Fake legs till you make legs

What’s this? The start of the show? Yes, we’ve managed to successfully start the show. I’m Jerod, your internet friend, and I’m joined by a few of my regular panelist friends. Nick Nisi is here. What’s up, man?

Hoy-hoy. How’s it going?

It’s going great. Friday afternoon… Again, off schedule for us, but it turned out pretty well last time, I thought… So we’ll try it again and we’ll see if we can do a JS Party on a Friday. [jingle 00:02:47.16] Amal’s also here… A quarter tank Amal today.

Hi! Yes, it’s Rebecca Murphy Amal. It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get – “ No, it’s not. Actually I’m –

Oh, Rebecca Black. That’s Rebecca Black.

Black? Murphy? I don’t even know where I got that – see, it’s half tank, or quarter tank Amal. Yeah, no, I’ve had a good, but long week, and I’m very TGIF right now.

Right. Well, happy to have you here with us. And also, rounding out our cast, Amelia is here as well. What’s up?

Hey, hey! Excited for this Friday episode.

We’re gonna do it segment style… If you’re a regular listener, you know we have some recurring segments that we enjoy participating in. Today we’re doing Story of the Week, the world-renowned and award-worthy Headlies segment… It’s not award-winning, but it is award-worthy. That’s what they’re saying. That’s what they’re saying out there on the street. I heard it said just a few moments ago… And we’re playing Pro Tip Time, if we have time for some pro tips. So we will start the show with Story of the Week.

Story of the Week, of course, is our opportunity to talk about some of the goings on around the JavaScript and web dev community, and then, maybe argue if you want about which one’s more important, better, or which one of us is smarter or better-looking. So I will start, because why not, right?

Yeah. Because you’re the best-looking! [rimshot 00:04:35.16]

Hah! Rimshot on that one… Thank you.

Yeah, yeah. It’s okay, don’t worry about it. [rimshot 00:04:41.26] Oh, there we go. There we go. I’ve been waiting for that –

The soundboard is in full effect today.

I know, I’ve been waiting for that.

Okay… I’m about to announce my story of the week… “The Future of the Web is On the Edge.”

…of extinction. Just kidding.

That’s it. That’s the story of the week. [laughter]

Oh, googlification…? No, just kidding. Actually, that really ties very nicely into my story of the week. But anyways, let’s continue with yours. So… On the edge, yes.

Okay, well let me explain this one first. So this is a post on deno.com, so disclaimer alert, they may have vested interest in making this be true, as they are one of these edge providers… But it’s a post by Andy Jiang. I’ll go ahead and just guess the pronunciation of your last name there, Andy… All about his thoughts on this trend that we are seeing, towards moving more and more of our compute, and maybe eventually our storage, to edge nodes. The CDN is no longer for static, it’s now for dynamic… And this is a transition that he’s watching, he’s being a part of, and he wants to see more of. There are some problems, there are some things to get over, but his post goes into the details of why things are headed in this direction.

[06:06] You may take a look at this or have opinions on whether or not Andy’s on track here… Are we actually moving the future of the web to the edge, or is this kind of one of those trends that’s gonna come and go? What are your thoughts? Serve users? Does it serve developers? Is it just here to serve a few vendors who have these vested interests? Anybody? Literally, anybody can talk.

My favorite thing about this is that I don’t have to think about it… Right? you have all these systems where, as a web developer, I can just act as if they didn’t exist, and then the user experience is better.

Right.

Yeah. I dig that. And that’s like a useful thing, right? Because it allows us to really focus our energy into the areas and kind of domain influence that we have as web developers. But I would say for me, specifically, this is very exciting, because I think it’s a huge win for users, and I think Fly.io is another very interesting company that our very own Divya works at; she’s a platform engineer there. But Fly.io is taking that concept of a CDN and said, “Hey, your processing of data and compute on the server should also be localized and near your users, not just your static resources.” So that’s exciting. And I think this kind of shift towards having compute boxes closer to the users is really reflective of what the internet should have always been. It just kind of sucks that things kind of started in the Valley and the West Coast of the United States and the East Coast of the United States, and it’s just kind of stayed there for a while, and now we’re moving on, up, and out, in the words of the Jeffersons… So hopefully, this is a good thing, I hope…

So let me throw a little bit of a devil’s advocate take on this. So at this time, at least – I mean, Amelia said it’s something she doesn’t have to necessarily think about, and these things kind of…. You can either ignore it, and maybe your stuff will deploy there, but maybe it won’t, or it’s gonna happen kind of at a lower level… It seems like today it does require re-architecting a lot of existing things if you’re going to take them there. I mean, if we talk about serverless functions - it’s not like I can just take my monolith and just say “Now it’s edge compute.” And so there’s a whole lot of code, a whole lot of apps, a whole lot of companies that are out there on the web today, that probably never will, or not with the current codebase, do that. And so until it can be completely seamless… You know, “Take my existing Django, or my Rails, or my Fastify, Happy, whatever my framework of choice is app that exists, and like serving users… Until I can actually just take that thing and just ship it around the world.” Are we actually all going to go there, or is it just going to be like toy projects, new startups etc? Is it going to be the critical mass that makes it to the edge, or not? What do you think, Nick?

That’s kind of what I was thinking… I don’t have a ton of experience with serverless and all of this, but it’d be great if I didn’t have to think about it ever, and it just –

Yeah.

It’s the best thing to happen, and it just happens.

Right. Right now, today, you do have to think about it. You do have to plan for it. It’s getting easier… I think the fact that containers and cloud-native technologies are allowing things – like, Fly is not really serverless. Disclaimer, Fly is a sponsor of ours, but that’s not why we’re talking about them.

Yeah.

