Brian Ketelsen: [44:13] Yeah, one of them was net.smtp, and the other was a nested Git vulnerability; if you tried to check out a Go package into another Git repository, you could cause a code execution exploit.

Brandon Keepers: Probot has been this long, long obsession for me. I’ve been at GitHub six years, worked on the engineering team on various features, and I spent the last couple years working closely with the open source community, trying to make sure that GitHub was meeting the needs of large open source projects, of maintainers that were over-burdened.

One of the common themes that kept coming out of a lot of this was that people were asking for or wanting features that weren’t necessarily high-priority for GitHub, for one reason or another; either they should have been a priority and they weren’t, or they’re features that only a few projects need and isn’t necessarily something that’s kind of universal to software development.

So I’ve been obsessed with the GitHub API for a long time and built a lot of things over the years; I’ve built this notifications client - which now Andrew Nesbitt built a way better one called Octobox, but kind of that idea. Last year at Universe GitHub Apps launched - it was called GitHub Integrations - and as I was talking to people, it became pretty clear that people needed these features, and a lot of people had common things that they could share with each other, but they didn’t really feel like they were empowered to build them themselves, or even that it was something that they could or should do…

So this kind of light bulb went off for me talking to people at Universe last year of this idea of like a scriptable GitHub, or scriptable workflows. GitHub has all of these primitives for software development - it has code, it has review, it has issues and project management, but what it’s lacking for a lot of people is this notion of “When this event happens or when these conditions are met, for my team and my needs it should kick off this chain of workflows.”

[03:57] It went through a bunch of iterations last fall. I started in November, I built this hack day demo where it used kind of a custom parameter, and you just commit a file in your repo and say “on this event, when these conditions are met, then do this thing.” I got it pretty far; I worked on that for a few weeks.

Then after talking with people and kind of soliciting some feedback online, someone was like – actually, like a jQuery-ish JavaScript style thing where you could dollar sign on this event and then chain a bunch of actions together. I took it a little bit farther… Then this last March one of the folks on the Electron team named Jacob Groundwater reached out to me and he was like “Can I give you some unsolicited advice?”, which is always the best…

Kris Nova: I was curious… I saw that too, and I was wondering if you could like do a join… If you could take files from this directory and match them on files from that directory and show how they relate. That would be useful if you’re ever doing a nested vendor and you wanna figure out which packages need to go where.

Alex Sexton: Nested installation… npm install that kicks of in npm install…

Jerod Santo: So while we’re still camping out on the history, I have to bring up 3D View, because at a certain point I switched to Chrome in the Webkit side, and I use Chrome DevTools even to this day… And there was one reason why I always fired up Firefox, and that’s because 3D View was a fun gimmick. It was like not even useful, kind of useful – maybe that’s why it’s gone now… But it’s gone! And for those who don’t recall, 3D View was this cool part of – I think it was a first-party, part of you guys’ tooling, where you could basically tilt the web page on the side and see the DOM built out based on nested tree structure. You could see it in 3D. So it was helpful, kind of… Sometimes you’d see something’s too far nested, or it’s not actually inside the Elm that you thought it was gonna be, but it was really a cool tech demo. I was recalling that as Adam and I were prepping for this and I thought “What happened to 3D View? It’s no longer there.”

Carlisia Thompson: I have another project, it’s called Ozzo Validation. There is a validation package for Go called GoValidate, which I actually have used, but this one is different because the validation rules don’t go together with the struct. With GoValidate you have to do struct tags to specify your validation rules. This one separates everything, all the rules, and lets you have nested validation, and a bunch of other things. It’s really cool.

Keith Randall: Yeah, especially when you JSON gets large and it’s really hard to… They tend to format as giant blobs that are hard to parse because they’re all nested, and so on. It’d be nice to have a way to see just the parse you care about.

Erik St. Martin: Even if we all as a panel said you should use this one, it’s not gonna matter because of that whole nested dependency problem, right? I use one, but I import a package that uses another one…

Max Howell: Yeah. So I started working on KDE, which is still around, a Linux desktop environment. I really enjoyed the sense of community, and making things that other people enjoyed using, so I almost got fired from Kodak, even though they would rarely do such a thing with these interns that they had. Then I went back to university, spent most of the year working on two apps. The first was Filelight, which was the first thing I ever made, really. It’s like DiskDaisy on Mac, it uses the same idea of representing the files and folders concentrically in pie charts that nest inside each other, which really helped – again, back then we only had so much disk space, so you really needed to figure out who was using what and delete files regularly.

