Developer Hiring in 2023
An open mic conversation exploring the challenges of developer hiring, open source contributions, and JS framework trends heading into 2023
Episode Description
JavaScript Jam's open mic covers tech layoffs, job hunting strategies, getting into open source, and 2023 predictions for React, frameworks, and VC-funded projects.
Episode Summary
This JavaScript Jam Live open mic episode kicks off with co-host introductions, including Anthony Campolo's new role as developer advocate at Edgio. The conversation quickly turns to the tech job market as listener Eric shares his experience being laid off in late December 2022 and navigating the interview process during a "VC winter," where venture capital tightened and major companies like Salesforce and Vimeo announced significant layoffs. The hosts discuss how senior developers with name recognition and networks fare far better than juniors in a downturn, referencing the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter's coverage. The discussion shifts when a newer developer asks how to break into open source, prompting Brian Douglas of Open Sauced to join and explain how contributing to smaller, growing projects and building genuine relationships is far more effective than trying to jump into massive repos like React. Brian shares stories of developers landing jobs through open source contributions and emphasizes that networking remains the most reliable path to employment. The final segment explores 2023 ecosystem predictions, including growing enthusiasm for non-React frameworks like Solid and Astro, the idea that React hate and React usage will both hit all-time highs, whether tRPC will replace GraphQL (consensus: no, but it will capture misplaced GraphQL adoption), and the decline of new VC-funded open source projects due to tighter funding.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Welcome and Introductions
Scott Steinlage opens the weekly JavaScript Jam Live session, welcoming listeners and explaining the open mic format where anyone can request to join the conversation. He introduces the co-hosts and highlights that the show airs every Wednesday at noon Pacific.
Anthony Campolo is formally introduced as the new developer advocate at Edgio, and he shares his excitement about creating content for the platform. Ishan Anand mentions Anthony's existing podcast and Twitch stream, then sets the stage for the episode's audience-driven format, inviting listeners to raise topics or questions.
00:05:34 - Eric's Job Search and the Tech Layoff Landscape
Eric shares that he lost his job at the end of December and has been navigating multiple interview pipelines, noting the stark contrast between companies that require twelve interviews and those that extend offers after just two. The conversation broadens into the macroeconomic forces behind the tech downturn, with Eric describing a "VC winter" where venture capital dried up and startups began tightening budgets.
The hosts discuss how the holiday season further slowed hiring timelines, and Anthony advises patience for job seekers, suggesting that interest will pick up as January progresses. Ishan references the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter and its coverage of how hiring freezes—not just layoffs—are the real economic signal, while Jason draws comparisons to the original dot-com bust and notes that companies like Facebook remain far larger than pre-pandemic levels despite layoffs.
00:12:42 - Senior vs. Junior Developers in a Downturn
Jason highlights a growing bifurcation in the job market: experienced developers with specialized skills or name recognition continue to receive offers, while those with only a few years of general experience face significantly more competition. He points to job postings at Facebook still actively seeking principal-level engineers despite the broader hiring freeze.
Eric shares colorful interview anecdotes, including a TypeScript fetch exercise that tripped up 90% of candidates and a React code review loaded with common junior-level mistakes. The group reflects on how these practical assessments reveal the gap between senior and junior skill levels and how interview formats have evolved to filter for real-world competency rather than algorithmic puzzles.
00:18:09 - Advice on Offers, Networking, and Recruiters
Anthony encourages Eric to take his time evaluating offers rather than feeling rushed, and Scott adds that demonstrating measured confidence can actually increase a candidate's desirability. The conversation turns to the role of recruiters and hiring pipelines, with one listener offering a cautionary perspective on corporate recruitment, emphasizing the importance of knowing people inside an organization before joining.
Ishan recontextualizes the recruiter discussion around misaligned incentives, noting that recruiters are paid by companies, not candidates, which can lead to over-promising. The group agrees that entering a company through personal connections and community relationships is a far more reliable and comfortable path than going through cold recruitment channels.
00:30:38 - Getting Started with Open Source Contributions
A newer developer asks how to get involved in open source, and Anthony explains the basics of looking for contributing guidelines and "good first issue" labels in repositories. He recommends joining communities like Open Sauced, which prompts Brian Douglas to join the conversation and share his experience from four and a half years at GitHub working to grow open source participation.
Brian explains that less than one percent of GitHub developers make open source contributions and encourages newcomers to find small, early-stage projects where they can grow alongside the codebase rather than trying to jump into massive projects like React. He uses the example of Tan Stack (formerly React Query) to illustrate how joining a project early can lead to years of meaningful experience and career opportunities.
00:39:06 - Building a Career Through Open Source
Jason adds that using an open source project yourself before attempting to contribute is a crucial but often overlooked prerequisite, and Anthony calls documentation contributions the "sleeper method" for getting involved naturally. Brian shares a compelling story about a GitHub intern who started contributing to Electron and eventually became a staff engineer, illustrating how open source can create long-term career paths.
The discussion turns to the importance of proactive community engagement, with Brian stressing that simply joining a Discord and saying hello is not enough—people need to communicate their specific skills and interests. Anthony shares his own origin story of reaching out to Brian about RedwoodJS, which sparked a two-year collaboration and demonstrates how initiative and specificity can open doors even for newcomers.
00:51:37 - Networking, Layoffs, and the Job Market Reality
Brian Douglas shares his perspective as someone with a finance background who graduated into the 2008 recession, emphasizing that building a network and community is the single most important career investment. He reveals that Netlify laid off 14% of its staff but notes that well-networked developers often land new positions within days, citing a colleague who had a signed offer by Friday after being laid off on Thursday.
The group discusses how companies with stable revenue and profitability continue hiring while startups burning through VC money without a path to profitability face the greatest risk. Jason agrees that networking is essential and suggests that for those who haven't built one yet, it's never too late to start, setting up a natural transition to the episode's closing predictions segment.
01:02:47 - 2023 Predictions: Frameworks, React, and the Ecosystem
Ishan opens the predictions segment, and Anthony forecasts growing enthusiasm for non-React frameworks like Solid and Qwik that prioritize performance without sacrificing the component model. The group discusses the Bytes newsletter prediction that React hate and React usage will both reach all-time highs simultaneously, and Jason argues that on the corporate enterprise side, React adoption is just getting started with decades of internal software yet to be built.
The hosts caution beginners against chasing trendy frameworks when React remains the most pragmatic path to employment, noting that recruiters use keyword-matching tools that won't recognize niche framework experience. The conversation touches on whether tRPC will replace GraphQL—Anthony firmly argues it won't, as tRPC only competes in the narrow space of end-to-end type safety while GraphQL serves much broader use cases—and wraps up with debate about WordPress's continued relevance and whether any current framework represents a true 10x improvement over React.
01:29:44 - Closing Remarks and Looking Ahead
Scott delivers the closing segment, thanking all the speakers and encouraging listeners to follow anyone who provided value during the conversation. He announces that future episodes will extend to an hour and a half and teases a potential format change alternating between guest interviews and open mic sessions.
The hosts invite listener feedback on the proposed format changes through DMs or comments and remind the audience that JavaScript Jam airs every Wednesday at noon Pacific. The episode ends with appreciation for the community's contributions and a preview of continued discussions in the weeks ahead.
Transcript
00:00:30 - Scott Steinlage
Welcome to JavaScript Jam Live. Yeah, buddy. All right, Anthony, welcome to the room. Let me bring you up here, man. There we go. Boom. You are on. Ishan, bro, you up here?
00:00:54 - Anthony Campolo
Hey.
00:00:56 - Scott Steinlage
All right. Welcome to JavaScript Jam Live. We do this every Wednesday at 12:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. And yeah, this is very much an open mic night kind of thing where we talk about web development and JavaScript-related things.
00:01:24 - Ishan Anand
No singing required.
00:01:27 - Scott Steinlage
No singing required. Yeah.
00:01:29 - Anthony Campolo
But still encouraged.
00:01:31 - Scott Steinlage
Absolutely. Yeah. No karaoke, but you know, maybe we
00:01:36 - Ishan Anand
Oh, Anthony's gonna outclass us all if it becomes about musical talent.
00:01:41 - Anthony Campolo
Scott's a better singer than you think.
00:01:43 - Jason
Scott's a pretty good singer.
00:01:45 - Ishan Anand
Okay. I'll just speak for myself then. But go ahead, keep going, Scott.
00:01:50 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, awesome. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Every single time you come here, whether you're a beginner developer or you've been doing this for a very long time, it doesn't matter. We love to hear from everybody. In fact, that's when we get the most value from this, when people contribute from the audience here. So we'd love it if you'd join in. Just request to come up and we'll bring you up. You can ask a question or state an opinion or fact or whatever it might be. We would love to hear from you. It's going to make things just that much better. So with that being said, we have our co-hosts Anthony and Ishan here with us. And Anthony is actually officially part of our team, by the way.
00:02:49 - Brian Douglas
Officially official, yes, absolutely.
00:02:52 - Scott Steinlage
What we mean by that is, we all work for Edgio, and I'm actually the technical community manager with Edgio. Ishan, I'll let you introduce yourself and Anthony as well. But yeah, we're going to get started today, and today's our traditional open mic thing. We're not having a guest today, so we're going to have a lot of fun, as always. Looking forward to it. Ishan, I'll let you start off, and we'll go from there.
00:03:16 - Ishan Anand
Yeah. So as Scott said, we're starting the new year with the original open mic format. So the agenda is driven by you. Really interested to hear what everyone has to say. I'm Ishan, VP of Product at Edgio, and I'm also excited today because I officially get to introduce Anthony as our co-host. He has joined Edgio as a developer advocate. I'll let Anthony introduce himself and say a little bit more, and then we can kick it off with whatever people want to talk about.