Fly is not really serverless. They have some serverless stuff…

It’s just cool, new technology.

[09:45] Yeah, exactly. But it’s like VMs, or it’s like containers. It’s like a runtime that you can run an entire web app inside of. But some of these things are just like streamlined, slimmed-down functions, and they have these functional architectures that require you to constantly be thinking about, “Does this run in Cloudflare Workers, or will it work on Lambda?” etc. So maybe we’re just kind of like at the beginning of it, where it’s going to happen underneath us, and that will be grand. Or maybe not.

Yeah.

That’s my hope, for sure, is “I never have to think about it”, and then it slowly just works. And I think also the other devil’s advocate is this is still enabling web developers to create more and more code that you have to send to users, which I feel very enabled, and I enjoy doing that… But I try not to read articles like this, that make me feel like it’s an okay thing to do.

Alright. Well, at least you’re moving at less distance to them, right? So if you’re already going to have code shipped into the browser, and you’re going to at least ship that code around the world to be close to your users, that’s I think an unmitigated win. If that then encourages you to increase that amount of code - I don’t know if that’s more on you than on it, but maybe not. Maybe there’s an unvirtuous cycle there. Good point.

That’s one of the things Andy did in this post, is he talked about the performance of running compute around the world at CDN edge nodes… And he set up a test between Heroku and Deno Deploy; of course, that’s their offering at Deno.com. But there are others as well. And he showed just like the time to first byte at these different locations around the world based on a single app server from Heroku in one place, and then against these edges. I mean, no surprise here, it was faster, because it’s just geographically located near the end user, right? Which is cool. So we will link that post up for y’all to read, if you find it so interesting. But let’s move on to the next story. Let’s kick it over to Amal. What you got?

Yeah, this one’s a really hot topic, and coincidentally, I was having a conversation with some friends last night about this topic of like monetization on the internet, and how we really need to figure out a way to do this cleanly, through standards, because we cannot leave our content creators in the hands of companies like Google, that are just very – they have a very different, specific set of incentives, right? So this story is from Brave, it’s from the Brave Browser team. For those of you who are like “Brave, the browser?”, let me just give you a quick summary. So Brave is a browser that’s been around for a few years now. It’s been my primary browser on my personal machine, on my phone… It means some of my experiences on the web are not great as a result of it, because Brave is intentionally very privacy-focused, and they aggressively block trackers, and all that jazz.

One of the founders of Brave is Brendan Eich, who is the person who also created JavaScript, ECMAScript. And love Brendan, hate Brendan, it doesn’t matter. I’m just stating he’s one of the people involved with this project. He’s been a little controversial in our community lately… And Brendan – I was excited about this project, I still am, but there’s a crypto elements to this, which I have just always ignored… But there is something called the BAT, Basic Attention Token, and so the idea is your attention is time, and we could potentially show you ads in a private way, and you can earn and get BAT credits, and whatever else. I don’t really do anything with that personally, so I can’t speak to that… But for me, it’s just the best browser in terms of limiting your tracking footprint.

[13:53] And so what Brave came out with is this a bit like – they’re letting you now, just through the browser, opt out of those annoying cookie banners, right? …which are getting like infinitely more complex, right? Because it just went from Accept or Not Accept, to now it’s Accept or See the Options, that will bring a confusing menu that’s worded –

We have six kinds of cookies, you know?

Yeah. Weird language… I mean, it’s not the greatest stuff. So they’ve kind of launched this ability for us to just have one setting in our browser, and they will try to the best of their abilities to block all of the cookies. And one of the interesting things that they’ve pointed out in this article is that those cookie consent tracking, the consent form things, ironically actually track users, even though their whole goal is to not track. So even if you hit Deny, sometimes you’re still getting tracked. You’re trusting that they’re doing what they say that they’re supposed to be doing.

Right, because you’ve interacted with the consent banner itself, and so they’re using that to track you. And there are a lot of extensions that go through and they’ll click that for you. It’s like a browser extension, which is a nice user experience, but it’s not saving you from that privacy-tracking moment.

Exactly. That’s exactly right. And so what Brave is able to do because they are building this into the browser and it’s not a third-party extension or whatever else - they’re just leveraging the Block u Origin, they’re like going deep, a layer down to not only like hide and disable the banners, any scrolling, limited scrolling, or anything to do with that, but they are also making sure that the cookies trackers themselves are not tracking you, which is awesome. And I was like “Yes!” Before I say more, I’m waiting to hear like cheers and excitement from all of you. You all are very mellow about this news… [applause 00:15:53.15]

Sorry, that goes on for like 45 seconds.

Yeah, it does. So yeah, what do you think, Amelia and Nick? Is this enough to make you want to use Brave? Nick is nodding no…

Yeah, he is. Nick, you can go.

It’s an audio podcast, Nick.

It’s worth noting Brave is Chromium. It’s a Chromium wrapper.

That’s why.

That’s why?

That’s why, yeah. Pretty much.

Why is that a deal breaker for you? Just because of the homogeny, or what do you call it?

Yeah. I’m standing my ground. I have a Chromium browser installed for apps like this, like Riverside, that we’re using to record this podcast.

That requires it.

Yup. But otherwise, it’s completely closed. The one I use is Vivaldi, but I’m not a fan of Chromium browsers in general.

Yeah. Amelia?

I’m not so moral in my stance against browsers… [laughs] I wish I were…

So you’re just a Chrome user, is my guess.

I am. I keep trying to switch, but it’s like, you know, you’ve been using it for so long…

Yeah. Chrome feels like Baby Gap.

What’s that mean?

I don’t know what Baby Gap feels like… [laughter]

What’s that mean?!

