Live at Remix Conf 2023
Speakers at RemixConf discuss frameworks, data at the edge, GraphQL, job-hunting, and finding passion in tech
Episode Description
Live from Remix Conf, the JavaScript Jam crew chats with Turso and Graphbase founders about edge databases, GraphQL with Fetch, and breaking into tech.
Episode Summary
Broadcasting live from Remix Conf, Anthony Campolo hosts a freewheeling Twitter Spaces conversation with Glauber Costa (Turso), Jamie Barton (Graphbase), Ishan Anand, Jen Junod, and community member Bro Nifty. Glauber shares his journey from Linux kernel contributor to founding Turso, explaining how the company pivoted from Chisel Strike's TypeScript-embedded database to a focused SQLite-on-the-edge offering after seeing overwhelming community interest in that direction. Jamie introduces Graphbase as a framework-agnostic GraphQL data layer and makes a provocative case that dedicated GraphQL clients are becoming unnecessary in the Remix ecosystem, arguing that the built-in Fetch API and framework-level caching handle most use cases. The two founders discuss a potential Turso-Graphbase integration. The group shares impressions of the conference energy, praising the intimacy of smaller events and highlighting talks on Cloudflare's edge work, Remix live loaders, and browser-based video editing. The conversation shifts to whether people should still pursue tech careers amid industry layoffs, with unanimous agreement that downturns are cyclical and tech remains viable. Speakers offer practical advice for newcomers, including leveraging open source contributions, attending and speaking at conferences, and letting passion emerge organically rather than forcing it.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Introductions and Turso's Origin Story
Anthony Campolo opens the show live from Remix Conf and brings up guests Glauber Costa and Ishan Anand. After some playful banter about name pronunciation and Twitter Spaces logistics, Glauber introduces himself as the founder and CEO of Turso, sharing his unusual path from a decade of Linux kernel contributions at Red Hat to building a NoSQL database at ScyllaDB, and now offering SQLite on the edge across thirty-plus locations.
Glauber explains the transition from Chisel Strike, the company's original product that bundled a TypeScript runtime with an SQLite-based edge database, to Turso. While some developers found the TypeScript-driven approach interesting, the overwhelming enthusiasm was consistently directed at the SQLite-on-the-edge component. After launching Turso in public beta and seeing strong traction, the team went all in on the new product, keeping Chisel Strike alive only as an open source project.
00:06:33 - Conference Energy and the Value of Small Events
The conversation turns to the atmosphere at Remix Conf, with Ishan recalling the infectious energy from the previous year's event and asking what the floor feels like now. Glauber praises the conference as significantly above average compared to others he has attended, noting that the smaller size actually enables more meaningful interactions. Ishan draws a comparison to Monktoberfest, emphasizing that the hallway track often matters more than the scheduled talks.
Anthony shares his preference for intimate conferences, likening the experience to summer camp where a tight-knit group can truly get to know one another. Glauber adds that conferences with over a thousand attendees essentially become glorified YouTube, making it difficult to form personal connections. He acknowledges the tension of being a sponsor wanting maximum exposure while personally preferring smaller gatherings. Jamie Barton then joins the conversation and introduces Graphbase, describing its evolution into a framework-agnostic GraphQL data layer that works with serverless databases like MongoDB, Neon, and potentially Turso.
00:13:40 - GraphQL, Fetch, and the Future of Data Clients
Jamie makes a bold claim that dedicated GraphQL client libraries are becoming less necessary in the Remix ecosystem, arguing that the framework's built-in Fetch API and caching mechanisms handle most data-fetching needs effectively. He suggests that the complexity of tools like Relay is hard to justify when frameworks already provide server rendering, revalidation, and persistent caching out of the box.
Bro Nifty joins to ask about typing GraphQL responses with Fetch, and Jamie walks through the options including template strings with editor plugins and the evolving approach of GraphQL code generators that now favor inline fragments over generated hooks. The discussion touches on how Graphbase plans to introduce a Fetch-based TypeScript client with full type safety. Jamie emphasizes that frameworks are extending the Fetch API so aggressively that building another caching layer on top would be redundant.
00:20:30 - Turso and Graphbase Integration
Glauber gives a shout-out to Bro Nifty as one of the earliest Turso community members, and the conversation pivots to a potential integration between Turso and Graphbase. Jamie explains that custom resolvers already make it possible to connect Turso to Graphbase, but both teams are discussing a first-class directive that would generate all the boilerplate automatically.
Glauber highlights that Turso's fully API-based architecture, which allows creating and managing databases programmatically while retaining the local SQLite development experience, makes it an ideal fit for platform integrations. The exchange is lighthearted, with Glauber joking about a bet with his VP of marketing over whether they can give away all their booth candy, and Jamie offering to trade Graphbase t-shirts. The camaraderie illustrates the collaborative spirit of the smaller conference setting.
00:23:26 - Remix Conf Talk Highlights and Upcoming Sessions
The group discusses standout talks and sessions they are looking forward to. Glauber highlights the Cloudflare edge computing talk, while Jamie is excited about Alex's presentation on the Remix live loader, which he sees as closely related to his own work on GraphQL live queries. Ishan reminds listeners that Alex and Kent C. Dodds were recent JavaScript Jam guests and promotes the upcoming React core team panel featuring Dan Abramov.
Jamie mentions an intriguing talk about using Remix in the browser for video editing, which resonates with Ishan's background in real-time audio and video engineering. Anthony flags the "Unconvince Your Boss to Use Remix" talk as a compelling meta-topic about technology adoption. Ishan highlights two web performance talks, passionately explaining why developers should prioritize real user monitoring data over synthetic Lighthouse scores when optimizing their sites, citing a pandemic-era study of state vaccine websites as a cautionary example.
00:31:14 - Conference Culture, Emceeing, and Welcoming Newcomers
Jen Junod joins to share her perspective as a relative newcomer to tech who has emceed four virtual conferences and spoken at in-person events on short notice. She offers practical advice for conference attendees, encouraging people to volunteer questions during Q&A sessions even if the questions seem simple, and noting how emceeing reveals the genuine kindness of speakers behind the scenes.
Ishan observes that developer conferences have become significantly more welcoming over the years as the community has taken inclusion feedback seriously. Jen then raises a provocative question she saw on Twitter: should the tech community pause encouraging people to enter the field given widespread layoffs? This sparks a lively debate among the panelists about the cyclical nature of tech downturns and the long-term viability of technical careers.
00:38:02 - Should People Still Get Into Tech?
Anthony responds strongly that layoffs are a temporary economic phenomenon and should not deter people from pursuing tech careers, drawing a parallel to the 2008 financial crisis and how finance remained a viable career afterward. Glauber echoes this, noting that the 2001 dotcom bust was arguably worse and that he entered the industry during that period. The group agrees that the real question should be whether someone genuinely enjoys the work rather than viewing tech purely as a path to wealth.
