Refined thinking

Hello, hello to all of our JS Party animals. I’m Jerod, your internet friend, and I’m joined, as often - almost always - by my friend Nick Nisi. What’s up, Nick?

Hoy-hoy. How’s it going, Jerod?

It’s going well. I haven’t seen you on the pod for a while. I think you’ve been on the pod and I’ve been on the pod, but never crossing the wire, so good to be back together again.

Yeah, I’m excited to be here.

You need to answer a question for me, because - did you listen to our latest Frontend Feud? Did you see the question about their favorite programming language?

I did? Yes.

So you know what happened, is that JavaScript was only the second-favorite programming language of our listeners. It had 24 people who liked it the most, but 30 people liked TypeScript. So we were wondering how many times you submitted the form…

Um… 30?

Okay –

Kidding. Kidding. I didn’t submit it at all.

Conspiracy confirmed. Thank you. [laughter] Was that a great moment for you? Was that the best part of your life, is when you found out that our listeners like TypeScript more?

You know, as I heard that, I was bumping my fist in the air and thinking of you.

Okay. Well, let’s talk to somebody else… We have a special guest today. Jim Nielsen is here. Jim is a blogger, web developer… You can fill out your bio, Jim. I know you as a writer, because I’ve been reading your blog for what feels like a very long time… Although I went in your back catalog and realized there’s a bunch of stuff I haven’t read, so probably it’s only been about a year… But I feel like I’ve been reading you for a very long time. I really appreciate your work. On Changelog News - I was telling Nick before you joined - I have a hard time not linking to darn near everything that you put out, because it’s just good. It’s insightful, it’s easy to read… So anyways, I’m done effusing for now. Jim, thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for that, I guess, introduction. That was really nice to you. It’s always nice to meet someone who reads my blog. Sometimes it feels like I’m just hitting Publish and it goes out into the ether, and who knows who’s reading it…?

Nope, you’ve got one reader. You’ve got at least one. Of course, your stuff has often topped Hacker News and other socials, so I know you know there are some other readers, at least on specific posts… But everybody who writes and publishes, even people who podcast and put their shows out into the world - we just sometimes think that no one’s on the other end of the stream, until there’s feedback or there’s some sort of loopback… So here to give you that feedback; please keep writing. You’ve been publishing online for a very long time. I think 2012 was what I read. Is that right, your blog?

Yeah, my current blog, that’s as far back as I go. I had a blog before that on - what was that, Blogspot? I could probably dig it up if I tried to find it. But it was a bunch of nonsense that I’d probably be embarrassed to archive it on my current blog. I mean, to be honest, probably a lot of the posts from 2012 I’m embarrassed about. I mean, posts from last year I’m probably embarrassed about, to be honest.

Right… Well, speaking of nonsense that we’re embarrassed about - Nick, you have a blog, don’t you?

Yeah… [laughter] You’re describing that, and I’m like “Oh, man, that sounds like it’s talking about mine.”

Yeah. See, Nick and I, we blog, but it’s like once a year, once every couple of years… Jim, you blog like four, five, six, seven times a month, don’t you?

Yeah, I try to shoot for about once a week. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes less, depending on the mood I’m in.

You know you’ve made it when you can have a section on your blog that’s called Hacker News hits. I could even dream of having that on mine…

Right?

Yeah, I don’t know how I feel necessarily about that, but it’s there. I don’t like to read the comments, to be honest, a lot of the time… But yeah.

That’s the nice thing about podcasting, is oftentimes, especially if you do interview shows, you can make it onto Hacker News, but the content is more the guest’s thing that they’re saying, and less the thing that I’m saying… And so it’s like you don’t have to be a quite – although inevitably there’s a person who’s like “This podcast is the worst”, but it’s like, “That’s off topic. Let’s talk about the guest.”

Well, stop posting that…

Yeah. Thanks, Nick. 30 times it said that, actually. Weird. You must have a 30x bot… But when it’s all your thoughts - I mean, you’re just kind of laying your thoughts bear out there to the world and it hurts a lot more when people tear them apart, right?

Not only tear them apart, but I think there’s a lot of “Oh, that’s not what I was trying to say… But now I can see how maybe you understood that… Or sometimes I still don’t know and understand how you thought that.”

Yeah.

It just made me think… I wonder if one thing that – you know, you have like search engine optimization, and that’s like something that you think about, trying to get your word out… In the future, in the very, very near future, are you going to have some kind of comprehension optimization, to where like “Okay, this is how OpenAI summarizes this document.” “Is it hitting all of the right points? Do I need to feed it with something else to make it?” …you know, as we lose our attention spans, and just ask OpenAI to summarize everything for us. Not that I did that, or anything.

Right. Not on Jim’s blog, no way. Read every word. I don’t know… I’ve read some summaries lately, and I feel like maybe I’m just – I’m on like the downward trend. You know, there’s the hype cycle, and I’m over the hill, and now I’m getting into the trough of disillusionment with all of the generative AIs… And I’ve also read - I don’t know if it’s true or not - that the results are getting worse.

[06:09] Yes.

And so for me, I’m just getting less and less value from them, and just more and more kind of grumpy when I want more value, to where I’m like “AIs are bad!”

Well, you’ve moved on to superconductors, so…

That’s true. A topic of which I know nothing about, so let’s talk about that for a while… It’s the internet, right?

Man, I already feel behind… What is this? Superconductors? Is this the new thing?

Yes, it’s the thing of the moment. It’s the LK99 superconductor at room temperature… Or maybe not? That’s the question. But that’s as much as I know. Nick, your head-nodding. Do you want to fill us in the rest of the way, or should we move on?

Yeah, you can synthesize it with like $24 worth of materials… That’s all I know. Or maybe not. It’s unproven.

It’s an ongoing debate, and people are trying to reproduce. And one person maybe did, but maybe they didn’t, and then somebody else also might have… But we’re not sure. And this is gonna change the world, but maybe it won’t. So that’s kind of the status of the internet this week.

It sounds like AI. It sounds like NFTs. It sounds like Bitcoin.

That’s what I said, it’s the thing of the moment.

It sounds like TypeScript.

Ooooh…!

Oh, Nick I’m sorry did I say–

Whoaaa….!