I mean, it’s like Gap. It’s like, Gap - like, everyone can walk in, all body shapes, sizes, whatever… Like, you can walk out with something, and so Gap is the lowest common denominator for many Americans in terms of like okay some people could. But also, it’s Baby Gap because it’s noncontroversial and cute, but also just kind of like problematic…

Why is Baby Gap problematic? I don’t understand… [laughter]

I mean, Baby Gaps are just kind of… I don’t know.

Alright. Quarter tank Amal. Quarter tank analogy over there…

Quarter tank, yes.

Fair enough. So Amelia, I’m curious, what hooks does Chrome have in you that when you try to switch off to it, you’re like “Yeah, I want Chrome back.”

I think a lot of it is things mostly work… So when I’m making websites, I can at least pretend that it works…

Yeah, so Stockholm Syndrome is what you’re saying. Got it.

Except in Firefox.

[18:00] Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Works best in Chrome…

Yeah. [laughter]

Yeah. So, I mean, I haven’t had Chrome on this new machine, at all… I do have Brave on it. It’s not my primary driver. I’m a Safari guy. I love Safari’s shared tabs between phone and computer. I use it all the time. I can’t live without it.

Is it weird that I didn’t know that? But that’s only because I’ve had an iPhone for like six months.

It’s amazing. You open it on your phone, and then you go back to your desk, and then you click on it. And it’s open on your desk, and you’re like “This is amazing.”

I think I’ve noticed that on my iPad.

Yeah. I just love that feature. So that integration for me is what keeps me there. But I use Brave for Riverside, and I use Brave for like software development stuff, because you get the Chrome DevTools built in. So the DevTools are awesome, they’re way better than the ones that are in Safari, in my opinion… And you know what? I’ve tried Firefox over the years, and for me, it’s just like Baby Gap. You know, I don’t know what that means… It’s just ugly every time I open it. It just feels ugly, and I feel bad saying that, but Firefox, you’re just kind of ugly to me… And I can’t use you because of that. And I’m sure I could theme you and make you pretty, but ain’t nobody got time for that. [jingle 00:19:09.17]

Ain’t nobody got time for that, yeah. I think my problem with Baby Gap is more that it just promotes consumerism in children, or something like that… But that’s like a deeper problem. [laugher]

I love that she’s still defending her analogy…

My kids are not excited to go to Baby Gap…

Let it go, let it go…

Yeah, I’m letting it go. It’s fine. [laughter] What’s really cool about what Brave is putting out there is that they’re building this into the browser, giving users an option that’s like trustable, and safe… There’s no creepy extension that you’re adding… But they also kind of point out that Google is taking some very aggressive steps to push forward some new standards, which would make all of this type of stuff difficult, right? So Google has been kind of waging this war, which is why they’ve been losing some market share; not enough, but they’ve been doing a lot of stuff that’s not very good for user privacy. We’ll put lots of links in our show notes. I think this should be its own discussion… But basically, there’s a proposal that they have called Web Bundles. And Web Bundles has this manifest v3, and that would remove a lot of the capabilities that protect user privacy, that would enable this type of thing.

So it’s going back to that problem where like, hey, Google’s incentive for how they make money, and their market share for Chrome, with Chrome, and their ability to influence standards - we’re getting into murky territory here, and there’s not enough people, I think, left on the Chrome team, that I know of anyway, that are really like fighting this issue as hard as it should be fought, right? Because really, what’s been going on at Google for many years is there’s people inside, actively fighting for user privacy and trying their hardest to like push back on the business, right?

And so the idea is – you know, the web was built to be open, we need to keep it that way… And so this is kind of actually really raising a lot of interesting, active points of contention within the standards community and the privacy community.

I agree. I think Nick’s point is valid with regard to rendering engine diversity, and Brave’s lack of that is that you’re still Chromium, and so you’re still doing that to the rest of the web by using it. You’re not getting the diversity that you get with a Firefox, or even with a Safari, or with a Vivaldi, or with Lynx, which is a command line renderer, which is still out there…

But that’s a different problem.

We have time for one more story. One more story. One more story. And it’s gonna be – who feels the most passion for theirs? Nick? Amelia? Who’s really passionate? I know neither one of you probably are, by the way you wrote about them in the doc… Who wants to do theirs? We’ll do one of yours.

Go ahead, Amelia.

Nick, you’re – oh…

[laughs] Neither of them wanna do it…

Okay, okay…

They’re both gonna defer. Okay, Amelia, we’ll do yours.

[22:10] Okay, so mine isn’t news, but it’s a happening… So yesterday, I think Linear, which is some task tracking app, their marketing website got DDoS-ed… And so they shared a Figma file, which was their design doc for their rewrite of the marketing site… And I just thought that was really interesting. You could see everyone’s cursors in there, there were like hundreds of people poking around in a Figma file… And they had like a whole Q&A; apparently, Figma also has spaces, so they were giving tours of “This is how we designed it…”

So I think some of the really interesting things there are like for a marketing site, how much are you getting that’s not just like the static designs, right? As long as you can read the text and see the pretty pictures, that’s pretty much all you need. And then I think they ended up like way in the positive; they got way more attention than they would have if they hadn’t had their website go down… So that was cool.

That is super-cool.

That’s hilarious and ingenious.

Yes, great marketing.

I want to be a fly on the wall in that room, when that decision was being made. Because I would have just gone on the table and I would have been like “Brilliant!” Because really, as a startup, you don’t want to be wasting time; like, any time you spend on anything before you can get it in front of users and get feedback - that’s precious time. So cut the middleman out. Do you even really need a real website? Let’s just have this be a PDF. Let’s just put the PDF on the whole page… [laughs]

Yeah, exactly.

