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**Alex Sexton:** So I both am aware of those types of gotchas, but I also understand... Getting something out there and shipping something, and just having a product at all that some people can use can often be a good start to something that you can eventually have all those other things on. So even though I feel very ... |
I guess that's a preface to all my opinions - I feel strongly that these things are right, but I understand the need to sometimes skip them temporarily; or something might die before I ever get to it, but... So I come from a big performance background. That's what I worked on a bunch at Bazaarvoice and at Stripe early ... |
I wrote an article a while back, and ran a conference called Frontend Ops. It's on Smashing Mag... There are now job postings on StackOverflow for frontend operations engineer, which is kind of cool; I mean, not that I took two words that already existed and just said them next to each other, but it kind of links to so... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's a mashup. |
**Alex Sexton:** \[20:04\] Yeah, a mashup. There you go. So a lot of the work I do is actually in the frontend operations world. It's less writing the end UIs these days, and a lot of it is the infrastructure parts or the build tooling or the measurement, internationalization, things like that. Or measuring performance... |
I guess single-page apps... There's a big war -- if you can even call something a single-page app... Or something's document vs. app-based, and I don't really care what you call it... I think server rendering is a good solution for lots of pages that people talk about. Anything that you're gonna read or you'd want to b... |
I'm a pretty big proponent of progressive enhancement... I think more so than some of my colleagues at Stripe. Stripe does really awesome landing pages and things for new products that we do, and those are designer-lead things, and I think they're cutting edge, so it would be silly to progressively-enhance some of them... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You're a pragmatist, you said before... Right? |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. So I guess I agree with everyone who are the purists, but my actions don't always fall in line with those things based on other constraints. I believe very strongly in the idea of the web, and links, and openness and open source and all that stuff, and I try whenever possible to embody all those ... |
**Jerod Santo:** And we live in a world that's gray. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I don't know, that's a little bit of a cop-out answer, but... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm sure we'll hear more from you over the next several episodes, and see how true this is for you. |
**Jerod Santo:** Plus, the nice thing about conversations is you can always represent the purist in a conversation, because the real-world constraints aren't necessarily in front of you. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, absolutely. |
**Jerod Santo:** So that will be fun. This kind of leads us into our next question for you. When you mentioned you believed in the openness and links and the web fundamentals, what's your favorite thing about JS or about the web platform? |
**Alex Sexton:** \[24:01\] The accessibility of everything -- not necessarily in the handy, capable sense... Just the fact that there's no app store, it's federated, it's fully open, the specs are open. People can kind of break away from those things... Pragmatism-wise, browsers can do their own thing a little bit and ... |
I like how the web moves forward. It's slower than the proprietary platforms, but I think it's outlasted every single one of them by a triple at this point. You even see with the iOS App Store - the ten most popular apps of 2016 were made by three companies, or something like that. |
So the world where young (or not necessarily young; don't be ageist) -- where new and inexperienced people can have a good idea and breakthrough... The web is still just leaps and bounds above every other ecosystem, and the fact that everything is open and all the tooling can be open is just... It's such a welcoming, w... |
I think the ecosystem of the web is more open and welcoming and harder to use and more frustrating, but ultimately the best real output of what we can do. It's the pragmatist's platform, I guess, in some regards. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you'll get probably both mine and Adam's amen on that. I think the lack of having to ask someone's permission in order to do a thing... The platform that allows you to just set up shop and start a business without having to have some sort of gatekeepers' permission is a powerful thing. |
On the flipside of that, you kind of alluded to a little bit and you said it's frustrating - what's your least favorite thing then? |
