Suz Hinton: Yeah, I really like Tenori, which is basically generating drum sequence patterns when you hit Improvise. Also, Magic Sketchpad is really cute as well. I think that’s using David Ha’s work, who was working on basically training a model how to actually do sketching based on thousands of human sketches fed into the system.

Jan Monschke: The sibling conference of JSConf was Reject.JS, and the host band was called The Rejects, so that was another one. These two bands were literally created for these – oh my god, yeah, The Semi-Colons… I completely forgot the name of my own band. Yeah, The Rejects was the song name and not the name of the band. Oh, my god… Thanks, David in Slack.

Brett Gaylor: Thank you. It was fun. That year it was David Letterman, and the folks behind Mr. Robot, and just some amazing media, and it was cool to see documentary work about the internet in the mix of important social issues.

Kevin Ball: So in terms of practices, David in the Slack channel brought up something that I was going to, which is immutability, and trying not to mutate state. I think so many of the bugs that we run into, not just our – so at one layer we could say these are about types and undefined, but at another layer it’s just about this thing has changed from what we expect it to be, and it’s way harder to reason about what we expect it to be and keeping it there if you were mutating state as you go along…

So the more you can write your code in a way where you’re always creating new objects and you’re being immutable and you have functions that are pure and that are not creating all these side effects, the more it becomes easier to reason about what’s going on, the more it becomes easy to test, and you have a lot fewer challenges with bugs. And you can do that in a way where even if you are dealing with something that is fundamentally mutation-oriented - I’m thinking about, you know, one of the big contrasts between the way that Vue and Vuex handles state, and the way that React and Redux handle state is that Vue leans very heavily into this concept of reactivity, and you have data that you mutate and things react from that…

[48:15] But if you isolate that reactive piece, and so you’re still doing – you know, all of your changes are based on “I’m gonna take something, I’m gonna immutably come up with a new state, and then at that point I’m gonna do my assignment, so that my mutable store changes at that point…” But all of your logic and communication and thinking about is essentially treating these things as immutable. It just becomes so much easier to reason about the flows of data, and you don’t end up with these objects where you’re like “How the heck did that end up that way?”

Suz Hinton: I wanted to thank everyone for sharing all of their stories today; a special shout-out to roberttables, David Poindexter, for calling in and sharing his. I know that takes a lot of guts, so we definitely very much appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to JS Party, we hope that you’ve enjoyed it as much as we did producing it, and we will catch you next time.

David Ojika: Thank you, Daniel. Thank you for having us.

Dan Kohn: …four years ago, and you previously had David Wheeler on the show, talking about the Badge app project, and I co-created that with him; that’s the way of open source projects talking about their health, and things like the buzz factor, and licensing, and other kinds of stuff. And by the way, for any project to graduate CNCF, they’re required to get that passing Best Practices badge. The first two projects this year graduated - Kubernetes and Prometheus.

But I think it is fair to say that I’ve seen now the entire range of open source projects, from extremely unhealthy ones, like OpenSSL, prior to Heartbleed, when you just had a couple very underpaid developers, and huge (almost universal) reliance on it across the industry, to kind of the most healthiest projects, which Kubernetes basically falls into, where you have dozens and dozens of the biggest companies in the world that are eager to fund it and move it forward.

Justin Dorfman: My dad was always like, “Yeah, that sounds good”, and my mom was just like the more realistic one, like “Shut up and go find something to do.” From that, it wasn’t until I discovered computers, where I just kind of became obsessed, and I was like “Okay, this BMX thing could work out (I was being naive), but I could fall back on the computer stuff, I guess… But I’m definitely going to be a BMX superstar, absolutely.”

Obviously, the BMX stuff did not pan out the way I wanted to, so it became computers, and starting with web development, and then went into IT, and then into Rackmonkey, putting servers in server rooms, and all that fun stuff… And then my boss and my really good friend, David Henzel, saw me and he was like “You’re not an engineer, you’re a marketer…”, and I’m like “No, no, now, I’m not a marketer, I’m an engineer. I’m gonna make this happen.” I was just like, “How dare he tell me that I’m not an engineer?” and I wasn’t; I was struggling, it was very, very difficult for me… But I liked it; I really, really liked it, but I didn’t love it.