And this was great marketing for Linear, because I hadn’t heard of it…

Totally.

Yup.

Literally right before this, I was admitting to my team how JIRA-illiterate I am… And this looks so much nicer.

That’s a better way to build products, according to themselves…

It’s awesome.

Yeah. Great job, Linear team.

I think it’s also – sorry, we’re probably out of the time… But it’s better than a PDF, right? Because when you look at things on the web, they’re behind these glass cases, and you kind of just go and look at what companies have built… But people could go in there, they could add comments, they could talk to each other… Which feels kind of like websites need to be more communal.

Yeah, it almost turned into like an MMO for a little while…

[laughs]

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Until they closed it. Like, “Let’s all collaborate on this Firma thing, and talk about it, and stuff.” It’s crazy. That’s the cool stuff of the web. Amelia, you win. Best Story of the Week. Congratulations.

For sure. Hands down. Who cares about internet privacy, and… [laughter] This stupid thing, that’s dead. Privacy has been dead for ten years! Why are we even talking about this?

I think I win by not playing.

That’s true. Nick wins. [laughter]

Well, I think we win, because we stopped Nick from talking about…

His beloved TypeScript. Ooooh…!

Nice…

Good play. Yes.

Yeah, we’re all out of time.

Do you mean that project that turned 10 years old?

Aww…

And that’s all the time we have left for Story of the Week… [laughter]

Wait, did TypeScript kill privacy? Is there like – I said, “Privacy has been dead for 10 years.” You said TypeScript turned ten…

Ooh…

I mean, there’s only one logical correlation I could make…

Whoa… [laughter]

Yes. Breaking news…

TypeSkip – TypeSkipped… Types– oh, my God… TypeScript! Nick is like having a fit. He’s like, “How dare you mispronounce my beloved TypeScript?” But yes, his beloved TypeScript… Yeah, no, so TypeScript killed privacy. You heard it here first, kids.

Yes. We’re gonna start a flame war with that one. Alright, we’ve got to stop. We’ll be back. Those are your headlines. We’ll be back with some headlies (see what I did there?) right after this…

Alight, it is time for Headlies, the award-worthy segment, which did have a theme song, but Kball laughed at it so much that I had to delete the file and never play it again… So no jingle for Headlies, but it is a game - and this is the first time we’re going to have the game with multiple players. It’s always been a one-player game. I played it against Nick, and then I played it against Kball… Here we have three participants.

So here’s how it works… I have scoured the web for various headlines. I have also fabricated some headlines. Each headline also has a description, like the first paragraph from the story… And so I will read a headline, at which point each of you will have an opportunity to guess whether it’s true or false. Okay? If you guess immediately, right after the headline, you get two points on the table. So you can either win or lose two points. You can then opt to hear the description, the first paragraph from the story, and after that description is read, now you can guess true or false, and you get one point or lose one point. So you have more opportunity to score points right after the headline, but you have less information, and then afterwards, less points, but more information.

Each of you will guess separately. So you’re playing against each other, and we tally the points at the end of all the headlines. Whoever has the most points, wins.

What if I just copy all my guesses to be the same as Nick’s?

Then you sabotage the game and it’s not any fun. [laughter]

Oh. But am I going to be like in a different room when Nick is giving his answers?

[30:16] No. Each of you will go in turn, but I’ll vary the turns, so that you can’t just go after Nick each time.

Ah, dang it. There goes my plan. [laughter]

I’m glad you said your plan out loud, so now I can defend against it.

Okay, okay. Fine, fine. Fine.

Alright, are we ready? Round one of Headlies. “Apple’s mixed reality headset to offer iris scanning for payments, logging in.” There’s your headline. So based on that alone, you should decide whether it’s a true headline or one that’s fabricated. Or you can say all defer till the description. Okay, so Amelia, what do you think?

Yes.

Yes what? Yes, it’s true? [laughter]

Yes, yes. True, I think.

Okay, so you think it’s true.

Yeah. I’m gonna go with that.

Okay. Amal?

No. Too obvious.

You’re gonna guess false. Okay. I will just restate - you’re both wagering two points at this point. You could say “I need more information” and wait for the description.

Yeah, sure.

Alright. So Nick, what would you like to do? Do you want to say true/false, or do you want to wait and hear the description, the paragraph?

I’m gonna say false. If you ask Apple, they don’t have an AR headset…

Do you want me to read the headline again? [laughter]

Hey, I only got one reading, so I would say if he gets another reading, then I want his points if he wins…

No. [laughter] You can’t just take his points…

They’re not gonna do – no… No, no, no. A certain company couldn’t even fabricate legs for a demo, okay? It’s not – they’re not gonna be reading.

Okay, so… Round one. The headline is “Apple’s mixed reality headset to offer iris scanning for payments, logging in.” Amelia says that’s a true headline. Amal and Nick both think that is a made-up headline. And the truth of the matter is that that is a true headline. So Amelia scores two points.

Yes…!

And you guys both lose two points. So I guess, in a sense, Amal, you did get Nick’s points. Just he also got them.

Oh, burn, Jerod… Okay, fine. Whatever. We can move on.

Alright, here we go. Next headline. “The US Department of Veteran Affairs postpones rollout of an electronic health record systems developed by Oracle under a $50 billion contract until the year 2030.”

Oh, my God…

Nick, we’ll start with you this time. You can guess, or you can wait for the paragraph.

Hmm…

I can also re-read the headline, if it would help.

I’m gonna say that that’s true. It sounds just preposterous enough to be true.

Okay. Amelia, what do you think?

I feel like it would take a very creative brain to come up with that, so I’m gonna copy Nick and go with true.

So true?

Yeah.

