Full Stack Radio

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**Full Stack Radio**

A podcast for developers interested in building great software products. Every episode, Adam Wathan is joined by a guest to talk about everything from product design and user experience to unit testing and system administration.

Latest Episodes:

133: Sam Selikoff - Building Production-Ready SPAs Fast with Mirage.js Jan 29, 2020

Show notes

Topics

What is Mirage and how does it work?
What makes Mirage better than a dummy JSON server you run on another port?
What makes Mirage better than running your actual API locally?
Using Mirage for actual development, and not just for your test suite
How Mirage's internal ORM works, and how it can help you mirror your API's behavior more quickly
Managing the risks of maintaining a complex stub of your real API with Mirage and keeping them in sync
What's next for Mirage

Links

Supporting the show

I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to pick up one of my books or courses:

Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.

132: Caleb Porzio - Just Enough JavaScript with Alpine.js Jan 15, 2020

Show notes

Topics include:

What is Alpine and what does it replace?
How does Alpine compare to Vue?
How does Alpine compare to Stimulus?
“Why not just use vanilla JavaScript you dummy?”
How Alpine works internally
Patterns for extracting reusable behaviours with Alpine
The Alpine roadmap

Sponsors:

Tuple, try the best pair programming app out there for free for two weeks

Links:

131: Ryan Singer - How Basecamp Builds Software Jan 01, 2020

Show notes

Topics include:

Why "fixed time, variable scope" is so important for actually getting things done
Integrating development and design into a single process instead of design first, develop later
What it means to "shape" work before deciding to work on it
What it means to "bet" on a project, and why Basecamp would rather trash a project than extend the deadline by an extra week
Taking deadlines seriously, and how it empowers teams to make their own decisions about scope to avoid having to trash the project
An example of a project at Basecamp that failed to ship, and working through what they did wrong that led to that outcome
De-risking projects by getting input from technical experts on the team before committing to actually doing the work
What exactly is the deliverable a design/development team receives from leadership at the start of a project that they are expected to be able to succeed with?
The difference between macro planning and micro planning on a project
How Basecamp avoids iterating on solutions within a cycle without turning projects into fixed time, fixed scope
Why designers at Basecamp start by actually building the very rough "Times New Roman" version of a UI with HTML and CSS before spending time on high fidelity visual design decisions
Applying "Shape Up" on client projects

Sponsors:

Tuple, try the best pair programming app out there for free for two weeks

Links:

Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters, Ryan's recent book about how they work at Basecamp

130: David Khourshid - Building Better UI Components with State Machines Dec 11, 2019

Show notes

Topics include:

What exactly is a finite state machine?
Why trying to keep track of a component's status using boolean flags is leads to bugs and complex code
Why it makes so much more sense to keep track of a component's state using some sort of label
How simple it can actually be to implement UI component logic with a state machine and why you shouldn't think of it as complex or over-engineering
How you can think of using state machines in UI programming to be like an inversion of the typical approach you may have taken in the past, where actions become scoped to certain states instead of actions needing to inspect the current state
What events might look like in your state machine and where you're actually sending them from and to
Advice for naming your events
What it means to "transition" between states
How using a state machine makes it easy to provide slightly different behavior for the same action based on the current state
The benefits of visualizing your state machines
Using the XState library to build state machines in JavaScript

Sponsors:

Tuple, try the best pair programming app out there for free for two weeks
DigitalOcean, get your free $50 credit at do.co/fullstack

Links:

"No, disabling a button is not app logic.", David's recent article on state machines
XState Docs

129: Evan You - What's Coming in Vue.js 3.0 Nov 27, 2019

Show notes

Topics include:

What were the first feature/change ideas that got the wheels turning for Vue 3
How Vue's underlying VNode data structure is changing and how that affects users who work directly with render functions
How the h function works in Vue 3 and how it helps you write code that's more composable
How many breaking changes are just removing deprecations vs. hard breaks and how a compatibility build is going to ease the upgrade process
The new template compiler and how it will drastically increase performance
What were the goals of the class-based component API and why was it cancelled?
The new composition API and how it will help you write more reusable logic without the downsides of mixins or scoped slots
A deep-dive into reactive vs. refs in the composition API
How the composition API compares to hooks in React
How provide/inject is being improved for Vue 3

Sponsors:

Cloudinary, sign up and get 300,000 images/videos, 10GB of storage and 20GB of monthly bandwidth for free
DigitalOcean, get your free $50 credit at do.co/fullstack

Links:

128: Alasdair Monk - Scaling CSS at Heroku with Utility Classes Nov 20, 2019

Show notes

Topics include:

Why Heroku introduced BEM to try and solve their CSS issues and why it didn't work
How custom tooling and Ember's component system alleviated any maintainability concerns about littering the HTML with presentational classes
Why Heroku still uses some component classes like "btn" and "input" even though they could encapsulate those in an Ember component
Why simply introducing any sort of rigid CSS architecture wasn't enough and why switching to a utility CSS approach specifically was critical to making UI development at Heroku more maintainable
How with a non-utility CSS approach, every new feature always seemed to require writing new CSS, no matter how many "reusable" components existed in the system
Why the team at Heroku still loves working with this approach, even 3.5 years after introducing it
How a utility-based approach has worked just as well for Heroku's marketing properties as it has for their application UI
Pylon, Alasdair's experimental CSS library that provides declarative layout primitives in the form of custom HTML elements

Sponsors:

DigitalOcean, get your free $50 credit at do.co/fullstack
Cloudinary, sign up and get 300,000 images/videos, 10GB of storage and 20GB of monthly bandwidth for free

Links:

purple3, Heroku's utility CSS library for their product UIs
shibori3, Heroku's utility CSS library for their marketing properties
Pylon, Alasdair's declarative CSS layout library

127: Jonathan Reinink - Building Modern Monoliths with Inertia.js Nov 06, 2019

Show notes

Topics include:

What Inertia.js is and what problem it solves
Why Inertia is more like a protocol than a framework
How navigation works in Inertia
How form submissions work in Inertia
How Inertia automatically updates your assets for visitors when you update your code
Handling flash messages and validation errors work
Building applications with persistent layouts
Showing placeholder screens with Inertia while data is loading

Sponsors:

Cloudinary, sign up and get 300,000 images/videos, 10GB of storage and 20GB of monthly bandwidth for free
DigitalOcean, get your free $50 credit at do.co/fullstack

Links:

Inertia.js
Inertia.js on GitHub
Ping CRM, the canonical Inertia.js demo application
Placeholder components in Inertia.js
Sponsor Jonathan's work on Inertia on GitHub

126: James Long - Building Distributed Local-First JavaScript Applications Oct 23, 2019

Show notes

Topics include:

How do you keep data synchronized between two different clients when all of the data is stored locally instead of in the cloud?
Understanding conflict-free replicated data types and how they help when building distributed applications
Diving deep into how messages are replayed across clients when network access becomes available to achieve consistent state
Using a Merkle tree to efficiently compare the message store from two clients to know which messages need to be synchronized
Considerations you need to make when structuring your data to enable eventual consistency
What it might look like to move an app like Actual to an offline-first web app where you can't use things like SQLite

Sponsors:

DigitalOcean, get your free $50 credit at do.co/fullstack
Cloudinary, sign up and get 300,000 images/videos, 10GB of storage and 20GB of monthly bandwidth for free

Links:

125: Rob Walling - Choosing the Right Product Idea Oct 09, 2019

Show notes

Topics include:

Brainstorming ideas vs. paying attention to your own problems
Why it's smart to start with a product that might never make a million dollars a year
Should you avoid markets with competition?
Why it's a good idea to build something for fewer people
Strategies for figuring out how many people have the problem you're trying to solve
Why you should start marketing before you start building
When should you start charging money for your product?
Why getting 1,000 customers is extremely hard and how that affects your pricing
Why you don't need an audience to build a software product

Sponsors:

Cloudinary, sign up and get 300,000 images/videos, 10GB of storage and 20GB of monthly bandwidth for free
DigitalOcean, get your free $50 credit at do.co/fullstack

Links:

Rob's website
Startups for the Rest of Us, Rob's podcast
Drip, the last software business Rob built
TinySeed, Rob's startup accelerator for bootstrappers
MicroConf, the conference Rob organizes
"The Stairstep Approach to Bootstrapping"
"Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding"
"Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg
"SaaS Marketing Essentials" by Ryan Battles
"Start Small, Stay Small", Rob's book

124: Leslie Cohn-Wein & Rafael Conde - Designing the User Interface at Netlify Sep 25, 2019

Show notes

Topics include:

Creating pixel-perfect mockups in advance vs. designing and implementing in tandem
Working with existing JS libraries for interactive UI features vs. hand-rolling a custom implementation from scratch
How design systems play into the design process at Netlify, and how mockups aren't meant to implemented pixel-for-pixel
What tools Netlify uses to design new features and manage the design process
What technologies Netlify uses to keep their UI consistent
Using modern CSS features like CSS grid

Sponsors:

DigitalOcean, get your free $50 credit at do.co/fullstack
Cloudinary, sign up and get 300,000 images/videos, 10GB of storage and 20GB of monthly bandwidth for free

Links:

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