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**Adam Stacoviak:** Is it coming back? |
**Alex Sexton:** It will come back... I've just had babies and lived in San Francisco for a summer, and those kinds of things, so it can be tough. But anyway, that's how I know Mikeal, and I used to be a crew with Paul Irish, Adam Sontag and Rebecca Murphey back in the days when jQuery was a little more popular. Not th... |
I've been doing JavaScript for like 12 years now, which is kind of crazy... It's a long time to be doing anything, so JavaScript is definitely what I've spent the bulk of my career working on. |
I worked at a few consultancies... I worked at a place called Bazaarvoice, which was a big job I had, and now I work at Stripe. Those are, I guess, the most interesting parts of my working history. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You've been there for a while now, right? |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I've been at Stripe for... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Four years? |
**Alex Sexton:** ... almost four years now, which is a long time... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's strange I know that, because I don't really know you, so I'm kind of wondering why I know that. |
**Alex Sexton:** No, it's creepy, but it's fine. \[laughter\] Stripe has been a pretty cool company to be a part of. I work remotely from Austin, Texas, and Stripe has grown quite a bit. Since I don't work in the office, every time I go back I don't recognize anyone, because it's growing so fast. But I know their Slack... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[04:11\] That works out, yeah. |
**Alex Sexton:** I'm not sure exactly what you guys want me to know; I can talk for a long time, so if you have specific questions about my past, I think maybe that would be more courteous to the audience members who want to listen to me speak. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, let's just give a little bit of your JavaScript background. Like you said, you were involved with jQuery, you were on the board of directors, you also have a lot of work put in the Modernizr, so thank you for that. Maybe give your open source background, some of the stuff that you're involved in,... |
**Alex Sexton:** I went to -- I think it was the jQuery Conf, because the ones before were jQuery Camp... But I guess if you scroll even further back, I joined the jQuery IRC channel on FreeNode way back in the day... I don't remember how long ago. That's where I met Paul Irish and Rebecca Murphey and Adam Sontag, whic... |
I'm trying to remember when that would have been, like 2008-2009, something like that. We did some small commits; I wasn't on the team, but I contributed for a long time. It was a goal of mine some year - I think my new year's resolution - to contribute to a major open source project, and jQuery was that. And then even... |
I don't have a ton of code in jQuery, but that was certainly where I came up in the open source world, along with a lot of those people. Modernizr was also written by someone in the jQuery IRC channel originally -- well, not really, I guess... Faruk Ateş wrote it, and Paul and Ben Alman, who has a couple plugins in the... |
Ben didn't necessarily stick around on the team, but Paul and I - we were pretty good friends at that point. I think we were at JSConf EU and we were talking about how people load too much into their browsers - we were way ahead of our time, I think it's still the argument on Twitter - so we decided to try to use featu... |
The goal of yepnope was that you only developed the code that the browser can either run or use, rather than every possible version of your code. I've since killed that project, because there are new, better techniques, like using HTTP/2 server and the build tools that exist today to load bundles and do things; there a... |
\[08:06\] Other open source stuff - probably my other most popular project... There's this CSS color checker that got a lot of press and tweets and things, but actually doesn't do anything; I don't think anyone uses it. It was a very popular project that everyone starred one time and then never used, so I won't talk ab... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's funny. |
**Alex Sexton:** Very big flash in the pan. The goal of it was kind of cool... I mean, I think we use it at Stripe...? It was kind of like a warning at Stripe; it came out of an idea from an old Nicole Sullivan talk from the original TXJS, where she was like, "I consulted with Facebook to try to help them with their 8-... |
**Jerod Santo:** Wow... |
**Alex Sexton:** That was how things worked back in the day; there weren't variables or anything like that. So they moved over to a system where it was harder to make those types of mistakes, but I still found that whenever you had the giant variables file, people would get Facebook blue right, because that one's easy.... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How about "grayer"? "More gray". |
**Alex Sexton:** Grayest, great. I realized I said I won't talk about this plugin, and now I'm going very deep into it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You are. I like it. |
**Alex Sexton:** \[laugh\] It's kind of a fun thing... So this thing just pulls out every color, and it finds colors that are different than each other in value, but that a human could not perceive the difference of within some range. And so, there's an algorithm for this, the CIEDE2000 algorithm. It's used in compress... |
The actual value that I think I've added since jQuery Modernizr days is in internalization tooling, which I got pretty deep into at the end of my time at Bazaarvoice, and do a bunch of work on at Stripe as well. MessageFormat JS is something -- if you've ever used GetText or tried to do pluralization or interpolation o... |