I feel like she was fishing there. Like, she wanted me to blush…

Yeah, yeah, she’s reading for body cues…

Like, “Oh, yes [unintelligible 00:33:09.03] And it did. It really did… No. Okay, Amal, what do you think?

Honestly, all I’ve been thinking about since I heard this headline is like “Gee, I wonder how they’re designing their database schemas”, because they better make sure that they have extensible architecture, so that they have a table that has a map for all the different diseases, because by 2030 we’ll have a whole different set of different things to be worried about than we are today… So I’m like, “I hope this isn’t like hardcoded.” I don’t know it’s Oracle; it could go either way.

I’m gonna say false… I think the government would be - especially this close to election time, that’s too big of an embarrassment to leak. I could give like a bunch of college students this as a hackathon challenge to build over the weekend, and it probably would still be HIPAA-compliant, so…

But that sounds exactly like what Oracle charges for… [laughter]

Doesn’t it?

Oracle can’t build a simple, HIPAA-compliant app? It takes them 10 years? Like, we have – yeah… No, that’s a canceled concept.

Yes, absolutely. That’s Oracle’s bread and butter.

[34:10] Yeah. Okay, so I will say no. I have faith in our government’s ability to somewhat use our money a little more responsibly… But I could be wrong. Please don’t prove me wrong.

Please don’t prove me wrong. So the headline,” The US Department of Veteran Affairs postpones rollout of electronic health record systems developed by Oracle under a $50 billion contract until the year 2030” is not real. That is a false headline.

Yes! Woo-hoo!

So Nick, negative two. Amelia, negative two, and Amal, plus two. So you’re back at zero.

Good job picking that.

Nick’s at negative four… So I will say, it was not a creative mind. What I did was I took a real headline and I changed the values. So it’s actually true in a sense, except for it’s not 50 billion, it’s 10 billion, and it’s not 2030, it’s 2023.

Yeah, but still, I mean - my God… Anything billion to build an app like that - my goodness.

It’s still $10 billion, and it’s still delayed until June of 2023. I thought that a 10-year delay would be just preposterous enough that you couldn’t think that… But it’s our government, and it’s Oracle, so I guess anything can be believed. Could you imagine announcing a 10-year delay though? A decade.

Yeah, is iOS even gonna still exist? Who knows…?

It doesn’t sound preposterous…

It’s like, you’re building an iOS app for ten years… It’ll be like iO-something-else in ten years…

10-year delay in Oracle…

You’re gonna owe a whole lot more in ten years…

This podcast is brought to you by Oracle. [laughter]

Probably never. Okay… So after two rounds of Headlies, Amelia has zero. Nick has negative four. And Amal has zero. So it’s a two-way tie at the top…

Oh, okay.

You lost two in the first round, and you scored two in the second round.

Oh, okay.

This is shaping up to be just like all of our other games…

This feels like a really sad pointing scheme. Why do we have to lose points? Can’t we just not gain them? But it’s fine…

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, it’s okay.

I don’ t know, I’m making this up as I go along, okay?

I think I’m enjoying Nick being at negative four right now, so it’s all good. [laughs]

It’s exponential. Alright, our next headline. Here we go. “Heroku reverses course, plans to reintroduce free plans after facing community backlash.” Now we’ll start with Amal. I will remind you, you can all wait and hear the paragraphs. Each one of these has a paragraph… But it’s less points. So do you think that’s true or false? Or do you want to hear the paragraph?

Yeah, can I hear the headline again?

The headline is “Heroku reverses course, plans to reintroduce free plans after facing community backlash.”

Yeah, I mean, I would say that’s likely true. The only problem is I haven’t been following what Heroku has been up to… So I wouldn’t be surprised if they took a dip in the market and then they’re like “No more freemium. Compute is expensive now.” And I don’t know, I’m gonna just risk it and I’ll say true.

Okay. Let’s go now to Nick.

I feel like I would have heard about it, because I heard about them removing their free plans, even though I didn’t have any reason to know about Heroku before that… And so I’m gonna say that it’s false.

But you did hear about the free plans being redacted, right?

I did. Yes.

That’s what I didn’t hear about, because I don’t follow Heroku anymore… So yeah.

Okay. Amelia.

I agree with Nick. I feel like I would’ve heard so false.

False. Okay, so on Heroku reversing course we have Amal true, Nick false, Amelia false. Nobody wants to hear the paragraph that I painstakingly typed out as I made this story up…

Why don’t you just read the paragraph anyway before you announce your result?

Okay.

And then maybe we can reassess. Can we have a bonus round if we want to change our minds?

[38:01] Okay, I’m liking this. Let’s change the rules as we go. Here’s my paragraph. This is a good one, folks… “After offering them for over a decade, Heroku announced in August that it will eliminate all of its free services starting November 28th. However, multiple sources inside Salesforce have told TechCrunch that Heroku GM Bob Wise will soon announce a course correction that keeps free plans available for accounts under certain conditions. The details of those conditions are still unknown.”

Yes, yeah. I’m gonna stick with my same answer. I think it’s true…

He already said it was false.

Yeah, I made it up. [laughter]

Oh, he said it was false? You said it was false?!

I said “I painstakingly made this paragraph up.”

That sounded so believable!

Thank you! I wrote that.

My goodness. I was “Yeah, that sounds true.” Especially if it’s like leaked insider information… Oh, my God.

It’s definitely believable, which is the basis of a good lie, right?

That’s so good. I was like, “My god, Jerod, there’s no way you made up that paragraph.”

Thank you, thank you.

I’m so impressed.

You really had me panicking, because it’s entirely possible that I would have just missed that news… Because I don’t care.

Well, especially if it was a leak from inside the company, and not an official announcement…

Yeah.

