useful in the REPL and other areas |
• Node.js version 8 adoption rates |
• LTS (Long Term Support) versions of Node.js drive the most downloads |
• Old versions of Node.js are being phased out quickly |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.