00:03:46 - Anthony Campolo
Hello.
00:03:46 - Anthony Campolo
Thank you. Yes, I'm a developer advocate at Edgio. You could maybe even say I'm the developer advocate at Edgio. I'm very excited to start just getting into it. I've already been very involved with the general JavaScript Jam stuff, and I feel like Edgio is a super cool platform, but there's not really a lot of people out there making noise about it and creating cool content about it. So I'll be doing that and just engaging in the community, as I already do a lot.
00:04:16 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, check it out if you haven't already. Anthony has his own podcast, FSJam, that he's had for a while. And then you just started, I think, a Twitch stream. Is that correct?
00:04:28 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, called AJC and the Web Dev.
00:04:32 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, so definitely check that out. He's really active around the web, which is another reason why we're so excited to have him. So those of you who are on our newsletter got an email where we talked about 2022 in retrospect and looking ahead to 2023 as one potential topic to cover. But we're being audience-driven as much as possible. I know Eric in the past has asked us to go back to this format, so I'm very happy to do that today. And I'm really curious if there's anything top of mind. I know when we used to use this format, your Twitter feed was always a great source of stuff to talk about that was very current and topical in the ecosystem. So I encourage anyone to raise their hand. I see Eric and Carol, you're up. Eric, I think you were first. If there's something you want to talk about or introduce, let's chat about it. Or I can go with the 2023 predictions or 2022 in review.
00:05:33 - Eric
Yeah. Hi, everyone. It's great to be back. Top of mind is that I lost my job at the end of December. So yeah, the runway ran out, so to speak. And I've been in the interview process for several companies, which is always an interesting thing. It sort of feels like you're in the digestive tract of different companies, where different companies want to ask you different things. Some of them want to have you interview with 12 different people on a 20-person team, and others are just like, yeah, all right, with two interviews, do you want to work with us or not? And that's been interesting. So if you want to ask me anything about that particular process in December 2022 and 2023, I've been all up in that. I'm not too worried about my prospects. I have a couple offers already, and I'm playing the field, as it were. No offers from you guys at Edgio yet, just saying.
00:07:19 - Ishan Anand
Well, we didn't know you were on the market.
00:07:21 - Eric
Ah, well, anyway, that's been fun. And previously, in December, I sort of wanted to talk about my experience at Micro Front Ends, the disastrous conference in London. That was interesting.
00:07:44 - Ishan Anand
Oh yeah, I heard about that. It was on our list of potential places to go to and sponsor, and we ran out of bandwidth to do that because of other conflicts.
00:08:01 - Eric
Boy, you got lucky.
00:08:03 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, well, it seems like it was definitely a mixed bag for some. I do appreciate that there's a lot of work it takes to put these things on, but I read a bunch of that, so there's a lot to unpack there.
00:08:18 - Anthony Campolo
Hey, real quick, looks like there's a question from Carol.
00:08:21 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, Carol, looks like you've got your hand up. Sorry. Thank you, Daniel.
00:08:26 - Eric
Hey, we put our hands up now.
00:08:29 - Anthony Campolo
We're very civil now.
00:08:32 - Jason
Yeah.
00:08:33 - Ishan Anand
When you were introducing yourself, I was
00:08:36 - Speaker 8
checking the edg.io app. I was trying to check it. So I just wanted to say, Scott,
00:08:42 - Ishan Anand
I think you have a.
00:08:43 - Speaker 8
some wrong handle on your...
00:08:45 - Ishan Anand
In your bio.
00:08:46 - Speaker 8
the edg.io app is saying that this doesn't exist.
00:08:54 - Eric
Bio 404. That's harsh.
00:08:57 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. If you check out mine, I think I've got the correct Twitter handle, Edgio Inc., because we're incorporated. We're not some made-up company.
00:09:08 - Ishan Anand
The handle changed, I think, and that's potentially why that's there. But good catch and callout. Thank you. So we should definitely fix that. Thank you for that. So going back to Eric, what you're talking about, there's a lot to unpack there. There's the Micro Front Ends conference in London. I forget the actual name. I don't think it was Micro Front Ends. It was like... no, no, no, no.
00:09:37 - Eric
No, Modern Front Ends.
00:09:39 - Ishan Anand
Modern Front Ends. Thank you. Before we get to that, though, it was a theme of 2022: the macroeconomic environment and its impact on our ecosystem. Certainly during the pandemic, initially, but especially the later stages of the pandemic, the developer ecosystem was less affected. But certainly at the end of 2022, we saw it at Meta, we saw it at Facebook, and various other places, so definitely very topical. I'm curious what you're seeing from companies right now. Are they being more selective? Are you seeing more competition or candidates than you expected for the same positions? What are you seeing compared to what you expected, say, from a year ago?
00:10:38 - Eric
Yeah, it's my understanding that, starting in early 2022, the venture capital folks started tightening their fists around their money in a prescient sense that the economy was going down. And it's not the same thing when the economy is booming, where you can just conjure money out of nowhere. Somehow it's
00:11:16 - Anthony Campolo
being printed is no longer happening as much.
00:11:19 - Eric
Sure. And so in that scenario, there's lots of money to go around, and all the startups are flush and hiring, hiring, hiring, and that's a different thing. But in 2022, especially toward the end of 2022, I don't know if I coined this term or if I heard someone say it, but it feels like the VC winter. Everyone's battening down the hatches and huddling with their money close to their chest because the economy needs to get through this time. So there were more selective investments going on, we'll say. And if you were a startup with a track record, it wasn't like you had to be the best of the best to get VC money. However, there are still companies that raised a bunch before that happened, or were one of the best of the best, that do still have money to hire people.
00:12:41 - Anthony Campolo
Supabase. They raised like $80 million last year, right?
00:12:46 - Eric
Exactly. So there's a bunch of companies that are flush with like six years of runway or whatever that are still looking for the best of the best developers. But a lot of places I've talked to have told me, yeah, we're on an engineering hiring freeze for the foreseeable future. And that goes with all the big companies, you know, all the Facebooks and the Twitters and stuff that are laying people off. The money's not flowing like it once did and hopefully will
00:13:31 - Anthony Campolo
again. But yeah, I think that's accurate from what I've seen and from talking to other people as well. All of what you said, right.
00:13:39 - Eric
But as for candidates, I don't know. I don't know what recruitment processes you guys have been through, but no one ever tells me how many candidates are up for this role. Or at least, well, that's not... I could ask that. But a lot of the people that are wooing me at the moment are wooing me rather than trying to fit a role, because that's a super luxurious position that I find myself in. But yeah, I don't really know. I imagine there must be a bunch of people out on the market that are ex-Twitter or whatever. But I don't know.
00:14:30 - Ishan Anand
I mean, there are a couple things that I found interesting there that you were talking about. The hiring freeze reminds me of a blog post I'm trying to find right now that basically said, don't pay attention to the layoffs, or the layoffs don't tell the whole story. The real story is actually hiring freezes, and that's where the real impact of the economy happens. Layoffs tend to be known about, but hiring freezes are more secret. What really matters is: when people get laid off, are they able to get a new job? And he had some really interesting data that shows when there are freezes versus when there aren't, that's when it really impacts the economy. Because if people can transition within enough time to a job, then it's less impactful. I'm trying to find it right now.
00:15:22 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, it's especially a tough time right now if you're a beginner, if you're someone who's trying to get their first tech job, that's a really rough spot to be right now, I think.
00:15:33 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, I would definitely imagine that's the case. And I totally hear that. Most people don't tell you how many other candidates there are, but you can kind of get a sense from how quickly they try to close or extend the process. In your case, I can totally imagine it's more people trying to craft something for someone like yourself.
00:15:54 - Eric
Well, the holidays have thrown a wrench in the machine too, because when I announced that I needed a job at the end of the year, I don't know, maybe December 13th or whatever, I had a whole bunch of interviews for like two weeks. And then Christmas happened, and it slowed, and everything was like, okay, we can't. I was sort of hoping that by the end of the year I would have a decision, but no. The CTO was on vacation, and then this other person was on vacation, and it slowed everything down.
00:16:42 - Jason
But, yeah, we'll see.
00:16:44 - Ishan Anand
I totally expect that. Whether it's hiring or, or deals or everything.
00:16:49 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Honestly, when you're doing it this time of year, try to hold out, because this freeze isn't going to last much longer. Especially once the holidays roll back around. People can't sit still. Funds start pouring in somewhere. If money's on the sidelines, it's going to end up going somewhere. And tech is always a likely place for it to go.
00:17:09 - Eric
So. Okay, but what do you mean by holdout?
00:17:12 - Anthony Campolo
I mean holding out on dates. Like, if you're looking for more competitive offers, there's going to be more. Once you get about three quarters of the way through January, interest will start to spark back up again.
00:17:24 - Eric
Okay, right. But how long is it rude to sit on an offer? Like, if I had an offer yesterday, if I wait three weeks, is that a jerk move or...
00:17:42 - Anthony Campolo
No, I mean, honestly, if the offer isn't anything super compelling, I'm sure it's a reasonable offer, whatever it might be. But if it's not super compelling, put a button in it. Follow up with them. Let them know you're doing your holidays thing or whatever you're doing, and that you'll get back to them by a certain date, and they'll be fine. If they want to hire someone else, they might hire someone else. But you shouldn't have problems finding anywhere to go.
00:18:08 - Ishan Anand
Yeah.
00:18:08 - Eric
Okay.