That’s why I kind of wanted you guys to wait for the paragraph… But you went ahead and guessed, and you got it right, Nick. Good job. So Amal and Nick got it…

No, no, no, Amelia.

No, sorry. Amelia and Nick got it right. Yeah. Same, same letters…

I don’t follow Heroku, so I was like, “I don’t really–”

So Amal’s now at negative two, Amelia goes to two, and Nick ties Amal at negative two. So we have a tight race here, with Amelia winning currently. [laughter] Alright, there’s two more left. Are we ready for the next round?

Yeah, I’m just sad that Nick is still negative… [laughter]

He’s used to it.

But that’s okay, that’s okay…

Yeah. I’m very used to it. I don’t win Jerod’s games…

Aww… I’m sad… Okay.

Alright. The next headline: “Decentraland’s reported to have only 38 daily active users in their $1.3 billion ecosystem.”

Is this a Web 3 thing?

Decentraland is a Web 3 platform, yes.

Are you just trying to like drill me right now on a podcast?

[laughs] Okay, who wants to go first? We’ll go back to Amelia. Do you want to guess now, or you want to hear the paragraph?

Oh, I have 0% confidence in any answer. I want to hear that paragraph.

Okay. Amal, do you want to guess now or hear the paragraph.

I want to hear the paragraph.

And Nick, do you want to guess now, or hear the paragraph?

Can you repeat the headline?

Sure. “Decentraland’s reported to have only 38 daily active users in their $1.3 billion ecosystem.”

I’m gonna say that’s true, before you read the paragraph.

Okay. So Nick goes in true before the paragraph. Now I’ll read the paragraph. “What’s going on in the Metaverse these days, you might ask? Looking at two of the biggest companies with over $1 billion valuations, one data point suggests that users may not be returning every day. According to data aggregator DAP Radar, the Ethereum-based virtual world Decentraland has 38 active users in the past 24 hours, while competitor, the Sandbox, had 522 active users in that same time.”

That is your details. Now we go back to Amelia. What do you think, true or false? This is your last chance to guess…

I’m going with true. That sounded just weird enough to be real.

Okay. And Amal, what do you think?

True. I mean, the only reason why I’m hesitating is because I wonder if you did another thing where you changed the parameter… You variable-ize the headline, where it’s like instead of 38, it’s like 100 active users, and so…

Right…

I hope you’re not that mean though, so I’m gonna say it’s true, hoping that you’re not that mean.

Okay.

That is exactly what I was wondering, too… Because I feel like I heard something about this, but I don’t know the details of numbers.

Well, the truth of the matter is that this one is true. I did not change any numbers. That is exactly what was reported. So everybody got it right. Good job, y’all.

Nice.

Nick goes plus two though, and you guys only go plus one. I mean, for the round. So he goes back to zero. [laughter] So yeah, he’s still at zero…

[unintelligible 00:42:10.23] I was talking about his final score. His final score is zero… [laughs] I’m sorry, this is just so funny…

[42:24] Well, you’re at negative one, so I’m not sure –

It’s like he never played. [laughter]

I love how she’s laughing at you, but she’s actually losing to you at this point…

No, what do you mean?! I’m like plus two.

Oh, sorry. I added, not subtracted. Hold on, let me recalculate. So you got negative two in the first round, and then negative two in the second – oh, no, that’s Amelia. You guys’ names are too close.

Oh, yeah. Blame us! [laughs]

Amal and I were tied.

Blame us, Jerod…

I think I should be zero and she’s negative one.

That’s what I have.

I think that’s right, yeah.

Yeah, So you’re losing still.

I’m probably still losing. No, for sure. Yeah.

Okay. That’s why I was making fun of you, because you were laughing at Nick, but you’re still losing.

[laughs]

I just thought that was funny. [laughter] So I was right. I was right to laugh at you. Okay. Amelia is winning, though…

Yeah.

And she has – I had to go back to the top… The scoreboard is weird on this game.

It’s confusing.

She got it wrong, then she got it right… [laughter] Amelia has one.

No. I have three.

Wait a second… Did I skip one? She got it right…

Maybe I’m wrong.

I think you’re right.

She got the first one right, the second one wrong… That puts her at zero. Okay, third one - right. Puts her at two. Yes.

Hah!

Fourth one right, puts her at three. You’re correct. Nick, keep the score for us, will ya?

You’re trying to take my points… [laughter]

Yes. Three, zero, negative one.

Alright, the last round. The last round. So if Amelia plays it conservative, she can probably walk away with this one… “Meta avatar legs demo created by Motion Capture, not Live VR.” [laughter] And we will go – [laughs] Sorry. We’re losing it here. That quarter tank emptied out quickly.

Yeah…

We’ll go to Amal.

Okay. So Meta has legs, and it’s in VR…

Metatar – Meta avatar legs demo… Did you know about the Meta announcement with Quest Pro and all that? That’s what this is about.

I mean, I actively don’t follow any news from Meta…

Okay… So here’s the headline, as it reads: “Meta avatar legs demo “created by motion capture, not live VR.” You might want to hear more information if you don’t know what that’s all about.

Yeah, sure. Please, more information.

Alright. So now we’ll go to Amelia. Do you want to guess now, or do you want to hear more?

That’s absolutely the truth.

Okay, she’s going true on a two-pointer. Nick, how about yourself?

Me too. I already made this joke in the Apple one, so I know it’s true.

I know, I heard you…

[laughs]

Okay, I’m gonna cheat and say – I’m gonna change my mind and I’m gonna just vote true. [laughter]

She’s doubling back… We’ll only allow it because she’s in the last place currently…

I’m not in the last place…

Yes, you are. You’re at negative one. That’s last.