I like this guy. I like him more and more. Oh, we could talk TypeScript, but we try not to around these parts. We are not a TS Party, despite Nick’s best efforts. Let’s talk about some of your writings, Jim. The one that really triggered me and made me change the way I think, or kind of put words around something that I’ve also felt was your “Language-level toll roads post”, where you’re noticing something about the new Deno KV storage feature. Not hating on Deno specifically, you’re a fan of Deno, I’m also very interested in what they’re doing; I use it a little bit, and respect the team quite a bit. But there’s this open source meets startup service provider hosting platform thing that’s going on, and it’s relatively new… And Deno is one of these things where it’s open source runtime, etc, etc. But at a certain point there’s a business behind it, and they have pretty clear lines on Deno Deploy; that’s their business. And these things aren’t usually all that confusing. But now we have this new feature, the key-value storage, which is built into Deno. To create your key-value storage, you open deno.openkv is like the function that you call; it’s right there as part of Deno. And it’s cool. It’s interesting. In fact, we had Luca from the Deno team lined up to come on the show and talk about the way it works and everything, and still happy to do that. I think the timing hasn’t worked out quite yet, but…

It’s interesting, because it has this SQLite database when you run it on your machine, but then you can swap that out in production seamlessly with their backend, which is like a distributed database all around the world, and it sounds like a really neat thing… But what you noticed, and why you call it a language-level toll road is the way they’re going about building this is just kind of new and different, and kind of – what do you call it, icky?

It feels. It feels strange.

It feels a bit strange, that’s what you said. And this post is not necessarily – like, you’re not ranting and raving and trying to call them out… You’re actually trying to like think out loud, and it seems like it struck a nerve with a handful of people like myself, who was like “You know what, that is a bit strange.” And I’ve noticed it amongst kind of the more recent companies that run open source projects, where it’s like – it’s not really built on top, it’s kind of built right in. Do you want to expand on what I’ve said so far?

Yeah, I think – well, to be clear, just to make sure Luca still wants to come on the show after I start talking…

No harm, no foul.

[09:54] Yeah, I love Deno, and when I saw this, I was super-interested to see what they were making, because I’m really interested in everything they’ve done thus far. And this one just kind of threw me for a loop in the beginning, because I was like “Wait–” I couldn’t actually sort of grok how it worked. And so I was trying to understand how it worked, and it reminded me of – it kind of goes back a little bit further than this, because it kind of reminded me of Next’s image component, where it’s like “Don’t write regular HTML, don’t write an image tag. Use this component.” And if you don’t use it, then the linter starts yelling at you.” And I don’t like that, because I’m like “I just want to write HTML, and now the linter is yelling at me. Why is this invalid?” And it’s because it wants me to use this image component. So then I’m trying to think “Well, how do I use their image component, but not actually host it on Vercel? What if I’m doing something else? How does that work?” And so I was diving into how that component works, and I still don’t understand it.

It sounds like you can write sort of a thing where you use the image component, but it still just outputs a regular HTML image tag, and it doesn’t actually take your images and host them somewhere, and give you all the extra stuff that it gives you… But it was just a little bit of a disconnect for me, because there are these abstractions on top of open languages like HTML, and Deno sort of felt like it took that even a step further, where it was like “How is this working? I don’t understand how it’s working.”

And to your point, in development it’s like a SQLite database, and then in production it runs on top of their thing… Which is interesting that it’s at the language level, because I almost would have expected it to be like a separate package that you import, and then do something with…

Yeah. Or like the adapter pattern, right?

Yeah.

Where you could just like have an adapter called SQLite Adapter, or have an adapter called Deno Adapter, or whatever.

Yeah.

That’s what I would expect, which is pluggable.

Right. And that’s sort of how your mental model is for how these things work, right? There’s the open Deno thing, and then there’s these things on top that you can use. And I was trying to think of – in the post I outlined, “Can you imagine Node doing something like this?” What if you wanted to use, FS, file system, and Node was like “Go ahead and use it.” And by the way, if you host it on Node’s hosting platform, for whatever reason – I don’t know, we have some special hardware, and it’ll be faster than it will be otherwise on other people’s… It felt like “Man, that would feel so weird if that was a thing just right in Node.”

And not only that, but then you start getting into these questions about like Node having sort of a leg up on everything, because they actually own the runtime, and so they can do things that other people can’t, who are building on top of Node… And I was trying to think of like parallels to that; even it reminds me of the whole Amazon Basics fiasco, where people were building things and then Amazon was like “Oh, that’s really popular. We’ll make one that’s just a rip-off of that”, and then everyone was buying that instead.

Yeah. Call it Amazon Basics, promote it number one, and make it a little bit cheaper.

And – I don’t know, I was just thinking out loud about how strange it felt… And I guess I’m wondering if that is going to become a pattern for new technology startups, and a way to monetize the thing that they’re doing, and allow them to continue to work on it… Which - I understand you’ve got to make money so you can continue to work on these things, but also, where’s that line between becoming such a great abstraction that everyone wants to use it and it becomes open, but you got funded to build it, so you’ve got to try and make money on it some way?

Right.

And I just started thinking of toll roads, and that was like the best sort of title I could come up with, but…

I think it makes sense. And not all of this is bad. It does feel strange, but I’m kind of like – you know, at a certain level it’s kind of nice to just be like “Well, I got this built-in KV thing, and why wouldn’t I use Deno?” Of course, because I’m using Deno. So like deno run, or deno deploy. It seems like a – I don’t know. Nick, what do you think? It feels kind of weird, but also I’m kind of like “Well, it’s strategically kind of smart, and it’s slick…” And I don’t know, they’re putting out a lot of open source in the world, so I’m kind of on the fence about it… But it’s a newer thing. Nick, what are your thoughts on this?

[14:13] Yeah, I’m all for them trying new things to try and like sustain themselves, and get funding, and make money on this open source stuff, because it provides a lot of value… The thing that just feels icky to me is it being on the Deno global itself, rather than being something that you pull in. And you could basically have the same exact thing, and you could even technically have the same level of influence, just pushing PRs through that directly support what you’re trying to do with this package, but it’s just a third party package. And that feels like the better way to go rather than this… Because what if I wanted to make my own Deno key-value store? I would never – I’m never going to be the built-in one now, so…

It’s JavaScript, man. Just monkey-patch it, or something. Can’t you just replace that object with your object? But you know, I’m with you…

This isn’t Ruby…

I think it’s also – you know, you think of someone who has not used Deno before, and they come in and they’re looking at the codebase… And it’s not immediately apparent what that is when you’re looking at the code. It’s like “Oh, cool.” And you don’t understand necessarily by just looking at it. “Oh, that’s a proprietary thing that I only get if I’m using the Deno runtime when I deploy this. And otherwise, it’s working this way.” That’s also where it kind of throws me off a little bit. I think you have these certain expectations when you’re looking at code. “This is how it’s gonna work.” When you see that it’s a separate package that’s installed… You’re like “Okay, I’m bringing in this other separate thing that has its own sort of way of working…” And that kind of throws me off too a little bit.