**Alex Sexton:** Least favorite thing...? Safari... people who don't do it right I guess. \[laughter\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Jerod's favorite browser. |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh I use Safari all day every day. |
**Alex Sexton:** Oh, cool... \[laughter\] The people who take from the web, but don't give back to the web, or things like Safari -- it's not Safari itself; Safari is pretty good because Apple's so currently good at what they do that it ends up not mattering a whole bunch... But anytime the web tries to innovate and Sa... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[28:19\] This is a little meta, but are you a listener of Request For Commits? |
**Alex Sexton:** Not currently. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Since you're on that subject, there's one episode you've got to listen to. It has to be something you do this afternoon. |
**Alex Sexton:** Sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's the one called "Funding the Web with Brendan Eich". You will never get more of a historical background to funding the web than you will ever get from that, roughly a little over an hour (I think it's 74 minutes long, based on the timestamp here). That's the good one there. |
**Alex Sexton:** Brendan is an old JSConf speaker and a TXJS speaker, and we've done the speaker circuit together, so I may have heard a lot of that information first-hand before, but I'll definitely go listen, too. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, listen to it and then you can tell us how much of it you already knew. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, how accurate is... How in the know are you, Alex. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I'd be interested. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** On that note then, we look at the future of this show... We asked you a couple questions like, "Where do you stand on certain controversial issues? What are your favorite/least favorite things about the web, JavaScript?" things like that, but I'm kind of curious on what particular topics you may be ... |
**Alex Sexton:** Current stuff? Service workers have been around for a while, but that world of the web is very interesting... I also do a lot of work on a large application at a company where people use something a lot, so frameworks are something I think that Rachel and Mikeal are a little less interested in and that... |
I'm also a pragmatist when it comes to choosing libraries. There's a lot of hype around React, and React is amazing and great. I think I intro-ed Tom Occhino and Pete Hunt at JSConf before they announced it, whenever it got like a terrible, terrible reception from everybody, so I feel partially responsible... But there... |
Also, people reach for React and they need the modification of the onchange event that React does, and that's the only thing they're using in the entire library... So kind of back to a world where maybe people are reaching for libraries that are too big. I'm interested in where this goes. There's currently Preact and a... |
**Jerod Santo:** Mhmm, Inferno. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, there are versions of things where people want some of this to be baked in, you know DOM-diffing baked into a browser specification, and all that kind of stuff. So I'm very interested to see where the frameworks world goes, even if I'm not necessarily writing any frameworks currently. |
What else... Build tooling is also something I care a lot about that I think we're due for another revolution on. I don't know how much people care about that, but things like Webpack and those systems... |
\[31:54\] I was a contributor to RequireJS back in the day with James Burke -- I mean, James Burke did 99.9999% of it. I added a little bit to the spec on behalf of the jQuery team, but that's since been mostly dead, and now Node is working on implementing ES6 modules in an asynchronous way, which is kind of full circl... |
Those two things I guess are pretty boring frameworks and build tools, but that's probably why Mikeal had chosen me for those opinions, because they weren't necessarily represented between him with Node stuff and Rachel with robotics. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right... Well, you would be surprised, because we went back and looked at our states on the Changelog over the last couple of years - two of our biggest shows had been 1) React and 2) most recently was Webpack 2. So people love hearing about those topics... Even though we may have to convince Mikeal an... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... There's enough drama to it though, they'll come up naturally, I think. The third thing I'd say that maybe isn't represented but also is under-represented in total is web security, which I do a lot of help with at Stripe. I spoke a bunch the past two years on content security policy, and kind of... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Can't wait. To wrap up, let's figure out your perspective on who you think might listen to this show. Each host brings their own perspective, as we've already talked about in this preliminary show... But I'm kind of curious who you think might/should listen to this show - anybody out there... You co... |
**Alex Sexton:** Sure. I mean, they have to be able to put up with a lot... You have to be patient and not dislike Mikeal too much... \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** You're limiting our audience... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, we're down to like maybe 10-15 people or so... You could also hate-listen, though; I think that audience could be quite large. No, I think if you're the class of person who has a Twitter account but can't keep up with every possible piece of drama, or doesn't care to, or wants it distilled down..... |
\[34:55\] And also, possibly if you're only interested in currently a single section - you're coming in from Node or robotics, it could also be good to kind of reach out your mind into the other sections and find the cross-sections between you and the other portions of the community. |
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