I think you should read the paragraph though, because it’s such a hilarious story.

I want to hear the paragraph, yeah.

A key segment of the Kinect keynote this week announcing that Meta’s avatars would eventually feature legs was produced with animations created from Motion Capture, the company said. So they couldn’t actually do legs in VR, so the motion captured them to demo what it’s going to be when like when they can do legs in VR.

Wow… This is what I call an MVP thinking. It’s like “We don’t need a whole person, we just need half.”

Yeah.

How do you do that though?

It’s like the old saying, “Fake legs till you make legs.”

Yeah, fake it till you make it. [laughter] Yeah, literally. It gives me a lot of faith…

[46:03] They got dragged when they had like the horrible avatars come out a few weeks ago, or a few months ago, or whatever… And then how do you just go up and say “This whole thing that we pivoted to - yeah, we faked it.” How do

you do that?

It wasn’t their best moment, was it?

No…

The best thing though is you have to go watch The Carmack Unscripted. John Carmack just – he just goes “Well, I told you if we weren’t doing this by next year, I’d be disappointed, and I’m disappointed.”

[laughs] That’s good.

Tells it like it is.

Yeah… It’s probably best that I stay quiet, so…

[laughs] That’s a good title for this show… “It’s probably best if I stay quiet.” After five rounds of Headlies, our new champion, first-time champion - it’s Amelia. [applause]

Yeah!

And we’ll be right back for some Pro Tip Time.

The award-worthy jingle…

I always think of like a dorky robot dancing whenever I hear that jingle…

Accurate…

It’s like going up on the downbeat, you know… [laughter] Just kinda janky, uncoordinated… Anyways.

Accurate.

[50:00] It’s kind of like that Steve Buscemi “Hello, fellow kids.”

Not that you would particularly dance like that, Nick. I just meant the beats; the beats remind me of that. But anyways…

Full accurate…

[laughs]

Nick is a world-renowned karaoke artist, so I wouldn’t sleep on his skills. This guy can sing…

What?!

…so I’m guessing he can dance. If he can sing like that…

Dude, no way.

Oh, man…

Oh yeah.

Can we get a demo?

Yeah, can we just do a karaoke podcast?

We should. We should do a karaoke segment.

Oh, I’m busy that day… [laughs]

No, you’re definitely showing up. Thank you, Amelia. [laughter]

We’re gonna have to pitch it to the bosses upstairs… [laughs]

I went to JS Nation and React Summit in Amsterdam… I ruined my voice doing Kiss by Prince. It was epic, and amazing, and I loved it. It was the first time doing karaoke since the pandemic started…

Right…

So fun.

Well, I’m looking for a setup… So I’m going to hit you up for a recommendation, because I’m thinking I want to start having karaoke parties. It’s like, winter’s coming… I need some indoor fun activities to do with my husband and friends, so…

What’s your go-to song, Amal?

Oh my God, there’s so many…

I have to myself.

Fiona Apple, Criminal…

Oh wow, that’s a hard one.

…and like Landslide… Fleetwood Mac, Landslide.

Wow.

Yeah. I do have a nice singing voice… Like, when I actually try. I sing jokingly on this podcast, but I do like singing. And then another one is – what’s its face? Enrique Iglesias, Hero. That’s like my sob… It’s a very adorable song. “You… Can… Take… My breath away.”

I’m here for it. Amelia, what are your go-to’s?

I’ll just choose whatever is shortest. [laughs]

Whatever is shortest… Tequila?

Yeah, exactly.

That’s a good karaoke song… I’m not a big fan of Vanilla Ice’s Ice, Ice, Baby. And I’m also pretty decent at Love Shack, you know…?

Nice…

I need somebody to be with me, because I’ll play the male part, but I can’t do the high-pitched Love Shack Baby part. I can do the low-pitched Love Shack Baby part. Anyways… Way off-topic. [laughter]

New segment, Karaoke Song [unintelligible 00:52:12.26]

What’s your favorite karaoke song…?!

Yeah! TGIF.

That’s pretty much what we’re playing right now. Okay, Pro Tip Time. Amal, what’s your pro tips?

Why’d you pick me first? Okay, my pro tip is actually gonna be a process; it’s not going to be like a tool, or anything. It’s something I’ve really started to do in my life, that has kind of really helped transform my day, as well as just my energy levels… I lead a very busy life and busy job… And it is keeping a daily journal. So what did I do, what am I what to do, what are some blockers… I have a little “rotonda” is what I call it, as well; I have another file that’s just like ideas. Because if I don’t write it down, it occupies mental space. And if I write it down, I can free my mind.

And the rest will follow.

And the rest will follow, exactly. En Vogue…

Sing it, Nick.

Yeah, sing it, Nick. Exactly. No?

I do know the song…

I wear some tight music– I don’t even know, I wear tight music. Anyways, back to the pro tip… So daily journal is a really great way for me to decompress and detach from work. I just kind of really block out time at the end of my day to just get my thoughts down, and it’s just really helpful. Then I can pick up the next day, and just start off where I left off, and I don’t have to think about it.

And then I’ve started to do a little bit of – I haven’t done a good job of this yet, and I want to try to get better at it, but set like high-level goals, like “Okay, what are three things I absolutely have to get done today?” And then at the beginning of the week, “What are three things I absolutely want to get done this week?” So “By the end of this week, I want to do X”, and “By the end of this day, I want to do X.” That helps me prioritize, because I have a very big appetite for problems and doing things, and I think it helps me… I need to do a daily prioritization exercise, because I’m gonna always want to do it all.

[54:21] Here’s a question about your journal. I feel like I would have one and never read it, but probably the benefit is really in just writing it down…

Agreed. 70% of the benefit is writing it down. And then there’s a huge benefit for me, just like “What did I do? Where do I pick up?”