And Amarok, which was a music player - that was my first proper open source project. We were working as a team of three or four of us. It became pretty popular, because there weren’t any good music players on Linux, and we were doing things that other people hadn’t really considered at the time as well, like showing the Wikipedia information for the artist you were listening to. I think we invented that… So I almost failed my chemistry degree. It was close, very close. I basically started going to classes and somehow managed to cram and get the minimum grade required, which was just as well, because I’d signed up to do a PhD, so I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I was doing computational chemistry for my dissertation, so the professor I was working for told me that he was mathematical, and I was doing quite well at that, but I didn’t get the grade required to stay there and do the PhD, so I had to go home. I just kept working on open source basically, until I got a job at Last.fm in London because of Amarok, because we were using Last.fm and scrobbling quite heavily. I went there and that’s what got me into the industry, without a computer science degree or anything similar.

Nadia Eghbal: Oh, Andrew Nesbitt.

Erik St. Martin: [43:45] I have to admit I have yet to work with it, but it seemed interesting. A couple of years ago Brian and I were working on a project that had that kind of nested data where you wanted to get this tree of information and do counts on some of them, and things like that. We ended up designing something different; GraphQL wasn’t released yet, right Brian?

Richard Feldman: I think I would agree. Absolutely, CSS is one of the hardest parts about web development. Possibly the hardest, honestly. But I think what’s tricky about it, coming from a perspective of using Elm, is that with JavaScript it’s a pretty reasonable proposition to say, “I want to take this part of my web app, and pull it out and replace it with some Elm code”, and just sort of introduce Elm that way. It’s pretty hard to do that with styles.

[12:22] CSS very much encourages having these global style sheets that are sort of everywhere, and unless you’re already on some inline style type bandwagon, you’re going to have trouble with that. Even if you’re on the inline style bandwagon style, usually deeply nested styles result in the hierarchy mattering, and it’s pretty hard to pull something out and say, “I’m going to drop in this new Elm thing that’s styled in its own way…” Basically, what I’m saying is even if Evan said, “Hey, Elm now has a great way to do styles, so you don’t have to learn the box model, and so forth” - that still would be difficult from a “how to introduce it” perspective, because one of the things we’ve learned is that the critical thing for people to start using Elm in production is introduce it gradually. I don’t know how somebody would do that with styles, just because the way that CSS is designed.

José Valim: Yeah, exactly. And sometimes those things are nested. You can think of it as a tree, where the pulse is the root and then sometimes you want to get the guests, and then the guest is doing more pre-loads, so that’s like one branch of the tree. Then you want to bring something else, like the likes for that episode. So you can think there is a tree, and what we pre-load in parallel are exactly those branches.

Pieter Hintjens: Most things are bullshit in our industry, that’s my best advice. [laughter] I learned this as a young developer. Don’t trust the mass opinion. Seriously, trust your own intuition and look for areas where you can be special, where you can find yourself, where you can learn or you have space to practice. Just because things are fashionable and everyone is doing it - in fact, that’s a reason not to do that stuff. Do stuff that’s hard and that’s different, that’s freaky. Of course, most of the time you’ll be completely wrong and you’ll be doing stuff that no one cares about, but you will learn, and you will learn the hard way and you will learn well, and you’ll internalize those lessons.

I consider myself a happy programmer. I program happily. I write code, it tends to work first the way I want it to work, and that took like 30 years to get there. So you need to be patient, as well. You can’t just learn something and then become a master in it. You have to internalize so many little lessons.

Making mistakes - that’s fun. Getting it wrong is fun. Just don’t make huge mistakes. Just don’t bet your company, or your house or your family on something that you can’t prove. It takes small steps, make small mistakes - you learn. You make huge steps, you make mistakes - you die.

Then my last advice is to trust other people. Not blindly, of course, as we’ve discussed. But you’re part of an ants nest, and your power is other people, it’s not you. It’s how you can bring other people into your world and be in their world, and how you can share and build stuff together. That’s the real power of a human being, whether you’re a programmer, or a writer, or a cook, or a taxi driver - it’s other people. And that’s my inspirational thought for the day.