00:18:12 - Anthony Campolo
I don't know. I'm all about that, especially for talented engineers. You know you have value. You're very skilled individuals. People are lucky to have you if they get you.
00:18:24 - Scott Steinlage
So, I mean, I also think that going that route that Daniel just spoke of is going to make people want you even more. Those people that were seeking you and that you did interview with, they're gonna be like, oh, he's not clawing at us to join us, right?
00:18:43 - Eric
Yeah, it's like hard to get. They call that.
00:18:45 - Scott Steinlage
Sure, absolutely. Yeah. You put in that work.
00:18:47 - Ishan Anand
Yeah.
00:18:47 - Anthony Campolo
Remember, there's a ton of companies with payroll. There's only one Eric.
00:18:52 - Scott Steinlage
There you go.
00:18:53 - Eric
See, if they could just all give me all their payroll.
00:18:56 - Anthony Campolo
Exactly.
00:18:59 - Ishan Anand
So I've been following... I see that Jason had his hand up, but he took it down. Jason, I'll let you speak in a second or give you an intro, but there's a guy I follow. I don't know how to pronounce his name. He has a website, Pragmatic Engineer.
00:19:16 - Scott Steinlage
Oh, yeah, I have. I have a book of his too.
00:19:19 - Ishan Anand
Oh, you do? So he talks a lot about these pragmatic parts of hiring and layoffs and stuff like that. So I just pulled him up, and I noticed it looks like he's saying that Salesforce just let go of 10% of their staff, and Vimeo 11%. He said one sad prediction for January 2023 is that tech layoffs will pick up again following the holiday break, and in 2023 we'll have reduced budgets put in place. And then he says, today Salesforce let go of 10, Vimeo 11. We will hear lots of similar announcements in the next week. So that's some hot-off-the-press news that's relevant to the topic at hand.
00:20:07 - Eric
Yeah, he's the most popular Substack in tech, I think.
00:20:17 - Ishan Anand
Oh, really? He is.
00:20:18 - Eric
Okay.
00:20:19 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:20:19 - Eric
Yeah.
00:20:20 - Jason
And yeah, I'd agree his coverage of the economic conditions in the tech industry has been pretty spot on. So if you're...
00:20:28 - Eric
Yeah, I've actually DM'd with him a couple times because he was a user of my previous company's software.
00:20:40 - Scott Steinlage
But yeah, he's got a pretty good podcast on
00:20:46 - Eric
Jersey. Yeah, he was on. He was on.
00:20:51 - Scott Steinlage
I can't think of it right now. I can look at it.
00:20:53 - Eric
The Tim Ferriss podcast.
00:20:54 - Scott Steinlage
Oh, he was probably on several podcasts, but.
00:20:56 - Eric
Well, I mean, he's on lots of podcasts, but yeah, he's successfully transitioned from engineer to pundit in a way that the rest of us level up.
00:21:09 - Scott Steinlage
Engineering was the podcast I was thinking of by coding fans. He did a good one on there if you want to give it a go.
00:21:14 - Ishan Anand
Listen, so how do I pronounce his name? Eric, you said it earlier. I'd love to know.
00:21:20 - Eric
Jerzy, I think.
00:21:21 - Ishan Anand
Okay. Jerzy. Okay, I'll have to practice that. Really interesting. Do you agree with most of his coverage? From your personal experience, how is it reflected in what you've seen firsthand?
00:21:37 - Eric
I follow him on Twitter, and I don't really investigate his conclusions.
00:21:45 - Anthony Campolo
So.
00:21:45 - Eric
Okay, it sounds like it fits with my worldview, but I haven't done any backup research.
00:21:55 - Scott Steinlage
He gets a lot of whistleblowers coming to him as well, like a lot of inside knowledge that's transferred to him because of his, I don't know, stature, I guess, or whatever.
00:22:03 - Anthony Campolo
Right.
00:22:04 - Jason
Well, and I think at one point, I don't know if he's changed his opinion, but he did roll back some of his coverage of the layoffs. I think he had put a tweet out saying that he wasn't going to be posting as much as he had been because it was a lot of doomerism and doom and gloom, and he didn't want to keep amplifying that. So I don't know if he's... yeah, because it's going to get... I think we're probably at the beginning of this, not anywhere close to the end. Not that I know anything, but Ishan, and I don't know who else here has been around since the original dot-com days, but yeah, baby, this is starting to feel more like the original dot-com days than maybe '08.
00:22:51 - Ishan Anand
Oh, really? I remember those days. I remember talking to a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and saying, I don't know that those days are the ones in the '90s where he said you could look through office buildings and see clear to the other side because they were just empty. Well, now it's because people are working from home, I suppose. But history never repeats.
00:23:21 - Jason
Yeah, history never repeats, but it rhymes.
00:23:23 - Ishan Anand
Yeah.
00:23:25 - Jason
I think the tech industry is so much bigger and different than it was then, but I think we can all start to see the euphoria of the last few years for what it is now. I think some of us are starting to see the euphoria of hiring and growth in tech headcounts for what it is now. And that's going to take a long time to process through. Facebook's still twice as big as it was in 2019.
00:23:53 - Ishan Anand
Yeah.
00:23:53 - Jason
So a 10 or 12% layoff doesn't really even get them close to being back to what they were before the pandemic. But I do think there is definitely, at least for the moment, a bifurcation between developers with closer to a decade's worth of experience or name recognition and their ability to get hired, versus somebody with only a few years of experience or no name recognition. I was even seeing new job postings for senior-level, principal-level, staff-level engineers at Facebook still being available with notes in the job description saying, hey, this is not affected by the hiring freeze. We're looking for a very specific type of skill. So you can get hired at these places if you have a very specific skill set or have the right experience that they're looking for, but your generic...
00:25:01 - Anthony Campolo
just the dark matter developer. Yeah, dark matter developers.
00:25:07 - Jason
Full-stack engineer with a handful of years of experience doing kind of general web app development doesn't have that leverage.
00:25:13 - Anthony Campolo
Right.
00:25:14 - Jason
Just to be frank.
00:25:15 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. I mean, I got hired at Edgio throughout this, and I think that's because my name recognition tends to skew much heavier than my actual experience.
00:25:24 - Eric
You know, Facebook used to be... I went through the Facebook recruitment pipeline, and they were very much just like, we want engineering talent. We don't care what your specialty is. We just want engineering talent. And they were just slurping up all the engineers they could. In the end, I told them no because I didn't want to live in Silicon Valley, but good for you. That was a thing that happened. I have two quick...
00:26:06 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, go ahead. I was just gonna ask, don't they have remote work or...
00:26:10 - Jason
No, they do now.
00:26:12 - Eric
They didn't six years ago when I
00:26:14 - Ishan Anand
went through the pipeline. Got it. Okay. Sorry, you're right.
00:26:17 - Eric
Thank you.
00:26:20 - Scott Steinlage
We will get to you after, Eric.
00:26:25 - Ishan Anand
Okay.
00:26:25 - Eric
I have to go soon, so I just wanted to share two little anecdotes about my tech exams during my interviews. One was they started me off with an empty repo that had, like, ts-node would run the index.ts, and they said, okay, here's a REST GET URL where you can get some repos from GitHub in JSON. They said, okay, on the command line, we want you to fetch these and list the titles of these issues or whatever they were. And it was so... I immediately started like, oh, well, this is a third-party API, so we need to confirm that the types all match. So I'm going to install Zod, and then we're going to parse this stuff from this fetch thing and then print them out. It was supposed to take 45 minutes, and within 15 minutes I had this strongly typed thing to fetch this list, and then they wanted me to sort them. It was kind of crazy easy. But then when I talked to one of the people that used to work there, they said that sort of thing tripped up like 90% of the people.
00:28:16 - Eric
People didn't understand that fetch gave you back a response, and then you had to await response.json(), and people didn't get that. And my other experience was an example code review where this company had come up with this PR in React where I swear every single line had some mistake in it. If I had tried really hard to do this, I don't think I would do it as well as they did. But it was just like they didn't supply the key prop to each React thing. And then there were other ones where they were calling unshift on a thing that was in useState, and you can't modify state that way in a mutating way. Anyway, these sorts of code tests have been really kind of fun to see what the industry is like out there. And this one was very... they were all legitimate. They weren't super contrived.
00:29:35 - Eric
They were all the kind of thing that a junior React person might try to do. Like they might do a useState todos and then try to do todos.push rather than setTodos and concat or whatever. So anyway, that has been fun.
00:29:52 - Ishan Anand
I think it goes to Jason's comment about junior versus senior devs, or devs with experience. I think we used to call them fizzbuzz. They were interview questions designed to filter out different levels of experience.
00:30:09 - Anthony Campolo
The first algorithm I learned, fizzbuzz filters out the...
00:30:13 - Ishan Anand
The.
00:30:13 - Eric
the experienced people, because the experienced people don't know fizzbuzz.
00:30:20 - Ishan Anand
Right. I do want to get to Scott. You did mention somebody else who was next in line. I don't want to hold them up.
00:30:30 - Eric
Okay. I love you guys. I have to go.
00:30:33 - Ishan Anand
Eric, thank you for joining.
00:30:35 - Eric
Cheers.
00:30:38 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, Deficio, what's up? We saw you came up here. Would love to hear from you.
00:30:45 - Deficio
Hi. Thank you for the opportunity.
00:30:50 - Scott Steinlage
We're having a hard time hearing you, at least I am.
00:30:55 - Ishan Anand
Yeah.
00:30:55 - Anthony Campolo
If you can get a little closer to your microphone.
