Show notes
Joseph Ni (aka Mordrax) shares the twisting tale of how an obscure 90s video game got him his first job with Elm, and how it brought him face to face with 10,000 lines of legacy code. Thank you to our sponsor, Culture Amp. Special thanks to Xavier Ho (@Xavier_Ho) for editing and production of this episode! Recording date: 1 April 2020 Guest Joseph Ni (aka Mordrax) (GitHub: mordrax) Show Notes 00:00:00 Intro and sponsors 00:01:42 Mordrax's history with programming Castle of the Winds InstallScript Language Reference Honeywell Enterprise Buildings Integrator Hawley Honeywell Mouse 00:05:16 Getting into front end web development TypeScript Angular Meteor Ember React 00:07:45 Getting into Elm Blake eLearning CoffeeScript Ruby Haskell 00:11:40 Castle of the Winds Castle of the Winds Python TypeScript jQuery Meteor React 00:15:10 First impressions of Elm… 00:18:00 Playing Castle of the Winds in Elm Castle of the Winds in Elm source code 00:19:36 Pacific Health Dynamics (PHD) Pacific Health Dynamics 00:22:35 Flattening state in 10,000 lines of Elm Elm at PHD ebook 00:27:17 Growth of Elm at PHD elm-jobs job listing 00:28:41 Sign-off and Outro Transcript [00:00:00] Kevin Yank: Hello again. It's your old friend Kevin, and we're back with another episode of Elm town. This episode. I'm joined by Joseph Ni. You might know him as Mordrax in the various online communities we frequent. Today he's gonna be here to talk about his journey with Elm and, how it's been used at a little company here in Australia called Pacific Health Dynamics. [00:00:22] Before we get into it, just a word of thanks as usual to Culture Amp for paying my salary while I record this. they support the show with my time and, it feels great to be able to do this in the middle of a Workday when I'm wide awake. And thank you to Culture Amp as you have probably heard by now, listener. We build a web app that companies use all over the world to invest in their people and their workplaces – to make the workplaces of the world better places to work is how I like to put it. We build our front end, at least in part, in Elm, in production. [00:00:54] And so if that is the sort of thing you would like to do for a job, you should reach out. My email address is kevin@cultureamp.com and you can visit https://cultureamp.com/jobs to see what open roles we have at any given time. [00:01:09] I'd also like to thank Xavier Ho for editing this podcast every single episode. He makes us sound great. We were just chatting the other day about some new software. He was looking at to do some live transcription of the rough cut so that you could then edit the transcript and that would cause the episode to be edited in a rough form that he could then tidy up. So he is always looking for ways to make this show better. [00:01:35] And I really appreciate that. If we sound at all good, it is mostly thanks to Xavier Ho. Joseph, welcome to the show. [00:01:42] How long have you been writing software for a living? [00:01:46] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): So writing software for living, pretty much ever since uni. And even before that, you know, I fell in love with the 286 with, QBasic and I'd be writing games and, and various calculators and whatnot pretty much my whole life. [00:02:02] Kevin Yank: So that's early. nineties, if not late eighties? [00:02:07] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): That's early to mid nineties. Yeah. Early to mid nineties. Floppy disks, five and a half inch. Those, those were the days. Yeah. [00:02:16] Kevin Yank: So what, what was your first language? [00:02:19] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): QBasic actually. Yeah. [00:02:20] Kevin Yank: Wow. Okay. Yeah, I came up on the Apple Basic. [00:02:24] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): You know, back then it was, it was all brand new. And, I was just amazed that I could actually get the computer to do something. And I was very much into kind of the D&D pen and paper role play, and, you know, and I've kind of tried to make a few games out of that. I was making along the lines of Grand Strategies, kingdom management and kingdom simulations. And then I moved on, to my first Windows machine, and then fell in love with couple of RPGs. Castle of the Winds was one of them. And that will come up again and again. (laugh) [00:02:59] Kevin Yank: My partner Jessica was a big fan of Castle of the Winds. It was her first, addiction as a video game. there are lots of fans out there who still remember that very fondly. So the programming bug, but you early, you were writing it as a hobbyist, as a gamer, as many of us were back in those days. [00:03:17] And then at a certain point, the web took over the world. What form did that take as it entered your life and, and I guess eventually became a career for you? [00:03:26] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): I kind of resisted the web for quite a long time. I was, you know, doing back ends, and I was doing a Windows desktop development for a while. [00:03:35] And before that I was, you know, at a big company, Honeywell doing a very, little known software called InstallScript. You know, when, whenever you're on Windows, then you double click on an MSI file to do an install. Powered by InstallScript, in the backend. It's a basic scripting