Yeah.

It just kind of parallels a lot of how I feel about Next right now, to be honest. I know you called that out in the blog post, but… It’s like, if you choose Next, but you don’t want to choose Vercel, it feels like a really weird choice. And I don’t really like that, because at the same time Next feels like the right choice if you think that that’s the future of React, like with Server Components and all of that. It’s a weird middleground to be in right now.

Right. The React team is like “Hey, Next 11 supports this new thing”, and so like they’re kind of saying you should use Next if you want RSC, right? At least that’s what they were saying last time we talked to them. Maybe they’ve changed their tune. And then Vercel is saying “Well, next works best on Vercel.” And so now I feel like we’re just being all funneled like cattle into this one holding pen, and that doesn’t feel great.

So that - I just tend to try to stay out of that entire thing. And I think where it is – I mean, frameworks and runtimes, language-level things is where it’s like the most concerning, which is probably Jim why your radar went off… Because it’s like “What if Python did this?” Just Python now all of a sudden had this company attached to it, and was like “Hey, if you use Python, one of the world’s most popular programming languages, we have a new key-value storage that’s like attached to a corporate entity.” I feel like everyone would revolt, and Pythonistas wouldn’t allow it… But I think if Deno were Node, I think you wouldn’t be the only one writing about this. I think there’d be a lot more kerfuffle, don’t you?

I mean, I think so. That’s why I tried to include the Node example. Because for me just writing it was like “Oh, this feels like there would be instantaneous outcry if someone saw something like that in Node.” But I guess because it’s Deno… I don’t know, people don’t notice as much.

But to your points earlier, it does seem like something that you’re starting to see elsewhere. And I get the convenience of it. It’s like “Hey, I don’t want to have to deal with this. I’ll just fork it.” What I worry about is “Oh, I’ll just pull out my credit card”, and all of a sudden I’m charged five bucks a month to use language features everywhere, just for convenience. And all of a sudden, I’m spending tons of money. But I also understand the convenience of it. It’s really nice.

[18:04] It’s nice to have an option that has a built in key-value store. I mean, so useful, and one that just persist on its own… I haven’t looked at the API, but I’m assuming it’s pretty straightforward to put data in, get data out… And the fact that they’ll actually then take that, and assuming that it works well, they’ll replicate that around, and now I have like distributed KV store built-in… I mean, that makes me as a developer very productive, and I really like that. And I want that. But you also want competition on your hosting providers. You want them to compete on the basis of the quality of their service, and their support… And that’s the things that they should be competing on. Not on “Well, we’re the ones that run the runtime, and so we’re the option that you get.” Because what happens is everything’s hunky dory, and I’m using it, and I’m paying five bucks a month - it sounds reasonable; they’re providing a lot of value. Five bucks a month. Well, then it becomes 10 bucks a month, then it becomes 15… And you’re looking around, “Where’s the $5 option?” “There aren’t any, because there’s no access.” So…

But at that point you also start to feel – I’m trying to remember who I heard this from… I think it was Dave Rupert who talked about this idea of - you know those spikes that you drive over, that they’re like “Don’t drive backwards. Once you go over them, these claws have you.” You start to sort of face that, where even if there is great competition, you’re like “Ah… But to refactor that code to now fit this other competition… I’d have to pull out so much”, and it feels like your tires’ getting stuck in those claws.

This is a trend though, maybe not at the language level, but if we look at Warp - it’s a new terminal that requires an account. Zed is a new editor, which to Nathan Sobo’s credit doesn’t require an account right away, but if you want to use any features, like syncing and whatnot, it’s going to require an account. I just installed the Arc browser. They want you to create an account right there. And Okay, Arc isn’t open source, Zed - I think parts of it are. These things are different. But it’s this software product that is free, and sometimes open source, attached to this entity that’s in the background, but also coming in through the side door all the time… I don’t know. That’s definitely a trend. And we see it with Deno, although - again, different things. You’ve got product versus a language.

It really does seem like we’re reaching this level of abstraction, where these pieces that we really want, that are starting to become more table stakes - they’re not sustainable without your credit card attached to them in some way. And then you really run into vendor lock-in. If you think about serverless functions - you could do them the lambda way, you could do them the CloudFront way, whatever… They’re different runtimes, and you’re locked into that, and to go refactor that is kind of a major change… And this is kind of the same thing. I think really the main thing that I have is just being on Deno. And I know that they have – one of the things that they tout is the standard library; that’s a big perk over Node, right? And this feels – saying an abusive of that seems like overkill, like the wrong terminology… But along those lines.

Yeah, I think that’s a really good – I mean, I’m still just trying to think about all this… I don’t have clear thoughts on it all. But to your point about pulling out a credit card - it feels like currently, or at least in the past, there was kind of a clearly defined point at “I’m gonna pull out my credit card and now I get this separate thing that plugs in.” And now it’s like, you’re looking at code, and each line of code could be a point where you’re pulling out your credit…

Right…

Right? It’s like, “Is this a line of code where I have to pull out my credit card? I don’t know…” And to your point about it being on the global… It’s on the global, so I think it’s free, but maybe it’s not… That’s the part that just feels so weird to me.

[22:00] Yeah, certainly unattractive, to say the least. Alright, well, we’ve covered that one I think pretty well. Of course, all the links to Jim’s blog posts will be in the show notes for people that want to read everything he has to say about a topic.

Let’s talk about quitting. This was a favorite of mine, that I think about a lot… Because I don’t want to be a quitter, and sometimes I think that’s wrong. And then other times, I’m like “Done with this”, and that feels really right. But other times when you’re done with something, it’s because you fail. Quitting is attached to failing. Anyways, you have this post from back in January, “The art of knowing when to quit.” And hats off for the [22:44] Semisonic reference; of course, Closing Time is a favorite of ours around here at JS Party, because that’s what you’d play at the end of most good parties; at least, back in the ‘90s that’s what you played… I don’t know what the kid’s play. But it’s this idea of - we feel like with creative things, quitting is failure. And so the idea is, “I’ve just gotta keep doing it forever.” And sometimes it’s bad. Especially with the TV series Lost. They should have quit after season three… Even without any answers, because their answers are so bad come season six. You referenced Seinfeld… Of course, Jerry Seinfeld, one of the best quitters of all time, where he quit at the top, and left everybody wanting more, and I feel like that’s the way to go out. But that’s also the hardest time to do it.