Marketing was always sort of something I loved, but I didn’t realize it was something that someone with a development background could parlay their skills into. Basically, what you are is you’re part of the marketing team. To become a really good developer relations person or developer advocate, or however you wanna define it, you have to sell without selling. Developers just want cool stuff, and if it’s free - awesome; if it has support packages that they can sell their company on - awesome… But it is forbidden for any developer advocate to directly sell, and I think most of them know that.

Nader Dabit: No, there’s none of that, but it’s just kind of like… I guess once you start working in the culture, you just kind of go along sometimes what other people are doing… But I guess that’s where I’m a little different. You’ll see me on Twitter saying “Hey, I’ve built this. I’m awesome. Come look at it.” I’m not as humble as some of the people I work with… But I think maybe the tradeoff is I’m not as smart as those people, so I’m kind of like trying to find a way to compensate for that.

But the point that you’ve made earlier is pretty interesting. I saw a tweet by David Brunelle - he works with Starbucks - and he basically was talking about what you’ve just said; his tweet, the general gist of it was something about the most talented and the better engineers that he’s known aren’t the people that are out there speaking at conferences and writing blog posts and stuff like that, because they’re just nose down into their work, whereas a lot of times people see the people that are out there like me, that are out there tweeting and blogging and speaking, like that we’re smarter, but in reality a lot of the smarter people that he’s worked with were the people that aren’t out there.

So if you’re not out there doing that, you shouldn’t feel bad about it, but also, when you’re looking at hiring, try to not take that too much into consideration. Take it into consideration to an extent, but really – he had an interesting point. And obviously, a lot of people thought it was a thoughtful tweet because he had a lot of interaction and there was a lot of cool discussion there.

Jason Snell: Yeah, it’s a great – not only there are legal issues… Like, if you have one revenue source, you’re kind of an employee, and the people who are paying you are not gonna like that. There are legal issues there. It’s always good to have multiple streams, if you can.

David Sparks and I talk about this on our Free Agents podcast, and we have talked about it a lot in the last three years… If you have one client, what happens when they go out of business or they drop you or they cut your work in half? You just lost half your income. If you have four clients and one of them goes out of business or drops you or cuts what they’re paying you in half - guess what? Your income went down by 12% or 25%, depending on the scenario. It didn’t go to zero, and that’s better.

[16:22] That also means that if you have four clients and one of them is a jerk, you can dump them and then go find another client, knowing you’ve got those three other clients to help see you through. So there’s so many reasons, if you can, to diversify. In my case, I’m diversifying not just in terms of clients, but in terms of industry. I’ve got a lot of podcast revenue and a lot of freelance writing revenue, which is good in either case of if the websites I write for go out of business, then I’ve still got the podcast stuff. And if the podcast ad industry falls apart, I’ve still got the writing. And then I’ve also got some direct audience support from my writing and my podcasting that’s in the mix there too, so it’s diversified in a bunch of ways.

If you’re a lawyer, probably the reality is you’re gonna have a bunch of different clients. If you’re an artist or a writer, you’re just gonna have a bunch of different clients in your field. I feel fortunate that I’ve ended up being able to diversify across these different media types too, because that gives me a little more confidence. I don’t think all the tech websites are gonna shut down AND all the podcast advertising is going to go away immediately. I think it’s unlikely that everything just goes bad immediately. You never know, but it seems a lot less likely.

Zed Shaw: [24:04] Yeah, my scenario perpetuated it, because keep in mind, I was working at Bear Sterns when I wrote that. So I was able to finally get a job, and the only job I could get was working at basically this crappy bank in New York, a bank that eventually collapsed. That’s how terrible that place was. And I was not making all that much money. Pretty much Ruby on Rails destroyed my ability to work as a Java programmer, because of all the animosity that David Heinemeier Hansson created between Rails and Java. So the second I started becoming high-profile within Ruby on Rails, I couldn’t get work as a Java guy because they were like the Anti-Rails to that point.

And then I find out all these background deals that Ruby on Rails people made, and a lot of the things that people were saying about me, and the stuff that Twitter was saying to defend themselves from investors wondering why their system collapsed all the time… That was why I couldn’t get work, and I’m like “Alright, screw this, I’m gonna write about it.” And I came out and told the truth.