Ishan adds nuance by suggesting that even people who do not want to code full-time can benefit from acquiring tech skills as a complement to their primary career. Anthony shares a personal example of wanting to teach his copywriter partner basic HTML to make her more effective. Glauber offers practical advice about visibility, urging newcomers to contribute to open source, attend conferences, and communicate their skills effectively, emphasizing that you only need to be in the top eighty percent rather than the top one percent to find opportunity.
00:49:53 - Finding Your Passion in Tech
Jen asks how each panelist discovered their passion, prompting a reflective round of answers. Anthony credits RedwoodJS for clicking with him after struggling through a boot camp curriculum, while Glauber argues that passion finds you rather than the other way around, comparing it to falling in love and noting that he was advised against pursuing both open source and operating systems early in his career.
Ishan traces his path from studying computer science while loving music, which led him to a computer music company where real-time audio performance problems ignited his interest in optimization. Jamie shares that his passion began at age eleven or twelve when he built a website to showcase magic card tricks and saw the joy on people's faces. He encourages aspiring content creators to persist through the early period when no one is watching, because consistency eventually compounds into opportunities and deeper passion.
00:58:18 - Closing Thoughts and Emerging Themes
As the show approaches the top of the hour, Ishan asks whether any consistent themes are emerging from hallway conversations at Remix Conf. Jamie reports that data, edge computing, and React server components are the dominant topics circulating among attendees, which Ishan appreciates given his work at an edge computing platform.
Anthony wraps up the live broadcast by thanking all the guests and encouraging listeners to follow the speakers for continued insights. He teases an upcoming in-person podcast interview with the Turso team scheduled for later that evening at Remix Conf and expresses his enthusiasm for the conference experience overall. The episode closes with a reminder to check out JavaScript Jam's website and newsletter for more coverage of the event.
Transcript
00:00:00 - Anthony Campolo
Yo, yo, yo. Welcome to JavaScript Jam, coming at you live from Remix Conf. We already got one of our speakers hopping in here, gonna add them, and we'll have some other people popping up soon as well. I did a mad dash around the conference to get as many people as I could to join. So, Bro Nifty's showing up. What's up, dude? Okay. And yeah, so we are at Remix Conf right now. For those who don't know Remix, it is a JavaScript framework, and it is a conference about that said JavaScript framework. Hopefully we can get our guest up here. Feel free to shoot me a DM if you're hitting any roadblocks as you do that. Oh, looks like we got Ishan too. We'll add him as well. Okay, so thank you all for joining. We're going to be chatting about a couple different things. All right, looks like we got W up here. Can you speak?
00:01:18 - Ishan Anand
Hello?
00:01:19 - Glauber Costa
Hello, live from Remix Conf.
00:01:22 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, real quick, how do you pronounce your name?
00:01:26 - Glauber Costa
It's a great question because I don't think I've ever had the experience of pronouncing my name correctly because it's a German word. Although I have no German ancestry. I was not born in Germany. I have no German in my family. So I guess it's Glauber. I say Glover.
00:01:41 - Anthony Campolo
Hey, that's what I said. Awesome.
00:01:43 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, in the UK.
00:01:44 - Glauber Costa
In the UK they call me Glaubaoba. That's good too, yeah.
00:01:49 - Anthony Campolo
What's up, Ishan?
00:01:51 - Ishan Anand
Yo. Yeah. You know, the fun part about Twitter Spaces is it's kind of like gamification built in. I missed the first prompt when you invited me, and if you miss that, you have to reapply. I was adjusting my headset.
00:02:06 - Anthony Campolo
They always keep you on your toes. I'm making you co-host, actually. Let's see if that works.
00:02:11 - Ishan Anand
Let's try it.
00:02:15 - Anthony Campolo
Glauber, you want to introduce yourself to the audience and give a little bit of your background and who you are?
00:02:21 - Glauber Costa
Happy to. I'm Glauber, and I am the founder and CEO of Turso. I don't really come from a JavaScript front end background. I was, for 10 years, a contributor to the Linux kernel, and after that I was writing a database at a company called ScyllaDB, which was a NoSQL petabyte-scale database. And now Turso is essentially an offering of SQLite on the edge in 30-plus locations. And this is obviously a lot more relevant for that community. So I'm here trying to make friends. If you haven't met us yet, just come to our booth and tell me more about the front end world and what you would like to see.
00:03:01 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, that is such an incredible background. And as you were saying that, I'm like, hey, I listened to a podcast with you. You were on Jamstack Radio. Some of this stuff, yeah. So just real quick, don't need to rehash the whole thing, but what was it like working on the Linux kernel? As someone who's just gotten into web dev the last couple of years, someone who has worked on the Linux kernel feels like this holy position. How do you even go above that? It just seems like the coolest thing ever.
00:03:33 - Glauber Costa
It's hard to do other things after that, in a sense, because developers, I noticed, we all sometimes divide ourselves. Like I'm a backend developer, I am a front end developer. But if you're a kernel developer, or if you're a database developer like I became later, you're actually none of those. I never had the experience of writing actual backend, so I guess I'm not a front end developer, so maybe backend. But your experience is very different than traditional developers, so sometimes it's hard to connect a little bit. But on the other hand, it's such a great community, a little bit toxic. So all the stuff you keep hearing about Linux, like how everybody's shouting at each other all the time, all true. And it was also much worse when I was there. I guess it's better today, but it was essentially the first programming thing that I'd done. I started contributing as a volunteer out of college, and then I was hired by Red Hat through my contributions. So for me, starting my career in that world was crazy in many ways and set me up for success later, right? Because after that, you're kind of the Linux guy.
00:04:38 - Anthony Campolo
Very cool. And something else I'm curious about in terms of the background, this is something that maybe a lot of people won't know, but I do because I'm so deep into this world, is that there was ChiselStrike and now there's Turso.
00:04:50 - Glauber Costa
That's right, yeah.
00:04:51 - Anthony Campolo
What's the deal there?
00:04:53 - Glauber Costa
So ChiselStrike is still the official name of our company, and it's our previous product. The idea of ChiselStrike, in a couple words, was to offer a database that was also SQLite-based and also going to the edge, but it came embedded with a TypeScript runtime. The idea there came from conversations we had early on. Hey, JavaScript developers, it would be cool if they didn't have to write SQL and you could program your database in TypeScript. What we saw there is that some people actually found that cool, but never to the extent that we were confident this would become a world-changing product. Every time we would explain what we were doing, they would say, this is cool and all, but tell me more about the SQLite stuff that you're doing, like SQLite on the edge, et cetera. And we started noticing that the interest was a lot stronger there. Then we launched Turso a couple months ago in public beta, and we saw so much traction, especially in comparison. So ChiselStrike is mostly, at this point, a historical thing, and we're putting it all in on bring your data to the edge, which is very strong validation.