00:30:58 - Deficio
Oh, you can't hear me very well.
00:31:01 - Anthony Campolo
You're still a little quiet. You're still a little quiet.
00:31:05 - Deficio
Kind of strange.
00:31:06 - Anthony Campolo
I can hear you if I turn it all the way up, and I...
00:31:09 - Scott Steinlage
think we can hear ourselves echoing, maybe.
00:31:16 - Deficio
That's strange. But what I'm saying is, yes, thank you for the opportunity to speak. I'm a JavaScript website developer, and I've been coding for two years now. And when I heard about open source development, I wanted to try it out, but I don't know how people really cope with open source development. Like, you just have the GitHub repo and you contribute. I thought there would be a ticket or a kind of core team whereby you can actually have, this is what you're doing next, this is what is necessary next. But I guess anybody can just go there.
00:32:00 - Scott Steinlage
I think I'm gonna stop you just for a second. Sorry, I still can't make it out. Can you hear it, Anthony?
00:32:05 - Ishan Anand
I heard the question.
00:32:06 - Brian Douglas
Okay.
00:32:06 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Okay. So.
00:32:07 - Eric
Okay.
00:32:07 - Anthony Campolo
Can you mute yourself because I'm kind of feeding back through? Yeah, okay. So the question was basically: how do you get involved with open source, and what do you do with all these random repos everywhere? Like, how do you actually...
00:32:20 - Brian Douglas
Just.
00:32:20 - Anthony Campolo
How do you do this? It's a very good question, but what you want to look for is projects that have some indication that they even want contributors in the first place. So you may see a CONTRIBUTING.md file in some projects, and you may see good first issues. That's another common thing you'll see: projects will have certain issues that are marked, like, this is a good first issue. It should be fairly simple. So there are some ways that projects try to signal to people, hey, this is a good way to contribute or get involved. But there's not really a lot of good standardized ways of doing it beyond those two I just mentioned, so it's kind of messy. The thing I think to do is to pay attention to spaces like this, where there are people out there saying, hey, I'm involved in open source. I'm looking to help people get involved in open source. Come talk to me. I can help you out. That's really kind of the best way to do it. So have you heard of Open Sauced or Brian Douglas?
00:33:27 - Anthony Campolo
If so... oh, if not, then I would say check out Open Sauced. That would be a great place to go join their Discord.
00:33:37 - Deficio
Okay, probably I should start getting involved. And yes, I'm open to any opportunity out there. So anyone looking for a JavaScript developer, I'm in need of one opportunity. Thank you.
00:34:01 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, well, thank you for the question, and thank you for sharing. Nifty, I see you're on the stage. Did you have something you want to jump in and contribute? Otherwise, I'm gonna take us back to... go ahead.
00:34:14 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:34:15 - Ishan Anand
Oh, okay.
00:34:16 - Speaker 8
You take us wherever you want. But I was actually going to chime in for Eric, but he's gone. Maybe he'll listen to the recording. It's just for him. The only thing is I don't have a lot of sound advice for job seeking, but the one solid piece of advice I can give is the word backfill. Whenever I hear that, I think unreasonable manager. And the other thing is I never blame the employee. I always blame the manager. And I would also advise that headhunters and corporate recruiters are psychopaths, and never trust them. Literally the only way to have a comfy existence in the workplace is to know the people that work there before you go. So that's it.
00:35:18 - Ishan Anand
So I have met some good recruiters, but it sounds like both of those have been informed by past experience. Would you be able to elaborate a little bit more?
00:35:33 - Speaker 8
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I spent like a decade just getting knocked around, just thrown out of employment for no reason, just because I sniffed wrong or whatever. People just make you feel meaningless, whatever. Even if you develop a very specific skill set in a very demanding thing where people tell you, you're showing up as the number one person for this thing, and I get tons and tons of calls, like I have to weed them out, but then every time I get placed somewhere... not every time, not every time. I mean, some of them, it was just my fault, whatever personal issues I had to figure out, like how do I deal with these people because they're just really not of sound mind. But either way, it can be really tough. And when you're in a good spot, even if you feel like maybe somebody else is making more than you or maybe somebody else is better than you, if you are working with people you can get along with, like even a company culture that fits, just stay there, because that's the most important thing.
00:36:51 - Ishan Anand
So yeah, let me maybe recontextualize it. You tell me if this is accurate or not. I think it's easy, especially as developers, to learn this the hard way. You need to pay attention to people's incentives and not necessarily what they communicate to you. They might overpromise and underdeliver. When you're talking to recruiters, if you think about their incentives, they're not getting paid by you, the person who's looking for the job. They're getting paid by the company whose position they fill. So their incentive is to send as many of the best-fitting candidates as they can to it. And an unscrupulous recruiter might overpromise to a lot of people because they get rewarded, if they're not thinking long term, and less punished if they overpromise to certain people or try to get as many candidates in there. Does that sound like another way to recontextualize what you're describing?
00:38:00 - Speaker 8
Oh yeah. You're focused on the recruiter part of it. I don't know if it's so much the recruiters. I think the pathway into an organization through a recruiter, where you don't know anybody first, is generally your worst path.
00:38:17 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I was, yeah, it's not super great. It's not a great place to be. I've been there.
00:38:23 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:38:23 - Anthony Campolo
As Ishan was saying, there are weird incentives, and the system's challenging to work through and involves signaling certain things that may or may not signal whether you're actually suitable for the job or not, and lots of stuff like that.
00:38:40 - Ishan Anand
I just noticed Brian's here. Yeah.
00:38:46 - Anthony Campolo
Summoned him.
00:38:48 - Ishan Anand
Yeah. I don't know if you summoned him. He was just. We just had somebody asking about how to get involved in open source.
00:38:53 - Anthony Campolo
I added open source on this one.
00:38:57 - Ishan Anand
Okay, so maybe we should go back to that topic. Do you want to just set it up and see if Brian has any additional insights?
00:39:05 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, we had a listener asking the boilerplate question: how do you get involved in open source, and how do you manage all these confusing repos? What do you even do to get involved? How do you even start? You run spaces about this exact topic frequently. I think you did today or yesterday.
00:39:25 - Ishan Anand
And maybe one other thing to add to that, and I might be extrapolating, is I think the goal for the listener was to both get experience and get exposure that could lead to landing a job.
00:39:39 - Anthony Campolo
To get a job, exactly. Yes.
00:39:41 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:39:41 - Brian Douglas
Thanks for the thing, Anthony. Yeah, I've been doing some spaces around good first issues this week. Going to do a video and a blog post around it. But for context, for everyone who doesn't know who I am, I spent the last four and a half years working at GitHub, engaging people to do more open source and talking to people who are doing it well to kind of grow open source in general. I shared that less than 1% of all developers on GitHub do open source contributions. So my goal with the company I'm working on right now, called Open Sauced, is to increase that number. I mention that because when it comes to getting started, I think there's a really good Open Source Guide, which is a thing that four members of my team at GitHub put together before I joined. And there's a lot of good information there. But that's kind of all it is. It's just information. It's very general information on how to interact with GitHub, how to open issues, how to be respectful and kind. But what a lot of people are looking for is the actionable thing.
00:40:39 - Brian Douglas
And I think getting your job through showing real work through open source is such an underutilized skill and opportunity, and that's what I'm trying to push for. So some options are... and I want to avoid saying, this is my advice and don't do anything else that's out there.
00:40:59 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. It's not necessarily prescriptive in the sense of, you do this, you're gonna get this outcome. It's more, here are a couple things that will probably set you in the right direction.
00:41:07 - Brian Douglas
Exactly.
00:41:08 - Jason
Yeah.
00:41:08 - Brian Douglas
So all the stuff that's out there will set you in the right direction. What I'm trying to do is give the next step after that. So after you found your good first issue, or after you found the project, or after you learned how to use GitHub, my pitch is in my Discord, actually, just folks who are sharing some early projects. So there's Avi, who's based in Japan, and she usually does Spaces a couple hours from now. She has built an open source project to share your Spaces, and it's got like 11 stars on it, and it's a Next.js app that doesn't work yet, but people are building it together in the open. So to go do open source in that manner of, hey, I'm going to build something from the ground up, in an early community, you don't get that opportunity all the time. And one of the mistakes people make is, I'm going to go contribute to React or I'm going to go contribute to Vue. It's such a big project with so many moving parts, and they're having calls and Zooms and all the other stuff that you...
00:42:05 - Brian Douglas
It's hard. It's like playing double Dutch. You try to jump in, and then you get burnt out or you hit the wall and you're like, ah, this is not for me. But if you went to, like... recently TanStack was renamed from React Query. But if you went to React Query in 2018 and were like, oh yeah, this is a cool project, imagine what you would be four years from now with all that knowledge in React Query, in a project that only one dude, a co-founder of some small startup in Utah, Tanner, was building for his startup. And if you come along and learn that, you could grow with the project. And I think a lot of times we miss the opportunity of growing with the project, showing contributions over time, and then leveraging those contributions to put in your cover letter or put in your resume, or take inbounds from people who notice you.
00:42:52 - Anthony Campolo
That's really the key advice: don't try to join the biggest project there is because you think that's the thing to do because it has traction. You want to be able to find the things that are almost about to blow up, which is harder to find, but those are also the ones that tend to most need the contributors, or the people who can give the intangibles like the docs or the videos or the extra stuff. They've built the thing, it's like an MVP, but it's still all the other stuff that it needs to really become a very successful open source project. And that's the good place to be.