Dylan Schiemann: Yeah. I mean, you have to imagine, this is a world where there was no GitHub, there were two browsers - IE5 (or 5.5) and early, early versions of Firefox. Safari hadn’t been released yet, or was about to be released. Chrome was still a few years away. GitHub didn’t exist… Almost all of the modern tooling that we take for granted wasn’t there. Firebug had not been released yet, and ES3 was kind of your JavaScript standard.

In many ways, it was like writing software in the dark ages. Your goal was to make something work in both browsers, because there was no mobile web at the time. And the idea that you were going to take this platform that most people kind of laughed and shrugged off as something you sort of treated as a DOM view layer, and that you were gonna turn this into a real area where you would write applications was pretty crazy.

Alex and I and David were working at this company called Informatica - they’re still around - and they had some pretty exceptional needs at the time; a lot of it would be vector graphics based stuff, large datasets, grids, charts, and all sorts of other advanced features that not only could you not do them with a dated platform, but no one else even really tried at that time.

Suz Hinton: i think it’s that classic form of like, you know, the existence of constraints is what forces people to be super creative; I think that’s how that conversation right there can be summed up. I really enjoyed that time of the web a lot. I was a Flash developer, so I was so heavily inspired by David Firth, who made Salad Fingers and a bunch of others super dark Flash animation videos… And it made me want to be more creative with Flash, because you know, at the time I was a Flash developer making banner ads for the internet, and that was where capitalism really started ruining all of this creative stuff… So that was really good for me to have on the side, to push me to still do silly things in Flash at the time.

Adam Stacoviak: …but we’ve had guests back, and it’s great. We’ll talk to them a year later, we’ll catch back up, we’ll see them on the next release or the next major release, or something that’s pinnacle and the projects change, whether it’s new maintainers or a new direction, or a conference finally, or something… Who knows. But we welcome the revisits. Those are actually sometimes a lot more fun.

This Friday we’re gonna release a show with David Heinemeier Hansson on Stimulus, and we’ve talked to him before about 10+ years of Rails, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t have him back on. The second time around I know I was a bit more comfortable, because I felt like David’s a buddy now, versus like “Oh, DHH…” Anyways.

Let’s end by saying thanks… I mean, I know personally – I’ve personally benefitted from knowing both of you, and then playing the behind-the-scenes role I personally have in this show’s creating and execution and production, so it’s been a lot of fun to coordinate things with you all, but at the same time take a back-seat to the content, and you two totally drove this thing. Mikeal, I know you’ll compliment Nadia, and you’ll back me up at least on this - your prior show notes are amazing; they should be published on their own, although I know they’re not exactly public stuff. Not that they’re bad or good, just that it’s not a cohesive end-to-end document. For people like us, it really makes a lot of sense. So those are really appreciated.

[41:38] I learned a lot of stuff from both of you, but all that to say thank you so much for working with us and caring about the community so much to put your time and effort into it, and then obviously to come back on as a finale to give a nice ending to a show like this, so thank you very much.

Adam Stacoviak: …but we’ve had guests back, and it’s great. We’ll talk to them a year later, we’ll catch back up, we’ll see them on the next release or the next major release, or something that’s pinnacle and the projects change, whether it’s new maintainers or a new direction, or a conference finally, or something… Who knows. But we welcome the revisits. Those are actually sometimes a lot more fun.

This Friday we’re gonna release a show with David Heinemeier Hansson on Stimulus, and we’ve talked to him before about 10+ years of Rails, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t have him back on. The second time around I know I was a bit more comfortable, because I felt like David’s a buddy now, versus like “Oh, DHH…” Anyways.

Let’s end by saying thanks… I mean, I know personally – I’ve personally benefitted from knowing both of you, and then playing the behind-the-scenes role I personally have in this show’s creating and execution and production, so it’s been a lot of fun to coordinate things with you all, but at the same time take a back-seat to the content, and you two totally drove this thing. Mikeal, I know you’ll compliment Nadia, and you’ll back me up at least on this - your prior show notes are amazing; they should be published on their own, although I know they’re not exactly public stuff. Not that they’re bad or good, just that it’s not a cohesive end-to-end document. For people like us, it really makes a lot of sense. So those are really appreciated.

