Frontend First

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Software How-To
**Frontend First**

A podcast about modern UI development on the web. Hosted by Sam Selikoff and Ryan Toronto.

Latest Episodes:

Nathan Selikoff on Omnimodal's real-time tech stack May 08, 2019

Show notes

Topics include:

4:23 – Overview of Omnimodal's tech stack
6:38 – Omnimodal's mission: to help cities manage transportation demand
16:10 – How to ingest open transportation data and present it in real time
21:43 – How graphics-heavy OpenGL and C++ apps can benefit from web tooling
31:06 – Why state machines are used in both video game and web development
34:55 – How JavaScript UI development compares to other paradigms
38:46 – Why Ember and Rails were chosen for Omnimodal's technology needs
42:09 – Using a prediction engine to improve on transportation schedules
44:56 - How Omnimodal gets data from its hardware trackers to the Rails server
50:55 – How services like Heroku and PubNub, custom AWS code, and the concept of a Data Lake help address scalability issues
56:40 – How deploys are coordinated across multiple services
59:47 - What the development process looks like for a multi-service tech stack
1:02:10 – What the complexity breakdown is between Omnimodal's frontend and backend
1:04:07 – Lessons learned on authentication while using Auth0
1:09:31 - Lessons learned on data modeling
1:12:21 – Tech choices, escape hatches, what's worked, and what hasn't
1:20:15 – Things Nathan loves about Ember, and things that are challenging

Links:

Frontend developers like us do things like this May 01, 2019

Show notes

Topics include:

3:12 – Getting Mirage 1.0 out the door, Mirage's roadmap, and how other communities treat domain modeling
15:18 – Seth Godin's blog post on tribal marketing
27:08 – Sustainability and project management in open source
48:06 – What benefits do products actually unlock?

Links:

Hark! The Halting problem sings Apr 24, 2019

Show notes

Topics include:

0:00 – Letting your yes be yes, following through on your commitments, and paying attention to opportunity cost
6:40 – When Ember releases actually become LTS versions
9:13 – Why we need "test apps" when developing Addons
16:50 – How to use newer syntax when authoring Addons that support older Ember versions
22:07 – How angle brackets change our component implementations
31:46 – How to make the APIs of our domain components more portable
38:45 – How to reuse code that has implicit data dependencies, and the Halting problem

Links:

Edward Faulkner on Embroider, Ember CLI's modern build system Apr 17, 2019

Show notes

Edward Faulkner joins Sam and Ryan to chat about his work on Embroider, a new three-stage architecture that will power the next generation of the Ember CLI ecosystem. They also talk about myriad other topics, including Yarn Plug'n'Play, the benefits of debugging other people's code, how Ember is embracing the larger JavaScript ecosystem, and more.

Topics include:

0:00 – What's hard about programming, why schools are bad at teaching math, and more
10:47 – Why computers should empower ordinary people, and how we can close the gap that exists between the technologically skilled and unskilled
22:12 – How the experience level of the median JavaScript developer affects tech choices made by the community
27:54 - The npm dependency graph and Yarn plug-n-play
36:24 – How to avoid making too big of a leap when improving software
41:58 – What Embroider is, and what problems it's focused on solving
46:10 – The three stages of Embroider and the V2 Addon format
1:00:15 – What Embroider enables, like tree-shaking unused Addon modules and route-level code splitting
1:21:08 – How to try Embroider out in your projects today
1:34:39 – How Ember is embracing the larger JavaScript ecosystem
1:39:35 - Why debugging other people's code is a great way to level up as a developer
1:48:28 - What Embroider's next steps are

Links:

Derrick Reimer on SPA architecture with Elm and GraphQL Apr 10, 2019

Show notes

Derrick Reimer joins Sam and Ryan to chat about building his new real-time chat product Level as an SPA using Elm, Phoenix and GraphQL. He covers domain modeling in Phoenix, his experience building his first GraphQL API, type safety in Elm, and the data fetching patterns he's using to support his application's real-time functionality.