00:43:28 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, echo that as well. Anthony, I learned how to code back in 2012, 2013, and it was around the time when bootcamps were getting popular. So Dev Bootcamp had just started. And one of the things, when you go around the room and do those intro meetings on Zoom or go to a meetup, they're like, hey, why do you want to learn how to code? And what I heard a lot around that time, and it's laughable now, was most people saying, I want to learn how to code because I want to start a company, because I want to be the next Facebook. I'm going to build the next Facebook. And what people usually do is they literally build Facebook. They put all the features in there, and they're like, oh, this is the best thing ever, and then no one uses it. And what a lot of people forget about Facebook is it started with one feature, and Twitter started with one feature. It was sending SMS to tell your friends what you're doing.
00:44:21 - Brian Douglas
And we miss that origin story of all these projects. So you look at any open source project, where even React was literally injecting PHP-style coding inside of front-end web UI. It's cool, but no one got it when React was announced. Tom Occhino actually gave a talk recently, last month at the Andreessen React party here in San Francisco, and he was talking about how when they shipped React, they were talking about all the technical things they could do because React existed. It was at the Facebook F8 conference. I don't know if that still happens, but I've watched some...
00:44:59 - Anthony Campolo
of these videos of these talks they've given back, like 2013, 2014. They're dense.
00:45:04 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:45:04 - Brian Douglas
And the crazy part is, when I learned about it, because I had just taken my first job as an engineer, and I learned about React at F8, the entire bank of engineers that I was sitting with, we all laughed at it because we had jQuery then. Why would you use React when you had jQuery?
00:45:19 - Anthony Campolo
Like, React was dumb then. How innocent.
00:45:23 - Brian Douglas
But six months later they announced it at JSConf EU. Jordan Walke presented it, and he didn't present it as a technical thing. He presented the painkiller part, the problems that were solved at Facebook because of React. And that's what grew adoption, because people could see, oh yeah... I saw you also, Pete...
00:45:47 - Anthony Campolo
Hunt did his talk where he put it in context versus Angular and Backbone and the other front-end frameworks that were available at the time. So he made the case not versus jQuery, but versus the other component things that were being created, whether you realized it or not.
00:46:04 - Eric
Yeah.
00:46:05 - Brian Douglas
And that's the.
00:46:06 - Eric
It's.
00:46:06 - Brian Douglas
It's funny because what I see in the Jamstack world, which is the place I come from, is everyone builds a new CMS every couple years, and all the other CMSs are still around, but there's yet another one. One that comes to mind is Tina. Tina is still around, but you see it evolve into the next thing and the next thing and the next...
00:46:26 - Anthony Campolo
thing and Gatsby the next.
00:46:28 - Brian Douglas
Exactly. And Gatsby is actually doing a rewrite as well. You saw the announcement where they're pulling out the content layer, and their focus is less on competing with Next.js. Now they're competing with Contentful.
00:46:43 - Anthony Campolo
Interesting.
00:46:44 - Ishan Anand
Oh, I missed.
00:46:46 - Anthony Campolo
So the person who asked that question is popping back up. Her mic is super low. If you turn your volume up all the way, then you might be able to hear what she's saying. And I have no idea how to pronounce her name.
00:47:08 - Scott Steinlage
Actually.
00:47:10 - Deficio
Okay.
00:47:10 - Scott Steinlage
Hello.
00:47:11 - Anthony Campolo
Yes, you're louder now. You sound great.
00:47:14 - Deficio
Okay, I had to rejoin, so I guess I missed some things.
00:47:19 - Anthony Campolo
So.
00:47:19 - Deficio
Yes, actually, I saw the link in the chat box later and I've joined. Thank you. And like I've said, it's just that someone is not actually getting the whole community thing. How do you bond well once you get to the community, and how do you interact well so that you maximize the opportunity? Also, in the name of this community, Developer Irene, is it like we have jobs available, or... I don't know. I just want to understand very well. Thank you.
00:48:03 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I think she's asking if open source is actually feeding people into jobs or not, which I think is not the case right now. It's getting you open source cred, right, Brian?
00:48:16 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, I mean, we'll get there eventually. What we've done so far in the last six months is we've made partnerships with companies that are doing open source, to get them to use open source for tracking their contributors and also growing their contributors. So that was step zero, really just getting the word out. Step one was connect to companies, because I think that's the missing point. We have so many communities that are encouraging open source contribution and showing them the ropes, but there aren't enough projects out there that will onboard these folks. And we have Hacktoberfest, which is a bit of a cluster because not everyone's prepared to do Hacktoberfest and you get random folks contributing. So the next step that we're working on is actually validating folks who are doing open source and doing it well, and creating that model to also encourage others to make that contribution. So eventually we'll have a job board. Eventually you'll have invites to contribute and to interview at places. Our roadmap, open-sauced/roadmap, it's open source, you can check it out. That roadmap is really our goals, our hopes and dreams.
00:49:15 - Brian Douglas
So the mode I'm talking about a lot now is because we're in growth mode now, looking forward to scaling the team and scaling the product. But to answer your question, I don't know, the purpose of the space is open mic and the subject is developer hiring. I just jumped in midstream. I think the best thing you could do if you want to get a job... well, sorry, this is prescriptive, this is my opinion, but I'm going to give a very harsh opinion. If you want to get a job and you're getting started, open source is a really, really good place to get that started. If you don't know where to start, I would start with open source. Sign up today. We're going to be feeding people projects and companies that are actively taking on contributions, actively have a business behind them, because there's a whole story... I've been doing YouTube, this podcast series called The Secret Sauce on YouTube, and there are all these stories of people getting their jobs through open source. At GitHub, we created Electron. Electron is one of the most popular native app solutions for building apps in JavaScript on the desktop.
00:50:25 - Brian Douglas
And it was built at GitHub because of the IDE that's no longer around called Atom. There was an intern who was done doing intern work in the middle of the summer and was invited to make contributions to Electron. Then he eventually was invited to work part time during his last year of school. And today he's a staff engineer building some of the coolest projects at GitHub, still at GitHub today. So any social card that you see on Twitter, when you see a repo, that was that intern that built that four years prior to... or sorry, who joined Electron four years prior because he was interested and started making contributions. And I know that's one path, but there are so many other companies that have open source projects. You don't have to contribute to Facebook's React, but you can contribute to a smaller React drag-and-drop experience or library out there.
00:51:20 - Deficio
Okay, got this. Thank you. I will join the community and try to find something I could do to contribute. Appreciated. Thank you.
00:51:36 - Eric
Yeah.
00:51:36 - Brian Douglas
And I would say, sorry, I don't mean to hijack the space. So, Ishan...
00:51:42 - Ishan Anand
This is on topic. Yeah, good.
00:51:46 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:51:46 - Brian Douglas
And I would say, when people join communities, usually people come through saying, hey, this is me, hello. And I do the same thing when I join a Discord. I forget about it. I don't log in ever again. And it's the same thing for the people who are running the show. If you don't say hi, if you don't show up and provide some updates or what you're interested in, or set up a Zoom call with me, because I have a pretty open calendar as well, I'll forget about you. So I'm not going to chase you down to give you contributions to make. But if you're like, hey, I just learned how to do state management in React, do you have any problems around state management in React, as opposed to some DMs I have right now that are like, hey, I want to do open source, like what projects? I don't know you. I don't know what to give you.
00:52:30 - Anthony Campolo
And I can speak to this from experience because the first Discord I ever joined was the Open Sauced Discord. This is why I still, to this day, send people to it. The way we did it was that I came to you with Redwood. I was like, I think this is a cool thing. I am a total newbie. I barely know anything about it, but I learned enough about this thing to speak about it. So get me on your podcast to talk about that. And you're like, great, this is a topic I want on my podcast. You're someone who knows more about it than me. I'll bring you on. And that's all it took. From there, we've had this now two-year-long collaboration where I bring you on to random Spaces I'm on. So yeah, it's cool.
00:53:11 - Brian Douglas
What's crazy about that is like, I
00:53:13 - Anthony Campolo
didn't know you're a newbie because you
00:53:14 - Brian Douglas
you didn't come to me in my DMs with your hat in your hand saying, hey, I just learned how to code, or I'm still learning how to code. You're just like, hey, this is a cool thing. You have a podcast. You've never mentioned this on your podcast. And I'm like, yeah, I've been wanting to talk to Redwood or talk to somebody who knows more about it for a while. And you presented yourself, and now you have a successful career. Not because of me, because of your...
00:53:36 - Anthony Campolo
tenacity though, but you're along there for the journey.
00:53:44 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, I think.
00:53:45 - Speaker 8
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
00:53:46 - Ishan Anand
Oh, Jason. No, go ahead.
00:53:48 - Jason
Yeah, no, apparently your hand goes down when you unmute your mic, so I didn't know that until just now. So, Brian, I think to add on to what you were saying, at least in my experience, using the open source repository yourself first before trying to figure out how to contribute to it would probably be a good prerequisite. I don't know if you, you called it out exactly like that, but at
00:54:13 - Brian Douglas
least in my experience, that's a great summary. Like, it's almost not obvious, but it's like the most obvious thing to do is like use it first because it
00:54:23 - Jason
has to be something, you're probably, you know, you're using it for a reason because you're interested in that. So just wanting to contribute to open source in the abstract is too wide of a question. Like you were talking about, like, what do I throw you at if you can't get any more specific than that? But if you've got a project you're using and something doesn't work right, or isn't clear enough, particularly that's the big one is like documentation, right? Because if you've used something and you figured something else that's not in the documentation, that's a great way to contribute something is you don't even have to fix the code. You just like, hey, I figured out how to use it. Here's an example. Because coming up with good examples is always a hard part when trying to. Especially for the younger repositories, younger projects. But anyway, that's just my two cents.