So the question with the art of knowing when to quit is really two questions. The first one is “When do you quit?” and then “How do you quit?” Both are difficult. What are your guys’ thoughts on the when? Let’s start with the when. When do you when can you know when to quit?

I mean, if you’re like the Simpsons, you would have quit after season nine, probably. They’re on like season 33. But I haven’t watched it… I hear that they’re going through a renaissance, and it’s getting really good again.

Really?

So did they survive the dip and now they’re back up?

Maybe…

Or Futurama. Futurama has quit four times, and now they’re back, again…

The second time Futurama came back was really good, though. I’m not current, but I remember when it quit and then when it came back, and I’m like “Oh, I’m really glad this one came back.” But those also have external factors. TV shows, a lot of times you get cancelled. So it’s not up to you. I’m sure the creators of Firefly wanted to keep going, but they were canceled after like 11 episodes.

[24:31] Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal.

And then the cult took over and demanded more, and they eventually made a movie… But I’m sure the cast, the crew, the writers, probably the director - they wanted to keep going, but the studio stopped it, or whatever. There’s just lots of different – there’s business reasons , there’s political reasons etc. But if we just keep it in the small, and talk about ourselves… Because we can control that. When do you know when to quit, Jim, something?

It’s a really great question. One of the things that is really interesting to me about this idea of quitting is – I’ve heard a lot of comedians talk about this idea. You’re on stage, and you’re kind of getting this – there’s always kind of this feedback that you’re getting as a comic about how the audience is responding, what you’re hearing in the audience… Is their silence? Is there groaning? Is their continual laughter? And if you do that a lot, like every single night, I’m sure you get a really good sense for how the crowd is feeling, and you probably have a better pulse on “When should I quit?” Because you’ve done it a lot; you’ve gone too long, you’ve ruined it, sometimes you’ve probably gone too short and you’re like “I probably could’ve stayed out there a little bit longer.” So you’re doing it a lot…

Right.

…and that was one of the things that interested me when I saw Jerry Seinfeld’s quote about it. Because he said something like “If I leave right now, the audience will have this feeling, and they’ll never have to say “Oh, that was good, but and then it kind of started to run out of gas.”

[26:04] So he obviously had this the sense for when that timing was right. And I don’t know if we have a lot of – maybe you guys can think of some examples… But a lot of really good examples of that in software, of when you think “Yeah, those guys, they quit right at the perfect time, and they ended.”

I think at the end of the post I talk about this too, because there was another piece that talked about how software should be entitled to a lifecycle… There’s a beginning, a middle, an end. A project shouldn’t be required to sort of live on forever. That’s just life. The Circle of Life: you live, you die. And sometimes it feels like there is an expectation that software should live on forever, and how do you know when to quit?

And the author of this – let’s see; it was John McBride. He talked about how there was a framework that just decommissioned it, because it was sort of rotting from the inside out, and they said “Rather than just let it live on in this sort of broken state, we’re just going to kill it and take it off of all of these places where you can install it, and stop letting it be a broken chain in the supply chain of –” I can’t remember the specifics of that article… But anyway, I can’t think of a lot of examples where people quit software at a really great time. Most of the time it feels like they were forced out, and we were just talking about the Apollo earlier… I mean, Christian’s definitely leaving at a point where people are left wanting more, and they’re probably going to be left with a really great taste in their mouth for “Ah, I always loved that. Yeah, I miss it so much.” It never got to this point of being ruined.

Right. Yeah. So interesting note… So on that post by John McBride - he’s talking about Gorilla. And Gorilla is a web framework in the Go ecosystem. And there’s a sequel to this story, because they did exactly as you described. But very recently, in fact, July 17th 2023, which was just a few weeks ago, it’s back, baby. Gorilla is back.

It is?

New set of core maintainers. So it’s not like the same people that did it picked it back up again, but somebody else picked it up and is resurrecting it like a phoenix from the ashes. So yeag, sometimes you quit, and sometimes – that’s the beauty of open source, is like “Well, if it’s worth something, somebody else will come along and maintain”, because it’s gonna be worth it to them to do so. And we’ve seen that countless times happen. There’s also times when it doesn’t happen, and then it’s like “Well, this project is finished.”

I think with software it’s so interesting, because we assume if it’s not actively being worked on and maintained, that it’s dead, and that’s de facto bad, right? Like “Is this project dead?” GitHub even has a pulse, which is kind of buried now in their insights… But it’s like the pulse of the project, to see how healthy it is, and stuff… And it’s like, if it hasn’t had active responses on the issues, and blah, blah, blah, it’s kind of like no heartbeat to this project, and therefore dead.

But some software I think is done. And I think the smaller the scope of what you’re working on, which is kind of maybe an advertisement for the Unix philosophy of software, is like if your project is small, and does one thing and does it well, I think it could totally be finished. Like, are people actively maintaining and adding features to LS? LS is a utility on every Unix-based system in the world. And is it changing? I’m sure if there’s a critical bug, somebody is going to go in there and fix that in LS and roll it out to the world. But pretty much – like, that’s a core util, it’s pretty baked. And maybe if you go to man.ls you can find at the very bottom the maintainers, but who knows? Those people could be retired or dead by now. I don’t know. I’m not sure how it works, I’m seriously asking. But that’s like an example of something that “That project should be finished, pretty much.” And if you wanna do fancier stuff, write a new LS - I’m sure they’re out there as well - that does it differently. But we just have this sense that if it’s not currently making progress, then it’s like, it died on the vine; like a failure. I think we just need to get over that, sort of. I don’t know.

[30:24] Yeah, maybe I’ll give a shout-out to another one of my favorite – so my blog is built on top of Metalsmith. I don’t know if Metalsmith. I love Metalsmith. I mean, this is my take on it. It has a really interesting sort of philosophy on how to do static site generation. And the core idea is really sound, and the library was built on top of this core idea. And it’s been on version two dot whatever for years, since – I don’t know, I feel like it’s maybe 2016, or something like that. I’ve never had to update Metalsmith to a major version on my blog, which I’ve been running for years and years. And it’s so nice that I don’t have to come in, update my dependencies, find out maybe – like, there are breaking changes; maybe those affect me, maybe they don’t, who knows… And I love that they have kind of just let it be at that core idea. They haven’t been like “Hey, you know what? It might have been better to do it this way, and we’re going to change it to be this idea in 3. And then 4 is going to change to be this, and 5 that.” And I almost feel like if they had another take on it – I mean, I don’t know the dynamics behind why it seems to be maintained so sparsely, but they probably would just create a new library and call it something else, and not sort of break people downstream of this thing that’s been running for years and years the way it is. And that’s kind of like the LS idea of if you’re going to do something different than LS, you’d probably just call it something different, and do something different entirely. And maybe that is for us making software something to consider when you think about quitting… You quit and let it be where it’s at, and if you want to do something different, you just call it something different.