Topics include:

2:01 – What is Level? What tech stack are you using to build it?
14:34 – Building the GraphQL API with Phoenix and Absinthe
37:40 – Building the frontend with Elm

Links:

Do you trust your test suite? Apr 04, 2019

Show notes

Sam and Ryan continue their discussion from the end of Episode 54 about how much we actually rely on our test suites versus how much implicit trust we place in semver. They also talk about some new Ember Octane features as well as a data-fetching issue.

Topics include:

2:00 – Do we trust our test suites?
10:00 – Breaking APIs in a changelog vs. in code
20:27 – Modifiers – they're kinda like mixins
37:17 – Named blocks
38:29 – Ember Octane & EmberConf trainings
43:15 – Fetching user-specific data in EmberMap's Video Views series

Links:

Chris Garrett on Ember Octane Mar 13, 2019

Show notes

Chris Garrett joins Sam and Ryan to chat about what's coming to Ember in Octane, its first edition. Chris talks about how module unification, decorators, ES6 classes, named args, angle-bracket components, template imports, modifiers, and Glimmer components offer a cohesive new programming model for Ember.js developers.

Topics include:

1:18 – De-scoping Module Unification from Octane
2:25 – Run-time APIs are coming to Octane, build-time APIs are being worked on
5:04 – What's the vision behind Ember Editions, and Octane in particular?
9:41 – What's the state of decorators?
15:43 – What can't you do with static decorators that you can with dynamic decorators?
19:18 – Why do we need decorators to use ES6 classes in Ember?
20:50 – Is it possible to lint for correct usage of named args and this-dot property access?
29:30 – How did Modifiers come about, and how do they obviate the need for lifecycle methods?
38:00 – Are you concerned that a player as big as React has abandoned ES6 Classes in favor of functions? Do you think there's anything to their argument that classes are fundamentally confusing?
43:49 – What's the thinking behind the Modifier Manager API that just landed?
52:04 - Could you expand on a point you made in your blog post about how Ember.set leaks state management all across your app?
58:50 – What's the status of Glimmer components?

Links:

SPAs should do more than server-rendered apps, not less Mar 06, 2019

Show notes

Topics include:

0:00 - Module unification
- 1:20 - Component resolution
- 5:45 - Why we don't use angle brackets
9:35 - SPAs should do everything a server app can do
- 10:15 - Ember's Router
- 11:00 - Replicating the server's "fresh data" behavior
- 17:15 - Reloading stale data
23:50 - Fetching data
- 23:50 - Getting Mirage working with React and Vue
- 26:10 - Data loading components
- 29:41 - Knowing what queries are currently rendered
- 32:15 - Using cache keys to track what data is loaded
- 35:00 - Pushing data into the client with web sockets
- 39:00 - Describing Twitter's UI in queries
- 44:00 - When will data loading be abstracted away?
49:45 - Dependabot workflow
- 50:20 - Can you merge a PR from a bot if all the tests pass?
- 53:20 - Trust, but verify

Links:

You still have to build two apps Feb 27, 2019

Show notes

Topics include:

0:00 - Refreshing an Ember app when a new version is deployed
11:05 - When SPAs become too difficult
- 14:50 - Building an SPA never got as quick as we'd hoped
- 19:20 - You're now responsible for two applications
- 28:00 - Integration costs
- 32:00 - Architecture is easier within a single monolith
40:20 - Beginners should use the same tools as experts
- 40:50 - Rolling advanced solutions back into the framework
- 47:41 - Services that are used by both beginners and experts
- 52:32 - Can you start an SPA without making an API server decision?

Links:

From build-time to run-time Feb 13, 2019

Show notes

Topics include:

01:15 - Implementing Mirage's AddonDocs blog with GitHub issues
- 15:30 - Discussion forum vs. GitHub issues vs. blog comments
- 18:18 - Moving the blog post source to a GitHub issue
- 23:30 - Dynamic vs. static data, and implications for changing build-time data to run-time data.
- 27:40 - Downsides of run-time data
37:00 - SPA architecture and distributed systems. How does React/Vue "happy path" architecture differ from Ember's?
41:45 - Testing is the only true way to know if your dependencies work.
43:31 - Where does Ember pass the Celery Test, and where does it fail?

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