[39:11] I learned a lot of stuff from both of you, but all that to say thank you so much for working with us and caring about the community so much to put your time and effort into it, and then obviously to come back on as a finale to give a nice ending to a show like this, so thank you very much.

Monty Widenius: What we have now, we have MaxScale, which is a really good proxy, that can also be able to do failover and other things, but also gives you more control over using MariaDB especially in larger environments, and we have licensed under something we called Business Source License. This was a license that me and David Axmark, the other founder of MySQL, came up with some ten years ago. And then we started to make it more popular, because I see a lot of companies struggling with that. They would love to do open source, they see the benefit of it, but they are afraid that if they will become open source, they will lose all the revenue, the customers would stop paying them, and that causes a problem, a conflict - you want to do the right thing, but you can’t, and the Business Source License was invented to solve exactly this thing, to allow more people to do eventually open source, and also give the users of the software many of the freedoms that you expect with open source software. So it’s not an open source license, but it’s an “eventually open source” license, and within four years it’s guaranteed that the code that you have is open source, but you had all the code from the start, so you get the benefits that if there are bugs, you can fix it, if you want to add something, you can do that… You still have to pay for it, like with any closed source software - or commercial software, actually - but you still have the freedom that you are not held by the one company who can do any changes, or just go out of business or stop producing the software.

Dan Kohn: Yes, that was probably my biggest success being involved in CII, was to find David and recruit him in. He and I were really the code developers on that project. He did really the lead on all of what the 66 criteria should be, and everything… But at the time, he actually hadn’t done any Rails development before, and I was working for a Rails development company. So I put together the original scaffolding for it, and the CI system, and then helped along the way on the software development. And again, it’s an extremely satisfying process to have started that from scratch and then have well over 1,000 badged projects.

In fact, not so coincidentally, one of the criteria in order for a project to graduate within CNCF is they do need to get the Best Practices badge.

Alex Sexton: [24:03] I would like to request from the community that someone make a Chrome plugin that switches the “raise your hand” to a David S. Pumpkins icon – I don’t know if you guys watch this or not, but… [laughter] “Any questionsss…?” [laughter] Really solid.

Nadia Eghbal: Absolutely.

Coming up after the break, we go further in this conversation. Nadia, Mikeal and Evan go into the struggle of corporate and community-funded open source. We asked questions like “Do you have a sense of being David battling Goliath? Do your goals change in open source when you start working on it full-time?” and as Vue grows, does Evan have a plan or know how to fund beyond the current Patreon campaign? Stick around.

Rachel White: My pick of the week is a talk from JSConf EU that just happened that I unfortunately did not get to see in person… It’s from Anjana Vakil and it’s about immutable data structures for functional JS. She explains it in such a really simplified, easy to understand way for people that don’t really understand what immutability or mutability or functional programming looks like, a.k.a. me… She just gives visuals that explains how nodes work and how you can do different things with it, and how you can have the arrays structured in – well, I guess that’s what mutability and immutability is, but she explains it in a way that makes sense and she talks about it in context of David Nolen’s mori library, and Facebook’s Immutable.js library and shows examples from both, so that you’re able to understand the concept and see how different libraries are handling that kind of thing.

So yeah, if anybody else was wondering about that kind of thing, there’s a link to it and it’s pretty great.

Rachel White: Yeah. If you’re thinking of making something but thing that people might not like it, do it anyway, because you’re never gonna know unless you try. I heard a quote from David Lynch once that was in regards to his films - when he has a vision, all of the creative process that he has that goes into it is super important to him, and it has a lot of meaning while he’s making something. But once you’re done and you release that into the world, your vision doesn’t really matter anymore. That sounds unencouraging, but just think of when you put yourself out there the way that people will view the art that you’re trying to make. Because I think that code is art - you’re still making something from nothing…

Keith Randall: Myself and David Chase worked on it in the early days from inside of Google, and then there were a bunch of people from outside who worked on it as well.

Carlisia Thompson: Thank you so much, David.