00:06:02 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, sorry, you cut there for a second. Sorry, I think I stepped over you. Continue.
00:06:10 - Glauber Costa
Yeah, so here at Remix Conf we're getting lots of people just coming and asking us about it. We have a booth here. So that's essentially the TL;DR. ChiselStrike is a former product of ours that we keep as an open source project. Some users still use it, but we're going all in now on this offer for SQLite on the edge named Turso.
00:06:33 - Anthony Campolo
Very cool. Go ahead.
00:06:36 - Ishan Anand
I have a ChiselStrike T-shirt.
00:06:38 - Glauber Costa
Amazing, man. I have plenty.
00:06:41 - Ishan Anand
So I'll save that as a memento. But congrats on Turso.
00:06:46 - Glauber Costa
Thanks, man.
00:06:47 - Ishan Anand
It's a really important pivot. I remember, I think we met in person at the Jamstack conference.
00:06:52 - Glauber Costa
We did, we did, yes.
00:06:54 - Ishan Anand
So, yeah, congrats on the pivot to Turso. What were you gonna say, Anthony? Go ahead.
00:07:00 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Glauber.
00:07:04 - Glauber Costa
No, I was just asking you, Ishan, if Scott's here, because I haven't seen him yet.
00:07:09 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, I'm not there. Scott and Anthony are there. I'm there in spirit.
00:07:14 - Glauber Costa
Awesome.
00:07:15 - Ishan Anand
This is how I'm gonna vicariously live through that.
00:07:18 - Glauber Costa
Awesome.
00:07:18 - Ishan Anand
At all the developer conferences I want to go to. I was at Remix last year, and I just have to say the energy at Remix Conference last year was just infectious. And especially coming out of the COVID pandemic, it was, you know, I came back to the company and I was like, guys, in-person developer conferences are back. There was so much energy and interest. I'm curious, what's the energy like right now on the conference floor?
00:07:51 - Glauber Costa
Again, I wasn't here last year, so I don't know in comparison, but compared to other conferences, like Jamstack Conference, for example, I think it's fantastic. But smaller doesn't necessarily mean worse. On the contrary, you have so many more interactions with people. So everybody so far is extremely friendly. Again, lots of chat going on, lots of energy. So definitely, compared to the baseline of what conferences usually are, way, way, way above average for me.
00:08:25 - Ishan Anand
Great, thank you. You know, it reminds me, one of my favorite conferences is not very well known. It's called Monktoberfest, run by the guys at RedMonk, and it's not a very large conference. And you can judge a conference by its talks or you can judge it by the hallway track, like the conversations you have in the hallway and the people you meet. And that's one of the reasons I fondly remember Remix. It's something you can't get from looking at the website and the talks.
00:08:52 - Glauber Costa
Absolutely, yeah. The best conferences I've been to, in terms of my career, were like 70 people, something like that. Small. But the group that's there is very, very relevant, very skilled, knows what they're doing, and then you can have those meaningful connections that can last a lifetime.
00:09:15 - Ishan Anand
Yeah. Actually, I remember, I think both at Jamstack and Remix Conference, there are some people I met and we started talking and said hello, and we'd forgotten we had only met online before. In fact, last year I met one of my coworkers for the first time.
00:09:32 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, you met me for the first time also.
00:09:34 - Ishan Anand
I met you. I met Scott. It was great. Anthony, what are you seeing on the floor at Remix Conference?
00:09:43 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I mean, to me it feels like a similar energy, which is a good thing, because I thought the energy last year was awesome. And I agree that smaller conferences I actually enjoy a lot more because you'll see the same people multiple times, and you can kind of meet more people that way. And it feels less like you're going to Disneyland. It's just a million people. You don't even know what to do with yourself. And it kind of reminds me, I was always really big into summer camps. I went to summer camp every year for like 15 years. So I like that kind of feel where it's a tight-knit group and everyone can get to know everyone. So yeah, I love it. I think it's really...
00:10:19 - Glauber Costa
So if you're going through a conference with more than a thousand people, you're going for the talks. And if you're going for the talks, I mean, it's essentially glorified YouTube. It's really hard to make those personal connections past a certain point. And again, I've been to conferences with 4,000 people and I've been to conferences with 70 people, and I would pick the smaller one to attend in person. It's tricky because as a sponsor, which I am right now, obviously I want 4,000 people to see my message. But as a participant at the conference, just being in that smaller group is so much better.
00:10:59 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome. So we have Jamie joining us. Do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself to the crowd, Jamie?
00:11:05 - Ishan Anand
Hey everyone.
00:11:06 - Jamie Barton
Yeah, thanks for having me. So I'm Jamie, doing DevRel at Graphbase. I've been around the GraphQL space for a while, and what's really nice actually about Remix Conf is you get to speak with a lot of different people in different ecosystems. It's very easy, I think, on Twitter to kind of fall into one particular ecosystem that you advocate for. But when you come to these conferences and speak to others, you can kind of go outside of that and get familiar and learn other cool new things and different ways people are working with stuff. So it's really nice. As was just being discussed, these smaller conferences really do make time for those more meaningful discussions. So I really love it, these smaller ones, and the same at Jamstack Conf. That was similar, a little bit bigger, but lots of great discussions going on.
00:11:57 - Anthony Campolo
Very cool. Yeah. And so Glauber gave a little bit of an intro. Would you want to speak a bit about Graphbase as well?
00:12:03 - Jamie Barton
Of course, yeah. So Graphbase, we've been around for a few years now. Started off kind of as a project from the CEO that wanted to build a database that had this GraphQL API at the edge. And we've kind of changed a little bit now, so we now work with other databases. What's the point of introducing yet another database for people to learn? So now we kind of work with other serverless databases. So things like the MongoDB Data API, Postgres with things like Neon, and Turso. I think we're working on something there. And yeah, we just allow you to bring in all these different data sources. I think the best analogy from speaking to people today is, if people remember Gatsby and the data layer that that had, that was a really awesome piece of Gatsby where you could plug in different data sources from anywhere and link those together. We are providing something similar to that, but it's kind of framework agnostic. And it's hosted, later this year it will be open source, so you can deploy it wherever you like.
00:13:06 - Jamie Barton
But we provide a platform for you to do that. I could go on and on about the different features on top of that API, but I won't. That's kind of the quick summary, is that you can bring auth, real-time, caching, and your own custom resolvers that live alongside these edge functions. So lots of really cool stuff happening, certainly in the GraphQL space. It's still vibrant, it's still going on, there's still a lot of hype. You just kind of have to look for it now. But that's the tech world, right?