language, and it's got, you know, basic kind of programming concepts. You've got functions, you've got, you know, variables, conditionals, and it's meant to be moving files, but, with the install, you've got a certain level of configuration of the system. [00:04:12] And within Honeywell I was in the, the EBI Enterprise Buildings Integrator. There is a lot of configurations required and depending on what version of Windows you're on, depending on what previous, I guess, updates have been installed, things can differ drastically from one install to the next. [00:04:32] So at that level of complexity, I found and discovered, was really hard to manage when you don't have proper tools and you've just got like a basic scripting language. I would've preferred to use QBasic. [00:04:46] Kevin Yank: When you said Honeywell, my mind went immediately to the favorite mouse I have ever owned: the Honeywell mouse. I had it for many years and I didn't want to give it up because there was nothing as good available to replace it with. It's the only mouse I've ever had that had two wheels on the bottom, a horizontal and a vertical wheel rather than a single ball. [00:05:07] It had two wheels and it just felt so accurate. And so reliable compared to everything else I've ever used. So what pulled you away from Honeywell? [00:05:16] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): Well, actually it was pretty much all about necessity, to be completely honest. I was writing, you know, Windows services and SOAP web services, I was writing Windows desktop applications. And my partner in crime at that time, at that startup, was doing most of the classic ASP web front end that was used in the offices. [00:05:40] And then, business didn't really go anywhere. My partner in crime left. And then I took over, took over the front end as well I kind of had to learn that. [00:05:50] Kevin Yank: So out of necessity, you mean there was no one else to do it? [00:05:53] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): Yeah. [00:05:54] At that point in time, I was exploring TypeScript, TypeScript was the stepping stone into JavaScript. I tried to kind of ease into JavaScript with the type system. Early on though, TypeScript wasn't particularly well known. [00:06:11] A lot of libraries didn't have TS, you know, definition files and so— and, and types was really easy to get around with a get around as well. So it just felt like there was a lot of, you know, kind of things in your way that we didn't contribute in the end. [00:06:30] At that time, I hadn't gone into JavaScript that much at all. So I thought, okay, let's. Let's put that aside and really get into it. Loved the language though, because that was the first language that I used where functions was considered as first class citizens. [00:06:46] Now I've got things that I can just call. Like it's just the function. It has no baggage of or concept of. Well, okay, you did have context. Yeah, you did have closure within JavaScript, but, you could explicitly just declare a function, pass it around as a parameter, and just say, “Hey, use this method or use this function, you know, for these parameters.” [00:07:10] And it didn't come with a class. It didn't come with any state of its own. That was brilliant. And I loved that. [00:07:18] Kevin Yank: And how quickly from there where you sucked down the functional programming wormhole? [00:07:24] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): Not very quick. It took TypeScript, Meteor, Ember, React, to eventually get to Elm. So I pretty much bumped into, you know, every popular framework. Drank every Kool-Aid. “Hey, this is great. Angular's gonna win.” And then 2013: “Yay. Meteor is great.” You know. [00:07:45] Kevin Yank: So you were telling me that, when you started at PHD, your Elm expertise was one of the things they were looking for. So, how did that expertise come about? where did Elm start with you and what did you cut your teeth on? [00:08:00] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): So right before PHD, I was at a place called a Blake E-Learning, and they made educational games for kids. While I was at, you know, Blake E-Learning. These guys are really, really supportive of technologies and, you know, explorations. [00:08:17] Kevin Yank: I've met a few people from Blake over the years at, like coding camps and things like that. And they always seem very open to experimenting with the latest tech. [00:08:26] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): They had Haskell groups, Elm groups, Ruby groups. They had, Elixir groups. So all of these lunchtime learning groups, and, you know, there were a great bunch of people, don't get me wrong. It was a really, really hard position, leaving it, because really, they fostered and really encouraged me, to, to learn and to really grow and, and to kind of analyze, you know, languages as well as concepts, you know, like what was good, what was bad. [00:08:58] So, you know, within Blake, that was kind of where my Elm journey really took off. Work at Blake consisted of CoffeeScript and Ember and Ruby. [00:09:07] It was actually quite interesting because I had already had, heard about Elm, you know, quite a few times just within the last year within the community, you know, listing out the new things. And then when I first joined Blake during