There is another competing library, React Intel, that we actually at Stripe, and it uses my parser underlying, kind of; it's kind of been changed a little bit since then. So a lot of the internationalization tooling that people are using today actually kind of came out of some stuff that I did, and I think it's a very ... |
\[11:59\] I really think that internationalization is super undervalued and the tooling needs years of work in order to get good; the thing I wrote is just a very basic start to the ecosystem of tools that you would need to do that well. How's that? |
**Jerod Santo:** That's good. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Clearly, you've got some opinions, which is great. I mean, that's the whole point of the show, just to kind of bring some different perspective towards this JavaScript web platform landscape and discuss the various things that are going on - both current events, to a degree, but then also some tried... |
**Alex Sexton:** I guess you picked up on the fact that I have opinions, and when someone offers you a platform for advocating for those opinions, it can be tempting. I mean, I'm very excited to do it; I think that Mikeal and Rachel also have very unique perspectives. |
I'm not necessarily excited for the listeners, right? I think they can make up their own minds; I'm not saying they're going to be imbued with my opinions and then become better people or anything like that, but if listeners happen to find the things valuable, then I think my excitement will turn from potential excitem... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So right now you're skeptical then? |
**Alex Sexton:** Well, sure, yeah. That's the default, I think. I'm not doubtful, but there wouldn't be a great reason to do it if I was just making people angry, or annoying them, or something like that. I'm very excited at the potential for having discussions with people that are valuable, and I hope they're valuable... |
**Jerod Santo:** I absolutely agree, and that's our hope, to have a shared discussion amongst all the people in the greater JavaScript/frontend/web community in a place where it's like the watercooler; that's why we wanted to do a live show. We want to have interaction with the chat room, because there's more people ad... |
But one of the reasons why I'm so excited, Alex, to have you on, is because Mikeal has convinced me that you are excellent at arguing with him. I love a good debate - I think we all do - so I think we'll have not just a shared discussion, but hopefully some entertaining discourse as well, as I hear you're pretty good a... |
**Alex Sexton:** Sure, that's how Mikeal would portray it. \[laughter\] Yeah, it's been a pastime of mine to, I would say, keep Mikeal honest. I'm sure he would say, "Always take the other side, no matter what." Mikeal actually has cleaned up his act quite a bit, but if you go back three or so years on his Twitter, he ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Just to fluff the feathers, something like that? |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Ruffle the feathers. |
**Alex Sexton:** As someone who knew Mikeal and knew that he would know that it was coming from a place of love, I took it upon myself to try to call out anything I thought was potentially, let's say, unfair. So Mikeal and I go back a long time, of comfortable, but heated discourse. |
\[16:05\] Now that you say that, that is an also very exciting aspect of this... \[laughter\] In the past - a year or so - we've tended to agree on a lot of stuff, so it maybe hasn't been on the forefront of my mind, but I'm sure if you bring up some topics we'll have some different opinions. He's softening at his age,... |
**Jerod Santo:** If you had to characterize your perspective, just with regard to frontend in the browser - progressive enhancement, graceful degradation... Are you a single-page app? Do you believe in frameworks? Do you not believe in frameworks? Give us a taste of where Alex stands in some of the hot topics, in the f... |
**Alex Sexton:** I'm definitely a pragmatist when it comes to most things. I have strong opinions about how things should be done, and they don't necessarily line up with how I do things, and I think that's good to an extent. I would love to make everything a hundred percent accessible and super fast, and sometimes you... |
I think it's very important to know what you're giving up, to make those conscious decisions rather than make them not caring decisions... But I feel very strongly that accessibility is extremely important, and fight for it at Stripe; I feel very strongly that performance is something that is very easy to say, "Well, w... |
It's the same with mobile support... It's like, "Well, we don't get any hits from mobile." Well, that's because no one can use the website on their phone. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No one wants to. It's a bad experience. |
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