00:13:39 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I love it. And for me, people who know my history very well will know that I worked at a company that built essentially exactly what you're building right now, StepZen. So the problem space is very near and dear to my heart, and I would love to get you on another time to do a full, in-depth interview about it. But right now I'm curious, what's been your Remix Conf experience like so far? And you were not at last year's Remix Conf. I believe this is your first time.
00:14:06 - Jamie Barton
It's my first time, yeah. Last year I kind of got the Remix bug. Shortly after the conference I watched a few videos by Ryan who was talking about web forms and actions and loaders, and it just kind of clicked. I'm someone that worked with Ruby on Rails for about five or six years, and then when GraphQL came out I kind of made the switch to Node, and I was kind of reimplementing a lot of that stuff with Node and GraphQL, dealing with a lot of the clients and caching and stuff. I think it's just nice, certainly it's been nice, to talk to people here about how they're using Remix and also see, are they using GraphQL, and if they're not, why? I think there's a big misconception that GraphQL is this weird thing that I just don't need because I have an SDK or REST API. But I try and just make people forget about GraphQL being GraphQL and just treat it as another data source. And I think it's perfect with Remix and with Fetch. Now the Fetch API is so good that I don't think there's a huge need for these GraphQL clients anymore.
00:15:08 - Jamie Barton
Certainly in my discussions so far, that's a bold claim. That's how a lot of people see it. I just find with Remix and other tools in the space that are doing a lot more server rendering, and they have built-in Fetch and caching and revalidation, I don't really see a huge need for a GraphQL client anymore. But obviously, in this ecosystem it's still very, very valuable for those that aren't in this space. So those are still needed, of course. But in this space I don't particularly see a huge benefit to adding that complexity to your application.
00:15:39 - Ishan Anand
Wait, so can we double-click on that for a second? So what are the alternatives? Like, just use what Remix has out of the box with Fetch? Is there a minimal stack you'd recommend, or like a library, you just...
00:15:52 - Anthony Campolo
Lob POST requests with your query over the wire, right?
00:15:55 - Jamie Barton
Yeah, essentially, yeah. And I don't see anything wrong with that. I think one of the biggest things with GraphQL is the type stuff. So creating types for your queries and mutations, and where do those belong? Do they belong inside of the file? Do they belong in a document folder? How are queries then generated? Should the generator generate these functions that you run? One of the things that we are kind of doing with Graphbase is we are going to introduce a client and a TypeScript config soon. So it will be full type safety from the schema and the API that you build to the consumption side. But to be honest, I think it's going to be based on the Fetch API, so it'll just work. I'm hoping we can build it as an adapter approach where you can plug in, or make it easily pluggable with Remix and Nuxt and everything else. It just hooks into their existing Fetch implementations. We've already seen, I think last week from another framework, they've extended yet again the Fetch API with some kind of custom config. These frameworks are doing so much now to revalidate and keep things up to date and persistent across their own caches.
00:17:06 - Jamie Barton
I think it just kind of makes sense to take advantage of that and not build yet another implementation that's wrapping that. So I don't know if that kind of double-clicks into that, but it's a huge, huge discussion. Maybe we'll save that for another day.
00:17:31 - Ishan Anand
Looks like we have Bro Nifty coming up to the stage.
00:17:34 - Bro Nifty
Oh, hi. Yeah, I was going to ask Jamie a quick question. Thank you. Hi, Jamie. Just a quick question about the Fetch implementation. Would you do something like, you want to type what's coming back from the GraphQL API, maybe just create an interface and say, yeah, I'm going to get a name, a title, and a post or whatever, and you could type out whatever's coming back from it? And then just from the fetch, wouldn't you want to pull in, it's been a little while, sorry, but is it gql or something like that? Like before you put it in those grave quotes, or the template string, you say what kind. Like if it's Sanity, it's GROQ, you preface it before you put it on there. Or if it's GraphQL, I think it's called like whatever. Just fetch it with a template string.
00:18:29 - Jamie Barton
Yeah, yeah. So you could just use a plain template string. You can instruct whatever code editor on the language of what the template string is. So that kind of gives you the added benefit of if you have a VS Code plugin that can kind of do the syntax highlighting.
00:18:47 - Anthony Campolo
I think.
00:18:48 - Jamie Barton
I'm not sure if this is still true, but some of the plugins let you execute those one-off, so you can kind of test it right in there. But yeah, there's a lot of discussion about Relay. Relay is really difficult to set up, I think, for most people that are new to GraphQL, and it kind of takes a few goes to get it going. But I think we're going to see a huge shift. I think with GraphQL and Remix, and the frameworks that are doing this SSR stuff, having their own cache, Fetch just makes sense to me. Like I said before, using these APIs they have to fetch data, I would just kind of want to use the framework and leverage the framework's built-in tools rather than bring along my bloat from other projects, and it might just be a time where we need to relearn and
00:19:32 - Anthony Campolo
retool in a new way.
00:19:34 - Jamie Barton
But like I say, this is specific to the Remix ecosystem. But there's still tools out there like the GraphQL Code Generator. They used to kind of prefer you use client plugins that would generate hooks that you could invoke in your front end. But now that's not recommended. The recommended path is similar to Relay, where you have inline fragments for your components, and then at a root level you compose those fragments and it takes care of that data. Then that's fully typed for the page and the component and whatever. That's certainly still possible with Remix, but the transport would just be using Fetch and HTTP.
00:20:30 - Glauber Costa
Just want to give a shout-out here, if I may. When we launched Turso in private beta, Bro Nifty was one of the first people to join our community. So super glad to see you around, man.
00:20:42 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, super cool. Bro Nifty's the homie.
00:20:45 - Bro Nifty
Yeah, prime.
00:20:46 - Glauber Costa
Yeah. I think it's the first time that I'm actually chatting with you, not in person, but at least not over text. So glad to see you, man.
00:20:55 - Bro Nifty
Hi, G. Yeah, I don't know how to pronounce your name, so I just call you G. But Glauber. Glauber, yeah. What's up?
00:21:02 - Anthony Campolo
So let's just call you G.
00:21:04 - Glauber Costa
Call me Turso. Yeah. Are you around?
00:21:07 - Bro Nifty
Yeah, yeah, I'm not. Unfortunately, I'm broke and so not traveling to the various conferences and stuff. But I'll get there. I'll get there one day.
00:21:23 - Ishan Anand
Yeah.
00:21:25 - Anthony Campolo
So let's tie this all together. Could we plug Turso into Graphbase?
00:21:31 - Jamie Barton
Yeah, totally possible. Yeah, we.