Share the deets though. What’s your gear? What’s your setup? Do you use an app?

Yeah, a Markdown file, and I just do checkboxes…

Obsidian?

[laughs]

Yeah, Markdown file. That’s like, Git controlled. I rarely push up and commit though… But yeah.

Why is that? Do you have a fear of commitment?

Yes, I do.

[laughs]

No, I don’t. It’s really just – I’m too busy, and I’m in a lot of meetings, so…

Fair enough.

But I don’t have like a daily commit rule for this, even though I should. So yeah.

You could automate it.

Dude, I gave this tip to one of my direct reports and he set up a whole automation with macOS, and the thing just gets published automatically. I need to steal his setup, but I have not done that yet. And I should.

Alright, good pro tip. Journal it down. That way, when you start tomorrow, you know what you were up to yesterday, and get it going again. Nick, what you got?

Okay, so I don’t have a lot of pro tips, and I’m pretty sure that I have said this one before… But I’m gonna pick it again if I have, because I actually wrote down, I actually blogged for the first time in two years.

Oh, wow…!

So a pro tip - you can actually go further…

[unintelligible 00:55:53.01]

Yeah, exactly.

We could do a whole show on your blog posts. Just break it down.

Please, don’t…

One whole hour…

Just breaking, eviscerating me on my writing… [laughs] No, it’s about using git worktrees, and my git worktree flow, and why I love working with git worktrees. It’s changed my life, and it’s just so good. I do also go into some downsides, so I try and be well-rounded about it… But git worktrees - if you’ve ever had to do more than one thing at once, which I constantly have to do… Git worktrees.

Yeah, taking that Git knowledge to the next level is like the best thing that you could do for your mental happiness and productivity as a developer. Yeah, agreed.

Give us a quick TL;DR, Nick, on worktrees. What do they do for you?

Yeah, so all it does is like when you clone a repository, you’re cloning it into – it creates a working directory for you to like work on your code, and do all of that. Well, what I do is I clone a bare repository, which is how GitHub clones, or has the repos out there… They’re basically the Git object database without a working directory. And then I shoehorn it to make that be like a home for me to put a bunch of working directories, so then I can have one that’s called Main, and that’s like my main checkout; so I always have like a clean state that I can check things from… And then I have one called Review, and that’s where I like check out PR reviews to actually run the code, and do my due diligence on PRs… And then I just make one for each feature branch that I’m working on. And then I can be working on something, and they’re like “Oh, we need to do a hotfix.” I just create a new worktree real quick, do the hotfix in there… Don’t even have to close my other editor. I just leave it open. I don’t have to stash anything, I don’t have to commit like a work-in-progress commit… I still do this all the time, but that’s okay; that’s a different story. And then I can just like switch over there, and switch back. It’s fantastic.

Very cool. We’ll link up your post, so that people can check it out in more detail. Alright, we’re running short on time. I will give a quick pro tip, and then we will call it a show. Maybe the best show ever made. I’m not sure yet.

It’s the greatest…!

I thought you were gonna keep going. I was giving you space.

I couldn’t remember the song. It’s like, that disco song… “He’s the greatest dancer…”, you know. So I was trying to do that, but then I forgot the lyrics.

“And there’s no companion…”

Yeah, Oh, that one, too. That’s another good one.

Yeah, that’s a different song, but on the same wavelength.

I’m telling you, we need a new music segment for JS Party. We need to make this happen, Jerod.

I’m in.

We’ll have to pitch it to the higher-ups.

Nick is gonna be in, and we’ll find out he has a costume, a karaoke shirt, got a karaoke mic, with sparkles on it…

Get up a green screen, the smoke machine…

Yeah.

He may even have like a separate stage name that we don’t know about [unintelligible 00:58:39.03]

Yeah. He won’t respond to the name, Nick, because he has a karaoke name…

Yeah. [unintelligible 00:58:44.20]

Yes…! [laughs] “I’m not Nick, I’m Nicolas…”

My pro tip, real quick, is get a Pi-hole. Shut your piehole and get a Pi-hole.

What is a Pi-hole?

I’m glad you asked, Amal. I’m glad you asked. Pi-hole is an open source network-wide ad blocker that you can run on your LAN.

Oh, that Pi-hole? Yes.

[laughs] It’s a piece of software that gets his name from the Raspberry Pi, although you don’t have to run it on a Raspberry Pi. You can run it on anything that runs a Linux OS. And you set it up as your local DNS server, and it blocks ads and trackers at the DNS level for your entire network, instead of having to do it on a browser by browser basis, or inside of your Brave browser as an extension, or whatever other way. You just network-wide block the ads. You can also do other kinds of content filtering, you can tweak the dog-doo out of it, you can do whatever you want. It’s really cool, it has a web UI… It’s completely free, completely open source.

I set it up just the other day on our local network, and it’s fun. They got charts and stuff, you can see how much stuff you’ve blocked… It feels good. Like, get out of here, ads and trackers! You can’t even be on my network, man. So Pi-hole - get one, set one up. Worth it.

Okay… Question. Is this the greatest show ever made? Let us know in the comments, or tweet at us. Is it the worst episode of JS party you’ve ever listened to?

Ohh, not the worst…!

Certainly not…

Keep it to yourself, you know? We don’t want to hear that.

No negative feedback! Only good.

We have lots of cool shows coming down the pipeline, tons of great guests, tons of good ideas, so stay tuned. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do subscribe. If you have and you enjoy it, share it with your friends. We always appreciate that. But that’s our show for this week. On behalf of Nick, Amelia and Amal, thanks for partying with us. I’m Jerod, and this has been JS Party.