00:55:10 - Anthony Campolo
I totally agree with you. I feel like that's the sleeper method to get involved that people skip on. You're accomplishing multiple goals at the same time. You're getting into the docs and actually milling through and learning what you're trying to approach, and then you're also contributing at the same time. So it's a natural process. A lot of people who try to get into open source try to go out of their way to do it, like, oh, I'm going to contribute for the first time. Whereas you could just be naturally learning something and making contributions. But I feel like what happens is a lot of people get insecure, and that's kind of where this buck stops.
00:55:50 - Jason
Again, from my personal experience, I started using a couple of new React open source projects, and I've been using them for the better part of this year, if not longer. And I'm just now starting to feel like there are things I can contribute to that repository that aren't there, or pieces that are missing. But it's taken me, as someone with a couple decades of experience, six months of using a thing before I felt like I was worthy of making a contribution. So it's not like you can just show up and start making contributions on day one. That's the hard way.
00:56:32 - Anthony Campolo
Absolutely.
00:56:34 - Speaker 8
I just want to interject here. Dougie is the center of the universe for contributions. Okay, everybody join Dougie, get in there and help me. I want to submit a project to let's copy Netflix's data model and build out some custom business intelligence solutions. Okay, that was my thing there. But yeah, no, I think it really goes really well with the idea of getting to know the people you're working with and then working with them, as opposed to just getting injected into this new organization. Nobody knows you, and you're supposed to just magically start getting along with everybody and start working. You could be a mild-mannered, normal person who's productive and has all the qualities, but maybe somebody just doesn't like the cut of your jib. You don't know. So this is the best way. It's so organic. Somebody said that. I think Jason said that. But yes, this is a totally organic way of...
00:57:25 - Anthony Campolo
Or.
00:57:25 - Speaker 8
Oh no, it was Daniel who said that. It's the sleeper way. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you just get in there, get to know the system, work docs, everything is contribute, and you're part of the community. You're in. That's good.
00:57:40 - Anthony Campolo
Exactly. And it makes you feel part of it, right? In a lot of cases, I feel like a lot of people have things to contribute, but they don't think it's a large enough contribution. Just over the last couple of weeks, I was playing with Sanity and going through their GROQ docs. I'm like, there is so much missing from this that they don't explain that would make it so much more valuable. And I just make notes to myself of what to write examples for, what to create a tutorial for, and I contribute it when I'm ready.
00:58:09 - Jason
Yeah, total imposter syndrome variant of, is this good enough to even contribute? Is it worth anyone's time to even look at? Absolutely. Brian, I did have one question, and to tie this back into what we were talking about at the beginning with the current macro environment around hiring: you said that you got started in 2011 or so, if I heard you correctly. What are things looking like from your point of view, as someone with that middle, and you've worked at GitHub, so you worked at a rocket ship? You've got a particularly unique set of experiences. How's the marketplace feeling in the current state of everything that's going on?
00:58:56 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, it's funny because I was having private conversations a year ago because everyone in DevRel, so I did DevRel at GitHub, was getting like a $250,000 salary. Senior engineers were getting like 180k no matter where you lived in the US, and it was pretty wild. I was like, I don't think this...
00:59:12 - Jason
is going to work.
00:59:13 - Brian Douglas
My background also is, I have a finance degree. I went to school specifically for institutional investments, so I wanted to be a stockbroker. Basically I graduated in 2008, the wrong time to try to get a job with no network. So my entire career as a dev has been: get a network, grow a community. And folks who have a network and community, you have no problem getting a job. I saw someone get laid off by Netlify. Unfortunately, Netlify is a great company, but they had to lay off 14% of their company, which is not a public number, so I probably shouldn't have said that out loud, but what I'm getting at...
00:59:45 - Anthony Campolo
We were just talking about this earlier today in one of our meetings, but
00:59:48 - Brian Douglas
I reached out to one of their devs and I was like, hey, I actually wanted to hire. I couldn't hire. I can't afford someone from Netlify. But I was like, hey, let's have a chat. Let's talk about your project. I'd never met you. They got laid off on Thursday. By Monday, they had an offer signed by Friday. So if you have a network, if you're here in Spaces, people can see you. It'll be okay.
01:00:11 - Anthony Campolo
I know a person who got hired 12 hours after they got fired.
01:00:15 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, I mean, any company making money and that has a stable runway or a profit, they're fine. It's all the startups that took tons of money and have no business. That's the challenge, and that's what you've got to... you don't need to avoid it, but you want to be concerned if you're working at a startup and there's no plan to profitability.
01:00:38 - Jason
Yeah, I definitely agree. I think networking is key, although it's a bit too late for this cycle. But definitely for the next one, be working on your networking.
01:00:49 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, that's why... and I have to drop to jump to a meeting. I love hanging out with you guys, but Open Sauced specifically, we're having profiles launch at the end of the month, so anybody can sign up. The landing page doesn't show this yet because we haven't shipped it, but if you look at any of our issues, you can see this feature coming. So anybody who has a profile, we'll start recommending contributions and companies to reach out to folks who want intros. That's all on the roadmap. And I would love to chat with anybody. If you want a demo, we'll ship some demos to the YouTube channel soon. But yeah, I love joining the space. I think this might be the first or second time I talked about it. But yeah, thanks for hosting this anytime.
01:01:29 - Anthony Campolo
We do this every week.
01:01:30 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, absolutely.
01:01:32 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah. And don't forget, guys, Anthony did link Open Sauced there in the comments. You can just click the little chat box there in the bottom right and find it. So go check it out.
01:01:41 - Eric
Nice.
01:01:43 - Ishan Anand
Scott, you want to do the station break at the one-hour mark? Go ahead.
01:01:48 - Scott Steinlage
Absolutely. Thanks again, Brian. Man, have a good meeting. All right, thank you all so much for joining us today. We do this every Wednesday at 12:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, where we discuss anything web dev and JavaScript-related. We're so glad you're here today. Whether you're a beginner developer or whether you've been doing this for a very long time, it doesn't matter. We want to hear from everybody. In fact, that's how we get the most value here, when people join the space and contribute and raise their hand. So if you do want to have a conversation with us, please just put your hand up or request to come up. You can do so by clicking the little plus-heart symbol there and putting your hand up as well. And we would love to hear either a question or opinion or fact or whatever it might be, because we also love to help people and bring value to them as well, which this space has done very much. So, so excited for the topic at hand today. We are talking about developers and hiring and the layoffs that have been going on, things like that.
01:02:47 - Scott Steinlage
But trying to keep a positive note here for 2023 and what people can do to better themselves in the new year. So thank you all so much. And back to Ishan.
01:02:59 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, thank you, Scott. So one of the things we opened with at the beginning, for those who joined late, was reflecting on 2022 and predictions for 2023 in the year ahead for the JavaScript and web development ecosystem, and that's how we got onto some of the topics we just raised. And again, as Scott mentioned, feel free to raise your hand. We're happy to bring anybody up to the stage. It's an open mic, so anything JavaScript- or web-development-related is on topic. But I'm curious, as we go into the last half hour of this space, what people think their predictions are for the ecosystem, whether that's technical, whether that's economic. I'm very curious to hear what people think is coming in the next 12 months after what we saw in 2022. We sent out a couple links in the newsletter this week, so if you go to javascriptjam.com, you can sign up for our newsletter, and I believe there should be a link there as well for this week's newsletter, where we had a couple of interesting articles we collected from across the web on predictions for the ecosystem.
01:04:15 - Ishan Anand
Anthony, I'm curious if you got a chance to look at any of those, and if you had any reactions to what was in there.
01:04:24 - Anthony Campolo
I have not. But I would say, in terms of predictions for the ecosystem, I think we're going to see a greater increase in enthusiasm for non-React frameworks. I made a tweet about this the other day, somewhat of a snarky tweet, that some projects kind of fell into this pattern where they're like, use our tool because React sucks. And I don't think that entirely follows. Make a case for your actual tool. But I think that's a strong sentiment, so we're going to see a lot more of that. I think just things that are going for different JavaScript frameworks, or even not JavaScript frameworks at all, like web components, and this push toward performance, and projects like Solid and Qwik especially, are really highlighting how we can still get the benefits of a modern component-based framework without having to sacrifice performance, which I think is what I'm going to be most excited for this year.
01:05:29 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, I definitely feel that personally, and that was definitely in the air. People are calling it post-React. I thought it was really interesting. One of the folks we linked to, Bytes, which was a newsletter, had their predictions for 2023. And another one was Ryan Carniato's reflections on 2022, he's the creator of SolidJS, and his predictions for frameworks in 2023. And this post-React, solving-the-hydration-issues idea definitely seems to be a theme. The interesting thing from Bytes that I thought was both insightful and also blazingly obvious was that they said React hate will reach an all-time high, and so will React usage. And it makes a lot of sense if you think about it. If you just linearly extrapolate, both are growing. It'll take some time before maybe it impacts React, and it remains to be seen if server components catch up and bend the curve there. But definitely, that's very funny because I...
01:06:35 - Anthony Campolo
did not read that and arrived at the exact same conclusion as them. So that, that makes me feel good.
01:06:40 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, I mean, it's insightful, but also an extrapolation of linear patterns so far. If you just keep going, both are growing. One of the other things they had, as it relates to what we were just talking about with the macroeconomic environment, and this was their leading thing, they said RIP to VC-funded open source.
01:07:07 - Anthony Campolo
Yes, it is so.