00:21:36 - Anthony Campolo
Go ahead. Yeah.
00:21:38 - Jamie Barton
Yeah, we've been briefly discussing this. I think there's a few things we need to tidy up, but I think we have resolvers right now. So that's kind of the easiest way to do it, is you can just use a custom resolver with Graphbase, create some type definitions that link to the custom resolver, and then when you execute that query or mutation, that can then talk to Turso. Yeah, it seems doable. What I would prefer, that we've been kind of speaking to Glauber and the rest of the team about, is making this a kind of first-class directive. It's like @turso, and then we kind of just generate all of that boilerplate for you. So yeah, I'm super excited about that.
00:22:23 - Glauber Costa
I like those guys a lot, by the way. And we do have a Slack channel where we've been discussing those kind of things. I think it is coming. And one of the things about Turso that obviously I find very nice, although I am of course biased, is that we're fully API-based. You can create databases, destroy databases, list databases, do all of your database work from an API, and you still have the local experience of having SQLite for your local SDK. So it integrates with platforms very, very well. And the Graphbase story for us is a very compelling story. Definitely want to make that a first-class citizen.
00:22:56 - Jamie Barton
And yeah, you're the corner booth, right? I will stop by.
00:22:59 - Glauber Costa
I am, yes. Yeah, stop by, get some candy. We actually have a bowl of candy, and I'm here with our VP of marketing, Michael, and I have a bet with him that we will not be able to give away all the candy that we have. So if you want him to win, and if you want me to lose, come and get the candy.
00:23:18 - Jamie Barton
All right. We've got lots of T-shirts, so maybe we can trade.
00:23:21 - Glauber Costa
That's right.
00:23:25 - Anthony Campolo
That's super funny. So I'd be curious, has anyone seen a talk so far that they're really excited about or have a talk coming up that they're looking forward to?
00:23:37 - Glauber Costa
I've seen half of the Cloudflare talk, and when you have a booth, it's really hard to watch a full talk because you always want to be around and be talking to people that are coming to your booth. But I managed to catch at least half of the Cloudflare talk. That one was super exciting. I mean, obviously very relevant for us, so naturally it called for my attention. But Cloudflare is doing amazing work on the edge stuff. I like them a lot as a platform, so definitely was excited for that one.
00:24:09 - Jamie Barton
Yeah, there was a talk from Alex on the Remix live loader, and I think this is not something new, but it's certainly an area which I spent a lot of time on last year with Graphbase when we were discussing how can we implement GraphQL live queries, which isn't a very popular thing, but I think it's much better than subscriptions to some degree. And yeah, it was just nice to see how that was implemented in a framework like Remix, because I was considering building a client library that communicated with Graphbase, and it actually seemed very, very easy from what I've seen in the slides and the talk. It's not as daunting as I first imagined. I'm super excited that that's going to be the thing that I look at when I get home.
00:24:55 - Ishan Anand
Just a shout-out to Alex. He was our guest last week on JavaScript Jam Live, and you can find that on our website actually, at JavaScriptJam.com, and while you're there, by the way, you can subscribe to our newsletter. We interviewed Kent actually the week before that, so for the last two weeks, in preparation and the run-up to the Remix conference, they were guests in the past if you want to hear. And Alex did go into some detail, previewing his Remix live loader talk. Any other talks people saw or are looking forward to? I know I see Dan Abramov, Mr. React, is going to be talking. I don't think that's happened yet. I'm trying to calculate the time zones in my head. I think that one's coming up, and that looks really interesting. And I know later today there's a React panel from the React core team, which is great to see, the presence of the React core team at the Remix conference this year.
00:26:03 - Jamie Barton
Yeah, totally. There's one talk on using Remix in the browser for video editing. I create a lot of videos and I'm keen to kind of see what that looks like and just kind of how it's possible. So that's one I'm looking forward to seeing today.
00:26:20 - Ishan Anand
Oh yeah, so in my past life I did engineering for a computer music, computer video company. It was like Avid slash Pro Tools. So I'm really curious to see what we can do in the browser these days and see how much can be done there. And back in the day we had to use custom hardware, let alone native applications. It's really amazing how far we've come. So I was looking forward to that one, but I felt like that's just me. So it's great to hear there are others who are interested.
00:26:54 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, it's Christopher Chedeau, who's an early React core team member, I think.
00:27:02 - Ishan Anand
And then I'm looking at tomorrow's, you know, schedule and I saw some interesting talks there too.
00:27:10 - Anthony Campolo
I like "Unconvince Your Boss to Use Remix." I find how you convince people to use any stack to be, itself, a very interesting topic.
00:27:21 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, we should get them on. I think that's a great topic, and I'm really curious to watch that talk. I saw that as well because, you know, I run product at Edgio. This whole thing on convince your boss is actually a very topical, important part of any type of product. So I'm always really curious to see what people do in this regard. And it's really important when you're not the default, so to speak. And Remix has certainly made huge gains, more so than a lot of other frameworks. But even then, if you're outside our ecosystem, you may not know Remix, and your boss may not know Remix, and you might need to convince at least your boss or your boss's boss. So that'll be a really interesting talk. We have two, I think, tomorrow on web performance, which is near and dear to my heart. So I'm always curious to watch those and see what people are talking about. One about data, I guess, on the state of web performance, and one on the difference between RUM and lab tests, which that last topic I think is really important.
00:28:37 - Ishan Anand
I will say, yeah, I know you're
00:28:39 - Anthony Campolo
a big rum guy. You're the first person who told me about rum.
00:28:43 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, so look, here's the thing. Everyone runs PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse, and they're shooting for 100, and it may not matter. My number one tip for optimizing your Lighthouse score is: don't look at the Lighthouse score. Look first at your RUM data and your Core Web Vitals, which is another part now of PageSpeed Insights. They used to have this problem with the user experience that interspersed the RUM data with the lab data, and you couldn't focus on what was important. They put the synthetic lab data at the top. And the problem with that is when Google ranks how fast your site is, they don't run Lighthouse. They only look at the RUM data. So that's the number one thing you should look at, and then look at the lab data to help inform how to improve your RUM data. There was a really good example during the pandemic where every state here in the US had its own webpage for the vaccine rollout, and somebody went and ran a test of Lighthouse across all 50 states. And they're like, here are the states with the best and worst vaccine pages.
