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**Mat Ryer:** You just submit it once. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[unintelligible 00:19:08.02\] |
**Mat Ryer:** No, trueduke. Trueduke-- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It might actually go in, but it probably gets buried immediately. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. It's not my style, to be honest. |
**Jerod Santo:** I think there's statute limitations. If you submit the same URL that's been submitted recently - I'm not sure what recently means - it will just upvote it. So it'll count as an upvote... Which makes sense. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. That's cool. No, it was trueduke on Hacker News posted it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Trueduke? One of your sock puppets? |
**Mat Ryer:** \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So what kind of user base came out of that? Because a lot of the Hacker News folks - they kind of hit it and quit it. It's like big ol' interest, and then here today, gone today. But you had substantial contributors, and like you said, it's an open plugin kind of an infrastructure, because as long as y... |
**Mat Ryer:** \[20:12\] Yeah, I think so. I think it's the ease at which you can contribute something, and the immediate pay-off you get. It's that same thing that attracted me to Go, the fact that I was able to deliver something very quickly - I think that also applies there. And you can also do it at development time... |
**Jerod Santo:** I love that happy accident, because it was like your lack of Objective-C skills accidentally created a very nice abstraction that you probably would have by-passed, right? |
**Mat Ryer:** Absolutely. |
**Jerod Santo:** And you're like "Wow, this is actually a pretty nice layer, because I can just shove whatever else I want in there as long as it conforms. Now I cannot just do Bitcoin." |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, that's it. It's kind of like taking a weakness and sort of owning it and turning it into a strength. And that's the thing - often you see people... It's sort of like they want to either compete, or they feel like they don't know enough to contribute, and so won't... And the lesson there is that some... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What about that day though, the Hacker News day where it was popular? How did you find out? How did you react, in terms of did you dig your heels in and get back in with the community and start writing code again? You said it was dormant... So how did you react to this new claimed fame? |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, so there was 65 pull requests in one day, and I was getting an email for all of it... So that's how I found out, I just suddenly had lots of spam. And that was a big surprise... I had to take a day off work, because I wanted to reply to people in the community, and also wanted to get the plugins mer... |
So it was great, it was like winning the lottery, or something. Very exciting. But also kind of nerve-wracking. And the original code wasn't great. I really didn't know Objective-C very well at all. People even submitted fixed where -- you know, you have to manage your own memory then. I've since added the ARC stuff, t... |
So yeah, I was kind of a bit nervous, and a bit worried about that, but also just basically very excited that there were all these plugins, and I was excited by what the plugins were doing. It was people building amazing things with this, and it was great. |
**Break:** \[23:40\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So go back to 2016. You've got all of this excitement, you've got all this \[unintelligible 00:24:44.14\] I would think it's like a relatively finished piece of Objective-C software, that can read from any kind of executable... Why rename it? We know that it's a rewrite, but why rewrite it? Joel Spolsk... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Joel Spolsky. |
**Jerod Santo:** Was it Joel? Yeah, so second-rewrite syndrome, or whatever it's called... Don't do a rewrite, just keep on keeping on. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** But you didn't do that. |
**Mat Ryer:** No. I think I kind of know where they're coming from with that, but if the language dies, maybe do a rewrite... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Okay. Well, well said. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Objective-C really -- you know, I started doing Go, obviously, so I've just spent all my time on Go, and not doing Objective-C, and then Swift came out, so then people are using Swift instead... So not just me, it was -- I couldn't find contributors to help maintain the project, and there were some ... |
**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna say, that's gotta be the problem, right? |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Little things like the vertical alignment of the text suddenly was different and needed work, and turned out to just be not easy to solve, especially if you don't know Objective-C. So it kind of started going stale, and we just weren't able to keep it alive. So yeah, the decision came, it was like -... |
And we did a Go Time episode with the creator of Wails, which is a Go-powered - and JavaScript... See? Best friends... Frontend -- it's a desktop app, for desktop applications. \[unintelligible 00:26:43.28\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Is that what that means? \[laughs\] |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I think so. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Explain that, please. |
**Mat Ryer:** It's a framework for building desktop applications using JavaScript as the frontend and Go as the backend, and it uses a WebView, and with clever styling and some other tricks it really -- you can do transparency in the window, for example... So it looks and feels like a real native app on the Mac. So we ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Which is why he called it Wails... |
**Mat Ryer:** It is... Yeah, because it's like Rails... It was like web-based. |
**Jerod Santo:** With a w. |
**Mat Ryer:** \[27:50\] Yeah. So I think it was that. So I was texting him, and he was tipsy, I think, is the polite way to say it... So he was agreeing, he was all over this idea; he was loving it. And I was like "Okay, maybe wait till the morning and see if you still feel the same." And then about ten hours later I g... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's awesome. |
**Mat Ryer:** So we set about writing the rewrite. And we got to write it in Go... So that's nice. That means now the xbar project is maintainable, and we can work on it, and it's well-structured, and it makes sense, and... You know, a rewrite is, I think, often better than the first version anyway, because you learn s... |
We built a plugin browser, because it's a proper desktop app it has transparency in the window... So it just looks gorgeous. And the project came back to life. So he loved it. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's cool. So I think project size also matters when it comes to the rewrite... I imagine a lot of Bitbar was the plugins, which were written in not Objective-C... And I'm assuming those all -- you just adopted the same format, so those probably all work with xbar... Is that correct? |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, absolutely. One of the goals was all the plugins had to work, because we didn't want people have to rewrite or change the plugins in any way... That's something I learned from Go, is that backwards-compatibility promise is so meaningful. It's not just a nice-to-have; it actually takes more effort, b... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. So people warn against the big rewrite... But small rewrite, not so bad, especially when the version -- I mean, it was kind of like you just shipped a prototype for a while. We're supposed to throw away our first versions, right? That's one of the problems with a lot of software, is we write our... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I agree. I think that probably is a nice way to think about it. I mean, I like rewrites, actually. Hemingway famously said "There is no writing but rewriting", or something like that... When you're writing something, the first version of it really isn't a thing yet. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... And what would that quote look like the first time he wrote it...? |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, it was probably awful. It was probably like "Writing, but not writing, but do it twice." \[laughter\] It was probably that, you know what I mean? It didn't quite-- |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. Well, a lot of our thoughts are formed through the process, right? |
**Mat Ryer:** Yes. |
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