Julian Shapiro: There are three things, in no particular order. First is blog posts on Smashing Magazine and David Walsh. CSS Tricks is great, but the sheer traffic I would get from Smashing Magazine in particular was incredible; sometimes 10,000 to 20,000 hits in the course of a week. That’s the first.

Second is I paid really talented developer designers who were showcasing their work on codepen.io, to build demos with Velocity, showcasing what you could do now that Velocity brought very performant animation to the web, to everyday web design. And I found these amazing people who for something like, again, around $50, were willing to spend hours, days, their weekends, building these incredible demos.

[28:05]They honestly would have done it anyway; so we built these demos, and I get the word out on Twitter and elsewhere, and they would just take off like wildfire and they’d be stuck on the CodePen homepage for a long time, they’d get twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand views. And at the end of each demo I made sure that there was a really prominent plug for Velocity, saying “This is the project that is in part responsible for bringing this to you.” That was really big, because that was not only distribution, but also credibility. Really talented people were using it, they loved it, and the results were impressive.

The third thing was Hacker News. Hacker News I think for a lot of startups, a lot of projects, is usually singularly the outlier; it’s the 10x traffic source over everything else, and it was very much the same for me. And I think I got on there a couple times, and collectively that jump started a lot of awareness.

Adam Stacoviak: Gratipay. It’s like our version of that. So if you wanna directly support the Changelog being around, being here, this is the way you can do it. Go to changelog.com/membership. I’m gonna rattle off probably around 20 names, I think… But every show we’re gonna start closing with the most recent, this week’s new members. Hopefully this doesn’t get boring…

In this case there’s a lot because I think we just have an influx, but we’ve got Douglas Gray, Shawn Dunn, Pablo Navares, Bill Israel, Garret Diamond, Dave… David, I can’t say your last name which is [unintelligible 00:54:45.23] I’m gonna try and say that. I have a bad last name too, so don’t hate me. Matthew Brixton, Jonathan Banta, Austin Ginder, Ben Gillan - a good friend of mine actually here locally; a good buddy of mine here, close by. We’ve got Matthew McCormick… Somebody who just put one name in, which is Ebers Bock… Mike Perham, a friend and past guest on the show, so Mike, thanks for your support. Kyle Mahan, Camilla Pyon, and Mr. P. Gomez.

Thank you all for directly supporting this show, supporting The Changelog. Your support means the world to me and Jerod and everybody else who’s a part of this… And I’m sure Darcy, too. Right, Darcy?

Sid Sijbrandij: We used to have this roadmap file in the repo, but it wasn’t maintained any longer, so we deprecated it… And we’ve found that normally, when a release is almost done - most of the time it’s a few days before the 22nd - Dmytro kind of knows what he wants to work on, the community knows what they wanna work on… But you just figure it out right there and then. So you’re done, the stress is gone, and you think “Oh, I’d like to work on this or that.” Or “I heard so many people complain about this or that.” And these things - you cannot predict them two weeks or a month in advance. Sometimes you can, but sometimes you can’t. And we wanna be working on the things that inspire us and that are important to the community and to the clients of gitlab.com. So why work on something less important, just because you said so a month ago? We don’t wanna end up in that situation.

I think David Heinemeier Hansson said it very eloquently when he said “Inspiration is perishable.” If you’re inspired by something, just go work on that. And we tried to keep that alive.

Sam Soffes: Yeah, it was really sad… I didn’t announce it until November, but I really started in August. I was just like ashamed to even have a job, and also kind of afraid that people would freak out that I’m not working on Cheddar full-time… But they probably figured it out, since I kind of quit saying anything.

David Smith (@_davidsmith on Twitter) was really encouraging me to do indie development, and I was like “Well, I had an offer from GitHub” and he’s like “Okay…” I could tell he was pretty disappointed. And thinking back to that conversation a couple days later is when I was like “You know what, I am gonna do my own thing.” That was one of the things that put me over the edge. And thinking when I was accepting the Seesaw offer, before I was signing the paper, I was like “You know what? David is gonna be disappointed.” And not that I’m even super close friends with David, but I was just like “Everyone in general, I feel like I’m letting them down for failing with Nothing Magical’, but whatever… I have 100 T-shirts in my closet, so yeah.