00:29:44 - Ishan Anand
And then I looked at it and found, if you look at the Core Web Vitals data, it was a totally different picture. In fact, there was one site that had an 80, another site that had a 20, but the Core Web Vitals were almost identical for them. And the only thing that really matters is the Core Web Vitals. So it was a great test case of where RUM data really matters. So I look forward to that talk, and the more we can get that message out there, I think the better the web will be as a whole. So that's a great one. The other one I saw that was really interesting, which is of the moment, is the get-rich-quick one, which is AI-powered Remix apps. So I'm curious to tune to that just because that's one of the hot topics in the industry. I don't know if there's anybody else who's a speaker who saw other talks they want to hear about. And I'll just remind folks, JavaScript Jam, since we're at the halfway or somewhat halfway mark, is an open mic for everything JavaScript and web development related.
00:30:44 - Ishan Anand
This week and the last two weeks we've been focused on Remix Conference, where we're a media sponsor and Anthony's there live streaming from the event. But feel free to raise your hand, ask a question to the speakers, or bring up another topic, especially if you're attending virtually. This is your chance to ask people how things are going there and get a little bit of the hallway track. And while you're at it, as I said earlier, go to JavaScriptJam.com and subscribe to our newsletter.
00:31:14 - Anthony Campolo
So, you know, just put it on Jumbotron.
00:31:16 - Ishan Anand
Yes, thank you.
00:31:18 - Anthony Campolo
Hey, it looks like we got Jen coming up too. She was just texting me on the side. Both Glauber and Jamie, both of you would be great guests for her stream. She currently works at a database company and is always looking for more database or backend-type people to bring on. So what's up, Jen?
00:31:36 - Ishan Anand
Hello.
00:31:37 - Jen Junod
Hello, beautiful humans, and thank you for the intro, Anthony. I was coming up to say yes, just that y'all should be a guest on my show. I am newer to the database world and still pretty new in coding as well. Anthony, you were my second guest, July 5th.
00:32:00 - Anthony Campolo
Did we decide that was the best episode ever? Apparently it is.
00:32:04 - Jen Junod
It has the most live view counts.
00:32:07 - Anthony Campolo
Like double the one that's in second.
00:32:09 - Jen Junod
Yeah, I still need to do better SEO and stuff like that. Anyway, just thought I'd come say hi. I was driving earlier, so I couldn't say yay, Bro Nifty, because Bro Nifty is the best. And yeah, that's really all I came up here to say and ask.
00:32:31 - Anthony Campolo
All right, cool. Thank you for joining us. And yeah, what's your experience been so far with conferences, Jen? You've done, I think, some virtual conferences. Have you done any live ones yet?
00:32:46 - Jen Junod
I've emceed four virtual conferences. I've spoken at one virtual conference, and I've attended one in-person conference. Well, kind of two, like an internal conference for Ivan and also Denver Startup Week. And both of those, I was like a last-minute, hey Jen, go talk on this. Okay. So, like, last-minute speaker for the two in-person ones I've been to.
00:33:19 - Anthony Campolo
That clutch DevRel right there.
00:33:24 - Jen Junod
Luckily they've all been about mental health, so we're good. We're good. But, you know, last-minute speaker.
00:33:31 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I recommend building like an example app that you can demo anywhere, anytime, and just be like, if anyone ever asks you to do a thing, be like, cool, I'm going to do this demo that I've done a thousand times. That was always my move as a DevRel.
00:33:45 - Jen Junod
Yes, that is definitely something I need to do. And I'm going to be working on recording videos today. I actually purposely didn't apply for conferences this season, for the fall, because a lot of CFPs are closing up right now, because I'm focusing elsewhere, yet excited to get to conferences. I agree with what y'all were saying earlier. I really like smaller conferences where you get to know people really well. I think those connections can be made at larger conferences. Like I've been to larger conferences, yet not in the tech world, and they're very similar. You can make connections, but it is much harder, and you have to purposely try to make those relationships, where at smaller conferences it's much more like water-cooler talk. So it's much more organic. And I would say, as for emceeing conferences and for those who have ever thought about being a guest or have questions or things like that, first off, if you have questions and you're doing Q&A, the MC will try to get to all your questions, but it's honestly not possible 90% of the time. And also, if you see there are no questions being asked, please just ask the most random question.
00:35:12 - Jen Junod
It doesn't matter if it's what's their favorite color, please volunteer yourself to ask a question to that guest if there's no one asking questions. And also, being an emcee, you get to see how dope these speakers are. You don't always get to see how they are behind the scenes when you're in the audience. And with Vue, Nuxt, API Days, so many conferences I've seen that people are incredibly kind even behind the scenes.
00:35:58 - Ishan Anand
That's great to hear. I feel like developer conferences haven't always been the most welcoming, and I think a large part of the community has really taken that as feedback. Over the time I've attended them, I think they've really tried to break down the walls to make them more welcoming and get more people into the ecosystem. So I think that's a really good point.
00:36:28 - Jen Junod
I do have a question that was brought up. I saw it earlier today on Twitter, and I will pin it. Somebody was asking, should we pause pushing tech until the layoffs slow down? Because they've noticed how they talk about tech and if we should continue to push people into tech anymore. And I thought that was such a curious question, especially with conferences because it is so much more welcoming. Yet with all the layoffs and scariness, how do we continue to promote the community that we're building?
00:37:12 - Ishan Anand
That's an interesting question. And by pause pushing tech, what exactly would that mean?
00:37:19 - Jen Junod
From the way I took it, I may not suggest to other people that may be bartending right now to start learning to code because they're not able to get a job as quickly because of all the layoffs. That's at least how I took it, of would it make as much sense, if it's harder to get a job, to suggest people learn to code, get into tech?
00:37:47 - Ishan Anand
Got it. Okay. That makes sense.
00:37:51 - Anthony Campolo
I lost connection. Didn't hear the last like two or three minutes of stuff. Looks like the Space survived, though. Thankfully. Continue on.
00:38:02 - Ishan Anand
You missed, you know, Jen raised a really good question, which was she saw somebody on Twitter saying, should we pause pushing tech?
00:38:15 - Anthony Campolo
Absolutely not. I hate this take.
00:38:17 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, with all the layoffs. Yeah, go. So I have some thoughts, but I really want to hear from you, Anthony. I'm really curious to get your first reaction.
00:38:27 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, layoffs, it's a temporary thing. The whole economy went to crap and a whole bunch of companies lost a ton of money. This has nothing to do with the viability of tech skills for a career and to...
00:38:41 - Glauber Costa
We've been there before. Yeah, I mean, we've been there before. 2001 is when I was joining the tech industry, and 2001 was in many ways much worse than what we're seeing now.
00:38:55 - Anthony Campolo
Right. So just like if people had said in 2008, don't go into finance. I think finance is still a viable career, and people who are in finance probably make plenty of money. But 2008 would've been a very bad... Actually, notice the people who graduated around that time with finance degrees, and it was really tough for them to get a job. And it's true, it will be tough to get a tech job right now, and that's something to make sure people are aware of. But we shouldn't say, don't bother. Be a carrot farmer or something. What are you telling them to do instead?
