Swyx is known for learning in public, and he joins the party to teach Ali and Nick about what he’s been working on with Temporal IO, what it is, and why he’s excited about it. We also talk about his role as Director of Developer Experience, including what developer experience is, how to do it, and what goals to set.

Today we’re joined by Shawn “swyx” Wang, also known as just “swyx” — and we’re talking about his interesting path to becoming a software developer, what it means to “learn in public” and how he’s been able to leverage that process to not only level up his skills and knowlege, but to also rapidly advance his career. We cover Swyx’s recent writing on the light and dark side of the API economy — something he calls “living above or below the API,” his thoughts on Cloudflare eating the cloud by playing Go instead of Chess, and we also talk about the work he’s doing at Temporal and how’s taking his frontend skills to the backend.

Shawn (swyx) Wang lays out Cloudflare’s strategy to disrupt the cloud from the outside in:

While the tech industry is used to come-from-below disruption, and the software industry is increasingly grasping class-for-the-masses atomic concepts, I believe Cloudflare is writing a new playbook that is the little-guy counterpart of the embrace, extend, extinguish model used by Microsoft.

Every 10 years there is a changing of the guard in JavaScript. I think we have just started a period of accelerated change that could in future be regarded as the Third Age of JavaScript.

From typography/colors to icons/animations and everything in between. This awesome list by Shawn Wang is worth a scan/bookmark.

KBall picks the brains of 4 of the speakers at JSConf Hawai’i to investigate the future of JavaScript and Web Development.