01:07:08 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
01:07:09 - Anthony Campolo
There's less VC money, as we were talking about earlier, but that doesn't mean there's no VC money, and that doesn't mean there aren't still smart ways to invest VC money in open source. So I think it's going to be a general downtrend, but I think that's because of macro forces, and with VC-funded open source, we have no idea yet because it just happened a year ago. So we can't even say whether it succeeded or not yet.
01:07:38 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, I, I don't think they're saying it's the end of open source. Well, I guess they're saying, you know,
01:07:44 - Anthony Campolo
VC-funded open source. What they mean is Astro, they mean Remix, they mean projects that are being footed by VC-funded companies like Netlify, Vercel. I think those both kind of fall into that bucket.
01:07:58 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, I think it means... I agree. I would just caution somebody listening to that not to mean those projects specifically, because those ones actually got funding. I think it means any new ones that might have been funded, say in 2023, are less likely to get funded.
01:08:16 - Anthony Campolo
Sure, some of the ones I mentioned, but it's not impossible.
01:08:19 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, New ones. Yeah.
01:08:23 - Jason
Everything just gets harder. And yeah, the quality of the things that do get funded goes way up or maybe reverts to the mean, or they
01:08:31 - Ishan Anand
become more entrenched, they become harder to dislodge. Whereas we might have, you know, 20 contenders to the throne of React, it might be, you know, just five or six, which might in some way be better and simpler and easier to decide. But that was an interesting angle that I thought was interesting about 2023 that I didn't see in a lot of other predictions, but makes a lot of sense. It kind of combines both the technical parts and the economic parts of the ecosystem together to look at how those interplay. Yeah, go ahead.
01:09:03 - Jason
I'll make a point on the topic about React peaking. I think on the flip side, I agree that it might be peaking in the bleeding-edge, open-source, flavor-of-the-week kind of hot-topic sense, but on the corporate side, where most software exists, it's just getting started over there. The amount of software that has to be rewritten over the next decade, and new software that needs to be developed, it's all going to be done in React.
01:09:34 - Anthony Campolo
Which is also why I think we should really caution ourselves against telling beginners to learn these hip new things instead of React.
01:09:42 - Ishan Anand
That's exactly what I was talking about.
01:09:44 - Jason
If you want a good, safe job that isn't necessarily at a startup or isn't necessarily at a quote tech company, there's so much work to be done in what some of us might consider boring, uninteresting software, but it's good-paying jobs, and that software lasts. They think in terms of decades for how long software needs to last. So there are a lot of brand-new React applications that will still be being written in a decade...
01:10:16 - Anthony Campolo
from now,
01:10:19 - Jason
if history does indeed repeat.
01:10:23 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, it's a really good point. I'm trying to think of a good analogy. It's like somebody telling you to go learn, I don't know, Rust if you're just starting, which makes theoretical sense, but from a pragmatic, getting-employed sense, might be harder unless you're already senior in your job.
01:10:37 - Anthony Campolo
There's probably more Rust jobs than SolidJS jobs.
01:10:41 - Ishan Anand
Okay, Solid, yes, I love SolidJS as a framework.
01:10:44 - Anthony Campolo
But maybe that's a good example. You'll enrich yourself by learning it. But if you want to get a job and you need to learn a thing now, you need to learn React. I tell that to all beginners. You can learn any framework you want, you learn basically the same thing anyway. But if you want to learn the one that a far greater number of companies that are hiring will be looking for, you should pick this one.
01:11:08 - Brian Douglas
Yeah.
01:11:09 - Ishan Anand
And if you think through the hiring process, like the SEO of it, if there are certain hiring managers and they see you've got Solid experience, they're like, well, that stands out, and they know what that means. But the recruiter isn't going to know that. And the keyword-searching tool, they get a hundred resumes into this thing, they run a keyword tool through it, it doesn't notice Solid, it looks for just React, because that's what the manager said.
01:11:35 - Anthony Campolo
That's what I was saying earlier about the recruitment process having you signal things that may or may not actually signal your skills, because it's hard to get the right information in front of the right people in the right format.
01:11:46 - Ishan Anand
Yes, totally.
01:11:48 - Jason
And I think, to tie the two things together, it might be a lot easier to get a tech job at a non-tech company in 2023 than it will be to get one in a VC-backed or mega-cash...
01:12:02 - Ishan Anand
Just about to go down that thread, because what we're hearing, some people say what's happening is tech is retreating, but now tech is going into... software is eating the world. So now these non-software companies need developers.
01:12:18 - Jason
And as someone who's been supplying engineers to those kinds of companies for the last six years... seven, yeah, six years... they have not been able to hire for 10 years, because why would you go work for a bank or a John Deere or some company in the Midwest that has tons of software they write when you could go get half a million dollars a year at Facebook? They haven't been able to hire, but now they might be able to start thinking about hiring. There are always cycles and countercycles, and I'm hoping my consulting company is well set up for that countercycle, but that remains to be seen. My VC-backed startup got acquired by a private equity company, and we've built a pretty good business servicing all of the customers of that VC-backed tech company, converting or upgrading or maintaining their software that's almost, if it's 10-plus years old, and it's all web tech. So we were one of the original VC-backed HTML-and-JavaScript companies.
01:13:35 - Ishan Anand
So yeah, you should tell people about, just say the name of the company. Well, if you feel like.
01:13:41 - Jason
Yeah, sure. I worked at a company called Sencha. We had Sencha Touch, which was one of the original mobile HTML5 JavaScript frameworks. We had Ext JS, which was our desktop software that predates that by five or six years. And at the time, every big company used our stuff. We had all the banks, we had everyone on Wall Street, we had pretty much every kind of non-high-flyer tech company from 2010 or so, and we were acquired in 2017. So we had thousands and thousands of customers, tens of thousands of developers using our stuff, and we were backed by Sequoia. I think if we weren't the first, we were in the first round of HTML5 JavaScript companies that were ever VC-funded. There were dreams of us being a unicorn, but we never quite made it, which is why they now live under a private-equity-backed tech conglomerate.
01:14:52 - Ishan Anand
But to the Sencha point that got us here, people still continue to write React, and you've built a whole business basically supporting people on Sencha.
01:15:03 - Jason
That's right.
01:15:03 - Ishan Anand
You know, in some ways that's the precursor in terms of adoption by large enterprises. I do have one question, though, that I'm curious to push back on, which is: you said there's a whole lot of software that needs to be rewritten, which I agree with, and you then said you think it's all going to be rewritten in React. And I feel like in 2022 especially, we saw, as part of the React hate or the React backlash, some acknowledgment or sentiment that maybe those people shouldn't bother rewriting it in React. I don't know if you guys saw Theo and Alex Russell had a debate on React, and at one point during the debate, they raised hands. I think one of them asked who here thinks an e-commerce site, or something simple, should be written in React, and there were a huge number of hands that said no, it shouldn't be. That's new. It very much felt like we were riding a wave that everything was going to be rewritten.
01:16:08 - Ishan Anand
Do you still think everything's going to be rewritten in React or do you think maybe there'll be some pullback and people are like, no, wait, maybe we'll go back, we'll stick with jQuery or we'll stick with WordPress or what's your.
01:16:18 - Jason
I'll revise that. I think there's a certain class of applications, if you think of boring enterprise software, not websites, not e-commerce. I don't really play in that field.
01:16:30 - Ishan Anand
Got it. Okay.
01:16:32 - Jason
But I'm thinking of internal applications, process management systems. The average age of the software we work on is 10 years old. That's the average. Which means there's software even older than that that's now being upgraded or refactored or rewritten for the first time in over 10 years. And in these worlds, that's kind of the young software. So I see...
01:17:01 - Anthony Campolo
I was getting some messages from Henri. He was throwing WordPress into the mix. I feel like that's an interesting angle as well because he's asking, is React going to be the new WordPress? And I feel like the React-to-jQuery comparison makes more sense because they're both libraries that do things that you can bring into a front end, whereas WordPress is something that kind of transcends coding itself. So should new beginners be taught WordPress? It's funny, my first visceral reaction is no, but the first website I ever created was a WordPress website. So it almost makes you feel like a hypocrite to say that.
01:17:45 - Ishan Anand
I'm honestly starting to come around to the value. I think it really depends on the context. I have this saying that a website is half built by developers and half built by the people who create the content on it, and you have to optimize for whichever team needs to move at the highest velocity, and where your core differentiation is. So for a blog, if you get a good developer to make sure your theme is lean and mean and you don't go crazy with plugins, it could be the right thing where you've got one developer and 10 content people who actually use WordPress. In that kind of situation, I think it does depend on the context. But I do appreciate the analogy of something that gets so entrenched. WordPress is 40%, and it gets overused in contexts where it doesn't matter. And then it becomes so hard to convince people to go any other way because that's just what they're used to using. Like a gasoline car, right? We've always had gasoline cars, and I know this whole ecosystem exists of gas stations, so why would I even bother changing when maybe my...
01:18:56 - Ishan Anand
I only drive 25 miles every day to the same spot. An electric car might actually be more efficient and cost...
01:19:02 - Anthony Campolo
So React is Tesla in that analogy.
01:19:05 - Ishan Anand
No, React or WordPress would be the legacy, would be the gasoline.
01:19:09 - Anthony Campolo
So what would be the Tesla then?
01:19:11 - Ishan Anand
The Tesla would be, you know, Solid or maybe Redwood or maybe... maybe, Jason?
01:19:19 - Anthony Campolo
I think that to me, React, Solid, Redwood, all that stuff sits in one bucket, and WordPress is in a different bucket to me because none of those solve the problem of where is the data, where's the blog post?