00:39:34 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, I think you should. I would just say you should go into something that you both like and that's economically viable, or statistically economically viable. So don't think tech is no longer economically viable. But if the only reason you're getting into it, like finance, is you don't like it but you think it's the only way to make money, then I think you're just not going to enjoy it.
00:40:12 - Anthony Campolo
I consider whether you should get into tech or not to be a question of: do you want to do this every day for the rest of your life? Is this something you actually enjoy, or have you been told it'll make you money? I saw this in boot camps, especially with Lambda, where it was an ISA and you could join without having to pay. People would be like, ooh, I could join this boot camp and learn to code and then make a bunch of money. I like computers. Brian Douglas has said this too. When people say I like computers as the reason why they want to get into it, he's like, that's a huge red flag. It's like, well, this isn't computers. This is coding. It's a different thing.
00:40:51 - Ishan Anand
Yeah. I will say this, though. Even if you don't like coding, it might be useful to augment whatever you end up doing with some coding background. I think it'll help you go forward. But maybe your career isn't coding, but you should still get tech skills because it's a good complement.
00:41:10 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. I told this to my partner, who's a copywriter. I'm like, I really want to teach her how to create a basic HTML site and show her, like, what is a head tag and what is metadata.
00:41:22 - Jen Junod
Let me teach her. Let me teach her.
00:41:24 - Anthony Campolo
It will make her far, far more effective. We're both going to teach her, but maybe I can get her into it. You can teach her first.
00:41:34 - Jen Junod
That would be really cool. I love Jen.
00:41:36 - Ishan Anand
She's amazing.
00:41:38 - Jen Junod
His fiance's name is Jen as well, in case anybody was curious. And she's phenomenal.
00:41:45 - Ishan Anand
So, you know, I'm alone and no one can hear me.
00:42:14 - Jen Junod
I just started being able to hear.
00:42:18 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, they cut out for a second. You want to just reset whatever you were saying? This Space is going real well. Is there anybody out there?
00:42:38 - Ishan Anand
Okay, I'm back.
00:42:39 - Anthony Campolo
Nod if you can hear me.
00:42:43 - Ishan Anand
Well, that's big. That's big shoes to fill. So can you hear me? Anthony? Can you hear me now?
00:42:51 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, we can hear you. Just restart whatever you were saying before.
00:42:55 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, I was going to say, and if folks want to go back, we had a really interesting conversation a few JavaScript Jam episodes ago where there was a question like, I don't think the economics changes whether you should get into tech, but there was, I think, a more fundamental question like, does AI change, you know, how does that affect getting into tech or a tech job? Maybe if you were looking at making it significantly easier, it may make it significantly easier. If your goal was not to code, but to be able to build certain things, maybe you can build those using ChatGPT and you don't need as much coding knowledge as you thought anymore in the future. Or maybe it changes the dynamics of how we segment the tech ecosystem between front end and back end developers. And I think that's a really fascinating topic, but we explored that in a previous episode. I don't remember which one it was, but you can go back and find it in the archive.
00:43:56 - Anthony Campolo
I'd be curious, Glauber, as someone who's been in the industry for so long, when you talk to people or if someone were to say, you know, I'm interested in getting into tech, and they are interested, you want to give them advice about how to do it, what would you say to someone who would ask you that?
00:44:13 - Glauber Costa
Well, I think the advice is the same as it's always been. You have to make yourself visible. The way I became visible in my career was through open source. Open source doesn't immediately guarantee you anything. You have to be contributing to a project that has some visibility. Don't assume that all projects are equally visible. But you have to keep in mind that when we're talking about downturns, people are being laid off, 20% of people. It's a lot of people, but that's still a lot of people that are not laid off, right? So tech is still around. So if you manage to be in that 80%, you don't have to be top 1%. That's the thing. You have to be top 80%. And you can hear the folks back here in the hallway, right? So you just have to make yourself visible. You have to make sure that you can communicate the skill set that you have in one way or another. Open source is not, by and large, the only route. And as long as you're in this top percentile, that is not top 1%, it's really top 50, top 80%, you'll be all right.
00:45:15 - Glauber Costa
So just focus on developing your skill and making sure that you can communicate your skills well and show them off well. Participating in conferences is another way. Speaking at conferences, doing interesting stuff, posting around. So it's how it's always been.
00:45:33 - Ishan Anand
To bring it back to the conference, we talked with Kent about this idea. I don't know if they had a chance to implement it, but conferences in general, like Remix Conference, are a great way to network and potentially meet future employers. If you're looking to get into tech, it's not the easiest because there's a time and logistics and sometimes a cost burden to attend them, but it is another potential avenue, especially if it's in your area geographically. It's not a bad way to go and get immersed in the ecosystem.
00:46:16 - Glauber Costa
Yeah. And you can get, I don't know, I've been to a lot of conferences, and there's this hack to how to go to a conference without paying, which is you speak at a conference. And it's also great because you get a lot of visibility. So it goes back to do something interesting. Something interesting enough. And sometimes you think the bar is like, oh, I'm not good enough, et cetera. But the thing is that you can always have an angle. You can always have something that you're doing that is interesting. Again, when I started my career in 2001, I was not obviously as skilled as I am today, and yet I was trying in local conferences and smaller places to get to the conference as a speaker. First of all because I was broke, I didn't have money to pay, and second of all because it gives you visibility. So it's a win-win. So try to get to conferences as a speaker. It's a great way to do it.
00:47:13 - Ishan Anand
Yeah. And another thing, we were talking about how conferences are now more welcoming. I get the impression from a lot of organizers they are looking for new speakers, and they try to make that easier. So it's a great call-out.
00:47:31 - Glauber Costa
Yeah. And especially in contrast with the Linux community, that was always very hostile in a lot of senses, the tech community in general in the past 10 years has been thinking a lot about how to gatekeep things less, how to give more opportunity to people of all backgrounds, and yada yada yada. So the fact that you are a new speaker that never spoke before, as long as you can come up with a compelling case that the stuff you're going to talk about is interesting to the audience, you have a good shot. So might as well try.
00:48:05 - Ishan Anand
Yeah. And very often they are looking for a mix of content too. So they're not looking for expert content where you got to blow the minds of the most sophisticated Linux kernel hacker.
00:48:19 - Glauber Costa
They're also looking for, it doesn't have to be sophisticated, but for a conference just put yourself in the position of the person who is looking for those slots, which is an advocate of the users. So put yourself in the shoes of somebody that is going to be watching that talk. It can't be something totally obvious, right? So it's not about beginner or advanced. I can give you an incredibly advanced talk that is so boring that nobody's going to want to see it. So you want to be able to spin this in a way that makes it interesting for the audience, and you can do that at every level. But I think it will be a hard thing to do to just show up with something incredibly basic and a tutorial on something incredibly basic. Probably not. But it can show, for example, how you use that in an interesting way, way more interesting. And again, same thing for more advanced content. If I'm just showing up and presenting the internals of this AI algorithm that I developed, hypothetically, I did not...