the interview process, I was talking to Martin, the tech lead there at the time. [00:09:27] And you know, he had said, he had started talking about Elm and he said he'd built some things in it, you know. I was like,“What, what? That's, that's crazy. That's amazing.” And so, yeah, so I really started exploring that on the side. The last time that I had done any functional programming, was in first year in uni. [00:09:49] Kevin Yank: I had a similar experience that FP is something I learned at university and then did not use for a decade. [00:09:55] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): And it was in Haskell. Loved it. Absolutely loved it. I had a lot of fond memories from Haskell, especially how it unpacked complex problems using recursion. It almost just makes the problem go away, you know, by kind of reducing your, your problem space from, “Oh, how do you solve this whole problem?” to just “How do you solve the current issue that you have at hand?” On the larger scale as well, it's like, “Oh, how do you solve this, this company's whole issue?” Well, how do you solve the current issue you have at hand? And typically that is, you know, in my view, the most optimal way of moving ahead: by solving the issue that you have at hand rather than worrying or holding within your memory and, you know, spending your time and resources, [00:10:42] right, within this cycle on everything else that needs to be solved in the future [00:10:47] Kevin Yank: Well, the really satisfying thing that I think you're getting at about recursion is that you are able to set aside the big problem, solve a small problem, and then realize that by solving that small problem, you have actually solved the big problem. [00:11:05] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): Exactly. And so the big problem that you thought was a big problem, is just really the same pattern of small problems over and over and over again. But I mean, so that was, that was the one really notable theme that I had from learning Haskell. [00:11:21] Kevin Yank: I'd venture to say that combination of functional programming that you had fond memories of and the type system that ever since you had moved into JavaScript land, you were looking for something as strong as the type systems you'd worked with in .NET. So that was, I guess, an irresistible combination. [00:11:40] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): So what I'd been doing in React was writing or rewriting a game called Castle of the Winds and as many who you know, have met me would know, I keep talking about this, this is the game that I keep rewriting over and over again. [00:11:54] Kevin Yank: So for people who have not heard of Castle of the Winds, can you describe the game? [00:11:59] Joseph Ni (Mordrax): So Castle of the Winds is a top-down RPG. So tile based RPG, made by Rick Saada in the late eighties, I believe. And it was targeted at Windows 3.1. It was a, it's a very old game. But I love it to bits. It was my first RPG that, that's what got me into RPGs. You're going into towns and randomly generated caves, you know, turn-based. And you're just clicking around. It's got, your basic warrior and your mage, really simple in its concept. And that's why I thought, okay, it'd be awesome if I could recreate this, you know, relive my childhood dream in some ways, but as I've found over and over again, RPGs, you know, and, [00:12:42] this is to kids at home: don't pick RPGs that you first game to remake! I'd been remaking this game, you know, but at every opportunity using a different language. It actually started, first with Python 2, and then, you know, I was doing it with TypeScript and jQuery of all things, and that was horrendous. [00:13:04] And then I tried to remake it in Meteor, and finally I moved to React and then replaced the Meteor backend. I reached a point where it was kind of like the momentum was sapped by continual changes. Continual refactorings continual type changes. I had test cases in place to test for when things breaks, right. [00:13:30] Did this item in the inventory gets stowed away properly or did a purchase of a potion, was that purchase successful. And whenever I made refactoring changes, you know, you may break some things and I knew about it, but it kind of inhibited me from making those changes because I knew every single time I tried to do a system wide change, [00:13:52] it would then, you know, take me a few more days of debugging to fix everything again. Right at the beginning as a project ramps up, you're like, ah, okay, I'm making a lot of progress. Everything's great. You know, 1,000 lines, 2,000 lines, 4,000 lines, 5,000 lines, 6,000 lines, and then eventually you hit a point where you don't want to make system wide architectural changes anymore because it's just, you just don't know what's going to happen. And then you're constantly adding tests. [00:14:22] So it was at that point that I joined Blake, with my Castle of the Winds. All right. Let's derail with this one last time. This thing called Elm, what is, what is this thing called Elm? Let's just try it out. And so that first two weeks I was absolutely, absolutely gobsmackedly hooked onto it. It was really amazing. [00:14:48] Kevin Yank: It's good to have a specific project that you're cra…
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