Food for thought, for sure. And then the how is also interesting, because I think how you go about quitting something kind of informs whether or not it is a failure or a success… Because the slow fade into obscurity with the guilt, and then maybe promises of bringing it back again - you know, that blog post that says “I’m back!!” Or the way that every podcast fades out is with one last show that says “We’re back!” and it rededicates itself to publishing more regularly… Like, I feel like that’s a way to kind of fail out… But if you go out with a bang, and you’re like “Hey, last show. Let’s frickin’ have a party”, and like set your expectations for whatever it is; last blog post. “So long, and thanks for all the fish”, or whatever the silly sayings are. That’s different. That’s framing it – but you have to think before you can do something like that; you have to actually make a decision to stop. And that can feel a failure, unless you have some sort of meeting of goals, or thresholds… I don’t know, Nick, how do you feel whenever you wrote that last blog post? I’m not talking about you in particular… I’m just trying to pull you back into the conversation. [laughs] “How I rewrote my blogging engine…”

Exactly.

Once every two years, “How I rewrote my blog engine. I switched from Metalsmith to Eleventy.”

Yup. [laughs]

“And now I’m gonna blog more often.”

Exactly. And then I never do.

“Jim Nielsen said to write once a week, so I’m gonna do that.”

[33:48] The example I was trying to think of… And I don’t know if this is actually the case or not, but it seems plausible… I’ve been really getting into a language called Lua lately, because it’s how I tend to configure everything… Starting with Neovim, and now my terminal, and all these other things. But I’ve been really diving into it, and kind of looking at the reasons why Neovim specifically switched to that over Vimscript - it’s a better language; anything is better language than Vimscript. And b) it’s considered a complete language. So once you learn it, you know everything. And it’s embeddable. It’s tiny, and it can be embedded in literally everything, which is why it’s in games, and it’s in Vim, Neovim, and it’s in everything. I was trying to think if that was an example of it. I just looked it up on Wikipedia and they just had a release in May, so I don’t know how complete it is, but…

So Jose Valim of Elixir did the same thing. He announced that Elixir was API-complete at some point years ago. And that doesn’t mean they’re not working on it. They’re still going to do performance, they’re still going to have tooling stuff… There’s a lot of things you can do that makes a language better, or using a language better, but it’s not adding to the language itself. And I think that is kind of a success. It’s like “Wow.” Because I’m with you, Jim - there’s a fatigue to constant change of your tools, kind of an upgrade fatigue, where it’s like “Ah, I’ve gotta go through…” I’m having this with Phoenix right now, the framework that we use for our website, where they changed to verified routes, which is a cool new way of doing your routes… And it’s like “You should upgrade.” There’s deprecation warnings. So like this new style of routes. And for me, it’s shorter, so I like the end result in my code, than the way that I currently do it. Like, it literally reduces characters. But there’s no actual value beyond that, of the switch, besides making the deprecation warnings go away. And I’m just like – I have so many routes, just scattered throughout all my templates. You’re just like linking to stuff… Like, all over the place, hundreds, hundreds, maybe thousands. And I’m like “I’ve gotta go through and update all these, even the best regular expressions, and the tools, and everything, and the type system I don’t have…” None of these things will make this faster, and that’s annoying.

Maybe a type system would.

No, because this is like all strings at the end of the day. This is a land you don’t know about, Nick. It’s a land filled with milk and honey called Elixir. Anyways… I mean, Lua - I think that’s kind of a win, is like being like “No, we’re done. We’re not gonna throw in a key-value store on the top level of the language here. We’re done.”

I hope not. [laughter]

I think that’s actually a really good – I mean, you said we’re done… And I wrote the post “The art of knowing when to quit”, and I was thinking about that word “quit”, because I think there’s a lot of –

Baggage.

…connotation that people think of when they think of quitting. Whereas if you say, “The Art of knowing when to be done”, or “The art of knowing when to stop” - that’s very different in people’s minds when you hear that. And being done with something is a good thing. Versus like quitting something, right?

Yeah. I think that was my commentary when I linked to you in Changelog News. I was like “I think if you think about it as finishing, it’s not as bad as if you think about it as quitting.” Because it’s the same exact action, but it’s just the intent is completely different. And I think that that does help you, just to be like “Well, this is done now.” Which can still be hard… Like, if you have a successful thing… You know, like JS Party - it’s a successful podcast by many measures, but if we were to say we were done… We’ve been doing it how many years, Nick? I mean, five years?

Over five, yeah.

Yeah. Like, that would be hard. It’d be a lot better than fading out into obscurity, and like quiet-quitting, which is a new thing… But it’d be hard even to finish, right? To be like “Nah, we’re not going to produce any more episodes.” That would be hard. But it’d be a lot better way of doing it than quitting. So yeah, I agree with Jim, I think there’s baggage around the term. It has a lot of connotations that makes it harder to do. So I think intent… And then timing. Always leave them wanting more. I think that’s what Jerry Seinfeld did, and I think that if you can do that, then you’re ahead of the game. But it’s probably still hard. Should we quit this topic? I can’t stop…

[38:10] That was like a good time…

Yeah. Leaving them wanting more. Listener, if you wanted more on this topic, too bad. We’re trying to leave you wanting more. That’s exactly as we intended.

Come back for the next episode.

That’s right. Let’s talk about the stratification of social networking. This is not your title. I subtitled this section of our conversation this. I think it’s on point… When did you write this one? It was January; you were on fire in January, Jim… In January you wrote “Subscribe wherever you get your content.” Which is keying off of this statement that podcasters often say - and I’ve said it many times - is “Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.” We say it a little bit differently. We have a website we want you to go to. I think that’s even just a little bit better. It’s like “Go to our website, you’ll find all the ways to subscribe there.” But I also say the other thing. But this is kind of a cool thing about podcasts, that make them different than other social things, is they’re platform-independent. And this is something you’d love to see more of. You want to launch off from there.