01:19:31 - Ishan Anand
You're absolutely.
01:19:32 - Anthony Campolo
WordPress solves that problem for you at least.
01:19:35 - Ishan Anand
I mean, WordPress is monolithic. It is the CMS and the development environment, so to speak, ignoring that it's basically PHP, right? Whereas React likes to say, I'm just a library. So yeah, I totally agree, but I feel the visceral part of the analogy, which is just something that got so popular, it's going to be an overhang on the ecosystem moving forward.
01:20:01 - Anthony Campolo
I do think like on that point, like WordPress versus what's being talked about, you know, WordPress is the solution, whereas React is a tool like, and I feel like people forget that. Like it's great for what it is.
01:20:13 - Anthony Campolo
It's a really good way to put it.
01:20:15 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, WordPress teaches so much to the tools being used today and how we structure data and how we do these repetitive general tasks that we really shouldn't even need React for at this point. But it's a matter of preference as well, like wanting to develop your skills and do what's fastest if you're in a monetized environment. WordPress is a fantastic solution. It's the most complete solution when you really think about it, as well as the highest-adoption one.
01:20:49 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, I mean, in the Jamstack, you as a developer can piece a bunch of things together and suddenly you've got an e-commerce site. You use Contentful and maybe Shopify headlessly, and you put React on it, and then you host on maybe a Jamstack platform, but you still need to be a developer to do that. But if you're a non-developer, you can recreate the same experience by getting a WordPress instance and putting a bunch of plugins on it. Unfortunately it won't be as fast, or there are a bunch of other issues, but it certainly can make a lot of people productive really quickly. I think, again, it really depends on the team and the context. I'm curious for other predictions for 2023 in the ecosystem. Some of the other ones that I saw when I was going through a bunch of these was tRPC replacing GraphQL. A lot of people were...
01:21:49 - Anthony Campolo
tRPC is awesome. It's not gonna replace GraphQL. I'm so sick of this take.
01:21:55 - Ishan Anand
Oh yeah. Okay, dive in, tell me. I think I know where you're going, but go ahead.
01:21:59 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, link to the.
01:22:00 - Eric
Link to the.
01:22:01 - Jason
One of Theo's videos on the topic. He does a pretty good job of covering it.
01:22:05 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, he did actually, at the Composability Summit.
01:22:08 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I sent a video to my old CEO, who is at the GraphQL company that I used to work at. And I think the reason they're compared to each other is because they both provide a way to create end-to-end full-stack type safety. So you can write your JavaScript functions and you get autocomplete for your database row. That's all it is. That is the entire point. We built this huge, insane chain ecosystem of tools to achieve that so you can autocomplete your database from your JavaScript. That's the entire thing. There's nothing more than that. That is why people use tRPC. That is not the sum total of what GraphQL does and what GraphQL gives you and why GraphQL should continue to be a thing. So tRPC will not replace GraphQL. tRPC will steal a part of GraphQL's market share from people who didn't give a crap about anything except getting autocomplete in their JavaScript.
01:23:06 - Jason
Well and it might prevent people from adopting TypeScript who shouldn't have in the first place. I'm sorry, sorry.
01:23:13 - Ishan Anand
GraphQL that's what I was going to say.
01:23:15 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Yes.
01:23:16 - Ishan Anand
Yeah.
01:23:16 - Jason
Because for a while there, everyone was throwing GraphQL into their simple web app. If you've got a Next app that talks to a database, do you really need GraphQL to sit in the middle, or can you just write some APIs that return data from the database, and tRPC gives you a nice type-safe, fast way to do that? But if you've got the GraphQL cases, which is heterogeneous environments with multiple clients and multiple teams, and I think I'm summarizing Theo's points, or if it's a publicly facing API, then GraphQL is probably still the right choice.
01:23:56 - Anthony Campolo
He hates publicly facing GraphQL APIs. But yes, everything else you said there was correct. And I make the case for public GraphQL APIs also.
01:24:08 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. But it's interesting, going back to React, I think React got adopted sometimes by people where it was overkill, they didn't need it. So it doesn't replace GraphQL, but it does maybe compete with it for market share where it shouldn't have, simply by its popularity.
01:24:28 - Anthony Campolo
Well, this is funny, though, because this is what GraphQL did to REST. It's just history repeating itself in the other direction, because GraphQL stole a bunch of REST use cases that it had no business stealing.
01:24:41 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, history rhymes. So a few other predictions that came out regarding frameworks: Lori Voss, who ran the Jamstack survey, was predicting that Next.js would slow down and Remix would jump. One thing that I liked when I went through this, and I saw other people do this in various aspects, is they score their predictions from last year. I don't know if you guys know Tom Tunguz, he's a VC, venture capitalist. He also scores his predictions. Scott Galloway does that as well. And I thought it was interesting what they got right and got wrong. So I encourage folks to get our newsletter, follow the link, and see what they got right or wrong on their predictions. They had predicted, when it relates to frameworks, they said React will stay, Svelte will grow. And he gave their rating a B+, because he said Svelte grew nicely, going to 30% from 19% share, but React grew even further than they did. So it goes back to React hate will continue, but so will React usage.
01:26:02 - Ishan Anand
I'm curious what other people seem to think for predictions of frameworks that'll grow in popularity in the coming year.
01:26:10 - Anthony Campolo
I definitely think that Astro will and I agree with Remix as well.
01:26:16 - Speaker 8
I have a real quick one. Somebody mentioned, I don't remember who it was, but somebody said that it takes a 10x gain or 10x improvement for someone to want to shift from something for it to matter.
01:26:29 - Anthony Campolo
David is the one who said that.
01:26:30 - Speaker 8
Ah, he was right. Yeah, I believe that, because jQuery is awesome. I still use it.
01:26:39 - Anthony Campolo
[unclear].
01:26:40 - Speaker 8
It enables various widgets and stuff, and that's just what it is. But yeah, jQuery is awesome. As far as the main framework for doing imperative programming versus something more declarative, React is better. Going from React to one of these other ones, like Svelte or one of these others, I don't see a 10x there. And furthermore, I think the declarative nature of React, just like SQL where it's declarative, you're not imperatively telling which table to join, how, where, when, then this and that and the other thing. No, you just tell it what you want and it gives it to you. That's what React does in a very similar way. And there are things like React Fiber, Three.js, these animation frameworks, and you're building video games on top of it, and you have these plugins where you can do drag and drop on top of React. Things are getting more declarative and more standardized, and the more you build on top of that, it gets to the point where you don't really want to think about that underlying layer too much.
01:27:53 - Speaker 8
You want to stay in your specialty, stay in your lane. You want to.
01:27:57 - Anthony Campolo
You.
01:27:58 - Speaker 8
You don't want to be context switching constantly and all these different things. And like I think something like React where it gives you basic of everything you need, you can standardize upon it and you can build frameworks on top of it and stack it up.
01:28:11 - Ishan Anand
The thing about it is.
01:28:12 - Speaker 8
And just one other thing besides that that I want to mention: I got stuck in a long thread with the CTO of Vercel and Misko, the CEO of Builder. Those are super big, gigantic brains there. You guys know what they're doing. But somebody made a comment that React is not reactive, and I don't feel like responding there, but I'm just going to say React is reactive.
01:28:43 - Eric
Okay.
01:28:44 - Speaker 8
You have props and state. Any variable declared in the component body will force a re-render any time one of those changes. The difference between something like that and Solid is, if you think about state management, what is state management for? You want to manage the value of something across components. You already have state management inside a component, but if you want to pull it out, you want to lift state up, you want to control how your app is re-rendering, how many times, in what circumstances, that's where state management comes in. And that's where Solid is very nifty.
01:29:30 - Anthony Campolo
I'm sorry to cut you off, man, but I know that some of us have places we gotta get to. We're closing out here...
01:29:36 - Scott Steinlage
No problem. No problem.
01:29:37 - Speaker 8
All right. So that was it. My prediction is there's not a 10x beyond React.
01:29:44 - Ishan Anand
Okay, interesting. And that's an interesting way to look at it. But as Anthony mentioned, we're coming up on, I think, one minute till the end of the space. Thank you for the contribution. Scott, do you want to close us out?
01:29:58 - Scott Steinlage
Absolutely. All right. Hey, thank you all so much for joining us today. Greatly appreciate everybody coming up and speaking, as always. By the way, if you got value from anybody that was on today, be sure to follow them if you're not already following them, because you're probably going to get value from them in other places. So yeah, do that. Also, we wouldn't mind a follow on JavaScript Jam as well. We love that too. Next week we will be here again, Wednesday at 12 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. Typically we had been going for an hour, but we actually have extended this. We're going to be doing an hour and a half. And in the coming weeks, maybe we should put something out to get people's opinions, but we're thinking of doing something like, hey, how about we do a guest every other week and then this typical open mic that we normally do every other week as well, and then maybe even introduce having a half an hour up front where we just do open mic and then have a guest for the last hour, or something like that.
01:31:01 - Scott Steinlage
So yeah, we'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions because we want to serve you guys as best as possible and give you what you want as well. So yeah, maybe we should put a poll out there or something, maybe not. Either way, feel free to DM us or comment. We'd love to hear your opinions. And if you're listening to the recording, please still do the same. All right, thank you all so much for joining us. Greatly appreciate every single one on here. Thank you to our co-hosts. Let's give everybody a big round of applause, some hearts, some love, all that good stuff. All right. Thank you all so much. Appreciate you, and we'll see you next week. Yeah, always too fun. All right. Thanks, guys. See you in the next one.
01:32:05 - Ishan Anand
[unclear].