I think what first struck me about this is when you listen to a podcast, a lot of times you hear advertisements that - they do their pitch, and then a lot of times I’ll hear advertisements for podcasts. So they’ll pitch the broadcast, and then they’ll say “Find us wherever you get your podcasts.” And I thought it was so interesting that here you have a paid advertisement that’s pointing you to nowhere in particular; at least to not any corporate entity. It’s pointing you to a piece of content, but not where to get that content. It’s not “Hey, stream it now on Netflix” or “Follow this thing on Facebook.”

And this idea of being able to distribute your content in a way that is not tied to any particular entity is really interesting. And I think about it even more with – I think I ended the post talking about… I’m super-big – one of the things I love about Bluesky… I don’t use it at all, but I got it on just so I could get my username @JimNielsen.com. Jim-nielse.com, that is.

Gotta get that hyphen in there. Otherwise, people might think you’re the senator, or whoever he is. The congressman.

You know, side story - there’s this guy, this other Jim Nielsen in the world who owns the one without a hyphen… And I emailed him years ago, and each year on his renewal day emailed him, like “Hey, do you want to give that up?” And he doesn’t even have anything there. I don’t know, maybe he does now, but he never wanted to give it up, and I just – now I’ve gotta have that hyphen. And I kind of despise that. I hate hyphens in domain names. Anyway…

Yeah, it’s not idea.

Sorry, that’s a tangent. But it would be interesting to live in a world where you hear people – you know, can you imagine hearing some popular influencer “Follow me wherever you follow people online”? Or “Find and subscribe wherever you get your content.” And it being much less tied to an entity, and more to – I really like this idea of people being able to own domains. “Follow me at JimNielsen.com.”

Jim-Nielsen.

Jim-Nielsen.com. [laughter]

Sorry…

And you know, you could just take that domain and put it into whatever type of content - music, video, text, and it would have the magic to know what feed to subscribe to, and all sudden you’ve got it, and there’s no corporate entity sort of between you and that. And it feels like in some ways – I mean, podcasts are interesting, because they are sort of going that way. Like, you have businesses who are putting real money into supporting this model, that gives users all the power to browse, follow, access podcasts. I mean, excluding Spotify and all of that, right?

I was gonna say, at the same time there’s entities that are trying to go the opposite way.

[41:54] Right. Thankfully, Spotify is failing, to a large extent. They do have an audience there that we appreciate the access to. I mean, we’re there. Our theory, our philosophy, much like “Always leave them wanting more” is “Be where the people are.” Don’t try to make the people come to you; just go ahead and be where they are. And so that can be annoying as a creator, because I don’t want to have a Threads, and a Mastodon, and an X - yes, I said X - account… You know…? Embrace or die…

I’m not sure if you were referring to – were you referring to the old Twitter there, or just hypothetical new X company that might exist?

Yeah, insert dollar sign x. Just insert your new thing here. But there’s people in all of these places. I mean, we even post on LinkedIn, because there’s people there, that - Jim, I know you’re a big fan of LinkedIn.

Go to Jim-Nielsen.com/linkedin.

And the reason why I think this is more interesting now today than it even was when you wrote it eight months ago is because when you wrote that - of course, this is the way podcasts work, and we see all of the value of that setup… And in fact, when we had Cory Doctorow on the show, he talked about how podcasting is very resilient to ins**tification, unlike every other platform, or every other medium which has been corporatized. But at the end of that, what if you say “Follow me wherever you follow people” or “Subscribe wherever you get your content”? I was like, “I can see people move to that format for everything now.” Because where do you go? Everything feels more unstable than it was, even in January… Because of course, Musk purchased Twitter in November, and things started changing, and Mastodon had a huge influx… But even now, since January, things have changed dramatically, and it just seems like – I don’t know, what are they going to look like in a year?

You know, I’m interested to hear your perspective as someone who runs all this podcasting, and the kinds of things that you do… I’m a nerd, so it’s super-interesting to me to think about this decentralized model of syndication. And every once in a while I think “I wonder how many people are subscribed to my blog via RSS?” I don’t have a newsletter or anything like that. I have no idea… It could be two people. The two people who are on this –

You’re talking to them, yeah.

Yeah. [laughter] Or - I mean, it could be more, and there’s no real way to know, because… You know, I’ve kind of looked into it a little bit, and there’s services like Feedly that I think they kickback their subscriber counts if you curl the right endpoint… But that’s just Feedly. People could be subscribing in all kinds of different ways. There’s Feedbin, you can do it just through your reader itself… So there’s no real way to know, and therefore it’s hard to – I’m not in the business of making money off of my blog, so I don’t really have to care about it that much… But for you, is that kind of a world interesting to you? Or does it seem even more difficult to be able to sort of make a living off of it because it would be so hard? There’s no centralized entity where you can grab all this information that allows you to monetize what you’re doing. Does that actually just make it harder?

It makes it harder, but I still like it more than the alternative… Because we’re not serving at the behest of the king, or whatever that saying is. We have more agency over the way we do what we do. Of course, if we’re talking about podcast distribution versus written, it’s different. We look at social networking as just promotional channels. Of course, it’s always fun to interact with people who enjoy our content. So that’s not really promotional, it’s just – I don’t even know what you call it. Community… I like to just talk to people who are interested in similar stuff that I am, and that’s going to be our listeners, that’s gonna be our guests, that’s going to be Nick, even though he doesn’t like talking to me that much…

About TypeScript I do.

[46:00] …mostly because I razz him constantly… But that to me just feels conversational, the social side. But then you’re talking about distribution of like written words… So we have a newsletter, we’ve got numbers around the newsletter, we have RSS… Like you, we do not have numbers around RSS. We took click tracking out of our newsletter, because it just doesn’t feel good. So we just took it out. We don’t know what you click on in our newsletter, and that makes us different to nerds like us who care about those kinds of things… So we lean more into impact, and for a lack of a better word, influence, and like engagement of the people who listen, than we do numbers.

So any company that wants to advertise with us and they’re like “It has to be these numbers, it has to be reported in this way, it needs to be IAB-standardized…” It’s like “Sorry, our stats aren’t– we’re not gonna pay $50,000 a year to have our stats standardized.” We just don’t get that business, and we just have to be okay with that…. Because - well, there’s people who do get it, who do understand, who do like us, and they don’t need the numbers like the ones that do. You know what I’m saying? So you just kind of miss out on that business. And that’s okay, because we’re a small company. It’s Adam, myself, a couple of employees, contractors… We can float by on the people who get it and not have to go get those big contracts, those big advertisers. We’ve never done a Squarespace. We’re not doing a Casper, we’re not doing the big dogs. I know on The Vergecast I think they have IBM, and Oracle, and Reuters… I don’t know, they have huge advertisers that we’re never going to get, because those people are all based on numbers and clicks and all of the ad tech stuff. We just have to miss out on it, and we’re okay with that.

I feel like you’re also probably just not a very good example of it, just given the audience. Your audience is probably naturally allergic to any kind of tracking whatsoever… I could put analytics on my blog and it probably is not going to do all that much, a) because I don’t get any visitors, and b) if I did, I wouldn’t be able to track them, because I block the trackers.

[laughs]

And so, I don’t get much. But you do kind of like abstract out of that a little bit… You’re controlling the ads that go through that; you’re not relying on your distribution channel like Spotify to inject ads, or something like that… And it’s the same thing with YouTube, right? I pay for premium, so I don’t see ads, but then I constantly have to skip through the ads that they do personally in every video… Which is okay.

Oh yeah, like the sponsored stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, YouTubers - they’ve got it good. They’ve got both the injectable ads, which are just like easy money at scale, once you’re at scale; not easy money for anybody else. But then they also can do the brand deals. And those are – those can be done really well. A good ad I think can be entertainment. Look at the way Dude Perfect does theirs. I mean, they’re really good. But I don’t know, Jim, does that answer your question? I mean, with podcasting, we have it a little bit better, because at the end of the day they download our mp3, and so we have at least that. Where you have - okay, maybe you have site traffic to your blog post, and I know you’re using Netlify, because I think you talked about it, like their server-side thing… And so I’m sure they’re doing a decent job of getting rid of bots, but there’s probably some bot traffic in there… And it’s fuzzy. We have Plausible analytics on our website, but like Nick said, most of our people block it… So what do you do? We just say “Well, bump it by probably 13%, 15%, 17% and you’re probably about accurate.” That’s good enough for the way that we do math around here.

Spotify rehosts, so Spotify traffic doesn’t show up in any of our mp3 traffic… So there’s a silo that we just opt into because they’re so big, and we want to be where people are. We’re like “Well, we don’t want to sell people who are not on Spotify, if that’s where they listen to podcasts.” So we’ll just let them go ahead and have their own little silo of stats, and try to pull them in and aggregate them for ourselves… But they’ve stopped us at the API layer from doing that, and so we’ll just be like “Well, add another 10% and you get Spotify.” It’s not exactly accurate, but good enough.

[50:05] So roundabout answer, but that’s kind of how I feel about it. I’d rather have the podcasting world than any other world where I’m basically just living off the land of a platform… Because – I mean, Facebook really pulled the bait and switch. And yet, here we are, on their Content Creators years ago, right? I mean, if you had 100 Facebook followers and you posted content to Facebook, at one point it went to 100 people. And they said, you know, the newsfeed, double down also – they said double video. It was way early. Everyone did it. Really expensive. And then it didn’t work out, and people lost a lot of money.

But all these publications doubled down on Facebook 10-15 years ago… Because if you could build the audience there, you could publish to your audience. And then they freaking cranked that back, and now you’ve gotta pay for the audience that you built… And that was the formula for everybody else. Like, it was so good for Facebook, it was so bad for the rest of us that I just – I don’t want to live in that world, where somebody can just reject me access to the audience that I’ve built. It’s just wrong.

So I’d much rather have the Mastodon, I would much rather have the Fediverse, I’d much rather have the podcasting world, even with all the problems. I mean, discovery, slowness, lack of features… There’s tons of problems, but it’s just a better situation.

Yeah… I think I actually have a post draft about this idea of maybe not having an algorithmically-driven feed; maybe a feed that you have to curate and manage yourself is a good thing. And maybe the world would be a better place if everyone had to manage by hand their own feed of content. And you probably can guess what I’m trying to get at with that… But the idea being it takes work, but things that take work are usually – you’re usually better off for it than something that takes no work.

Well, your life requires curation, right? Our lives is a series of decisions about what we want to do with them. And so that’s work. Your relationships are work, your health is work, your hobbies are work… The only thing that’s not work is TV, right? You just sit there and let it come to you, and that’s no way to live your life… But I’m 100% with you. I’ve for years – and Twitter was my favorite platform for many years, and I freaking just curated my feed… Like, if you’re posting too often - sorry, I like you, but I can’t do seven from you in one day, because I have to have a mixture. I’m just going to unfollow. And I do that, I put the work in, I follow people who are positive, people who post interesting stuff… Some troll accounts that I like, that I enjoy… And life was good. And then everything changed… Everything changed. So I mean, write that post… And that’s really how Mastodon works.

Yeah. I mean, it’s always good to have those junk food accounts in there; you need a little junk food in your life, right?

Well, sure.

Just not your whole diet is composed of junk food.

That’s right. I really am rooting for Mastodon in this whole thing. I have problems with the platform, mostly around just clunky, slow, and of course, onboarding is awful… But it’s mostly just slow. But I really hope it’s successful. I mean, it kind of already is, to a certain extent, but we’re still going to just post our stuff everywhere… I don’t know.

One of the things I love about Mastodon - and I feel like I was trying to express this a little bit in that same post - is this ability for you to have whatever third party client you want access. So there can be lots of people designing experiences that they think are interesting and good to them, and there’s this diversity in what you can pick from to access this content. And this is specifically for Mastodon. There’s tons of different Mastodon clients. But it’s the same for podcasts. There’s lots of different podcast clients, and you can pick your favorite one, and there’s different people creating different ones that center around different ideas of what it’s like to listen to podcasts…

[54:18] And I think that’s really interesting, and I think it would be really interesting if this idea of distributed, syndicated content could enter the larger public consciousness, and you could have all these different boutique clients for accessing the different kinds of information that you want to access.

I love Mastodon, and I stand it because I love Ivory, from Tapbots. I love Tapbots apps. And I feel like that drives my interest in using the platform, because it’s such a great client. And it’d be cool to have different clients for podcasts, different clients for blogs, different clients for video, different clients for whatever it is you want to consume online.

Do you think that we’ll get there, that Mastodon could win out if Threads follows through and integrates with –

Oh, and federates?

Yeah.

Good question. I know there’s a lot of Mastodon rage about it, like “Will you federate? Will you not?” I like the fact that you can just make that choice, and people can federate or not. I don’t know about Threads… It’s just like, the verdict is out, or the jury is out, whatever that saying is. I just feel like it’s too early to know. For me, threads feels very much like “What if Instagram didn’t have pictures?” It’s like “Well, the only thing good is the pictures, man.” [laughs] It’s very fluffy, and brandy, and… I don’t know. Influencery.

Yeah.

That’s why it’s gonna win out.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it might.

But if I can access that – I have a Threads account, and I have a Mastodon account…

Yeah, same.

…if they integrate, I will probably just post from the Mastodon one. But I’ll follow a bunch of people from Threads. And I think that would be fantastic, because I’m tired of going to Bluesky, going to Twitter… I’m not going to call it the other name. Going to Threads – like, going to all of these.

X is gonna give it to you, Nick. I just think DMX is rolling in his grave right now, because all of his songs, all of his branding is just getting reused by x.com.

I hope that one dies.

Bluesky is the one that I peaced out on. There’s just too many apps to launch, you know? But I do like that feature where you can get your domain name.

Exactly. For that reason.

Well, here’s what’s interesting about that, Jim… So you got on Bluesky because you can get your domain name, but also, it’s your domain name. Nobody could have taken it from you, right?

I know…

So what was the hurry for? [laughter]

I know. There was no land grab there, right?

Exactly.

Just the novelty of it…

No, I get it. It’s a cool feature. It’s the cool feature.

Yeah. And that is something that’s interesting, that I’ve done for years… Like, when I go to conferences and stuff, if I am given a blank nametag to write my name on, I just write my Twitter handle and put it on there. And today–

Now what do you do?

I still do it, because @NickNisi is what I am everywhere. So it doesn’t matter. Like, you fill in what you want, and I will probably be there with that name. No dashes.

Oh…! Ouch.

Sorry. [laughs]

I’ll be there as Nick-Nisi to imitate you… Unverified account… I’ll pay the eight bucks a month, I’ll get verified as @Nick-Nisi, just to troll you even harder…

[laughs]

This reminds me of a draft that I have, which is literally – the way I do drafts, Jim, is I just write a title, and I never write anything else. Because I like titles, but I don’t like writing.

Have AI write it for you.

I’m kind of over that… I’m in the trough of disillusionment, so… It’s called something along the lines of “RSS is the indie social web.” And I know that RSS is missing some stuff, and maybe it’s that… What’s Man Reece’s thing, which has a small indie –

Micro.blog?

[57:54] Yeah, microblogging, which I think has RSS in there… There’s stuff that’s missing from RSS to make it feel like the more modern social networks. But for my money - which is not very much money, because it’s indie - you can just subscribe to people’s blogs on RSS and then read them there. And then if we had a share mechanism - I guess I use the social networks for this… But if that was built in somehow - share and discovery inside RSS, which is what Google Reader had - I would just be happy. I could just be done with everything else. Because your podcasts are in there, you can get your memes in there, you can get your blog posts… It’s everything that we want, isn’t it? What’s missing? Share and discovery.

Google Reader.

Why was Google Reader the thing?

I don’t know… [laughs]

Okay, so I have a blog post on this…

Okay. Is this a real one or a draft?

This is a draft… This is one I want to write. So this is how I think of it right now. I loved Google Reader. Speaking of things that quit before it was time… There’s another one.

They left us wanting more… But that was a bad quit.

Yeah, that was a bad one.

Everything at Google.

Back in that era, I loved subscribing to blogs. I still do. But I had my wife, brothers and sisters who were subscribed to blogs. And my theory is that back when there was Blogspot and all these really easy ways for people to create blogs, there were more people creating more blogs, about more things, and there was more sort of incentives around getting traffic and being able to create a blog about anything, that you could maybe make some money off of. And my wife, for example, she’s subscribed to all these blogs that now have mostly fallen by the wayside. And sometimes I ask her about it, and she’s like “Yeah, the few people who are left, who still have actual websites, and aren’t posting on Twitter or whatever, I just go to their website. I just type in the domain and go to it myself.” She doesn’t have a reader anymore, because Google killed Google Reader, and she was never interested enough to figure out how to migrate from that.

And so I think there were a lot of incentives around producing content for the open web, under domains that you owned, or maybe, you know, .blogspot.com… And so there were a lot more blogs, and there were a lot more people writing for blogs, and people reading them… And I think that kind of died away, and I feel like what we need is – that’s the world that I miss nostalgically, where I’ve talked to my brothers and sisters and my wife about random blogs that they followed - it could be a car blog, a mommy blog… All kinds of different things. And that’s more of what I miss about Google Reader, is that sort of more people were doing it… And I think it’s maybe because there were those incentives that just don’t exist today. Could we bring those back?

Do you think that it was because – like, it effectively felt like it was provided by the platform, the platform being Google, like to your wife; it’s just right there, you don’t have to go search for this third party thing and install it. Is that what the appeal was of Google Reader?

I think that was definitely part of it. The ease of it. Like, I already have a Google account, Gmail and stuff… Like, “Oh, look, there’s this reader thing over here.”

Now we answered the question on Deno KV…

Yeah.

There you go.

We’ve come full circle.

I already have this Deno runtime… [laughter] Okay, so what we need is a TypeScript runtime for RSS readers… Or am I missing the point?

Yeah, please don’t put Typescript and RSS in the same sentence.

Nick wants to put it in every sentence, so don’t tempt him with such challenges…

[laughs]

Okay. Well, I think we have more to say, but no more time to say it, unless we want to make this a marathon episode, or maybe a two-parter. Jim, we’ll have to have you back. We’ll have to pick out a couple other blogs, and some of your drafts will become real, they’ll turn into real boys and girls over the next X days, and we’ll have you back on the show to talk some more. I really enjoyed this conversation. Like I said, I love reading what you write; I read it right there in my RSS reader, and then I go out to all the social networks and talk about it… But if you are a developer, maybe you’re a TypeScript dev and you want a new project, some sort of Google Reader thing that appeals to the masses…

In TypeScript.

…in TypeScript, right there on the global object would be a hit. It’ll get people doing RSS again. It’s a pipe dream, but it’s my pipe dream… Anything else, guys? Anything else left unsaid before we call this a show?

I think we’ve found a good time to quit… Or, sorry, be done with…

Finish… We like to give Nick the last word – no, we don’t. We like to act like we’re gonna give him the last word, and then not let him talk again, because we know what that last word will be… So, for Nick Nisi –

Elixir!

Heeey! Our new friend, Jim Nielsen, Jim-Nielsen.com. I’m Jerod, this is JS Party, and we’ll talk to you again on the next one.