00:49:22 - Glauber Costa
But way less interesting for this audience. For example, if I submit a talk about the nitty-gritty inner details of how we do replication at Turso, some conferences will take it, probably not Remix. But if I'm talking about how you can use that to create better experiences with your front end application, much better chances of being accepted. It's all about the framing. It's not so much about the level. So just find the framing. It's a bit of work.
00:49:53 - Anthony Campolo
Jen, you got your hand up.
00:49:56 - Jen Junod
This is something that I was actually talking to Anthony about. Being only a year, and not even a year, almost a year, we're 10 months into starting my show, Teach Jen Tech, I had no idea what I wanted to go into. I was kind of just trying everything, and somehow, and I feel very nerdy for this, but databases seem fascinating to me and I love them and I love learning about them. And I'm curious, how did y'all find what you're passionate about to do talks about them?
00:50:35 - Anthony Campolo
Ooh, yeah, this is a really fun one. For me, it was Redwood. As people should probably know, people who know me at all know that I am so gung-ho on Redwood. And the thing that got me into it was I was at boot camp and I was learning quote unquote full-stack React development. And I went through this four-month-long curriculum that taught me, you know, from front to back, how to use React, use Redux, how to use Express, how to use Postgres, and then you tie it all together. And then I was like, wow, this is complicated and doesn't work very well, and the architecture and all this, no one understands. And then I discovered Redwood, and it's like, hey, you get all that from a freaking command, and you have an app set up with literally all of that. That was the thing that got me fired up, and it was just kind of circumstantial. I happened to be in a place where I needed a tool like Redwood. I found Redwood and I got it. I got the problem it was solving because I intimately knew that problem firsthand.
00:51:40 - Anthony Campolo
And yeah, so it's always hard to say, like, how do you find your passion? Because a lot of times there's not like a cookie-cutter kind of solution to that. But I'd be really curious, Ishan and Glauber, what you guys think about that, how you found your passion.
00:51:58 - Ishan Anand
I'll let Glauber go first and then I can go.
00:52:02 - Glauber Costa
I think passion finds you, and that's really the answer. Now the question is, once you find your passion, is that passion profitable? But most of the time it finds you in experience. You have to remember, in 2000, before open source was trusted, the game was just Microsoft, Oracle. They were the only games in town. And on top of that, the industry was focusing a lot more on web stuff and user-facing stuff. And I found this passion in the Linux kernel. So the advice that I got from anybody was don't go into operating systems because there's no money there, there's no career there, and on top of that, don't go into open source because that sounds crazy. Now I did it anyway out of passion. But it's not like I found it, it found me. And the leap of faith is an interesting thing because when you're young, you have the luxury of not worrying too much about it because if it fails then you go do something else later, more targeted.
00:53:09 - Glauber Costa
But the real question is, when you look at the passion that found you, is this something that I'm going to be able to keep doing or not? But it finds you. Passion cannot be manufactured. You click, and it's almost like falling in love with another person. It's hard to manufacture that.
00:53:29 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, that's a really good answer. I like that it finds you because I don't have a good answer. It's all like, for me, well, how'd...
00:53:39 - Anthony Campolo
You discovered performance as your thing?
00:53:41 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, so if I was to go through the history, coming out of school I was really interested in music and I studied computer science, so I wanted to do something at the intersection.
00:53:53 - Anthony Campolo
We were the reverse. Yeah, I was really interested in tech.
00:53:57 - Glauber Costa
Yeah.
00:53:58 - Ishan Anand
And so I'm a better engineer than a musician. So I went to a computer music company and did code, and that's how I felt like I was part of the industry. And when I was there, we were trying to do a really difficult problem, which is hard to appreciate today with how fast computers are, but we were trying to do real-time audio editing, and video at the parent company, and that's where performance really, really matters. And so that's what actually pulled me into it. It was in the service of that passion. And then I've kind of slowly worked my way up the stack, but performance continued to be a problem or a place where I would find a performance problem. So eventually from drivers to the application layer to then cloud and mobile. And when I got into mobile, it was again a bit of happenstance. One of my friends was like, hey, I want to start this mobile project. And it was to launch an app for the iPhone the day it came out, before there was an App Store, and I got pulled into that ecosystem. And again I found, hey, this is web performance.
00:55:04 - Ishan Anand
And I can use the same set of skills. And so that's what has... like every single turn, there was one foot in one place and one foot in where it felt like things were going.
00:55:18 - Anthony Campolo
Looks like Jamie's back up here. Did you disconnect from the Hilton Wi-Fi like I told you to?
00:55:27 - Jamie Barton
Yeah, I had to go downstairs, so hopefully you can hear me now.
00:55:32 - Ishan Anand
But I bumped.
00:55:33 - Jamie Barton
I bumped into Glauber, though, in the hallway, which is good.
00:55:40 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, so what we were just talking about was
00:55:45 - Ishan Anand
tech.
00:55:45 - Anthony Campolo
It may be what we would recommend to new people who are trying to get into it.
00:55:48 - Glauber Costa
Before you get the answer from Jamie, I will thank you all and apologize for missing the last couple of minutes. I do want to go because there are people who started crowding around the booth, getting some attention.
00:55:59 - Anthony Campolo
Thank you. Thanks for joining.
00:56:01 - Glauber Costa
Great pleasure being around.
00:56:02 - Ishan Anand
Thank you.
00:56:02 - Glauber Costa
So thank you, guys.
00:56:07 - Ishan Anand
Yeah.
00:56:07 - Anthony Campolo
So, Jamie, how'd you find your passion in tech? Which could be GraphQL, could be something else.
00:56:15 - Jamie Barton
Sorry, could you repeat that?
00:56:18 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. We're talking about how we found our passion in tech. So for me, that was Redwood. For Jen, it was databases. For Ishan, it was performance. For you, I would take a wild guess that it might be GraphQL.
00:56:33 - Jamie Barton
Yeah. So my passion started way back when. Well, I have a hobby. I do a lot of card tricks, magic tricks, and way back when I was doing that kind of stuff, I wanted to show people this. And I ended up building a website maybe when I was 11 or 12 years old, kind of the first kid in school. And from that moment I could just see on people's faces the reaction and the joy that it brought, being able to share information with others. And even though it was just, in my time, my hobby, that was just a really good time. And from that moment I've just kind of continued to do that. I moved into Ruby on Rails. I moved into Node with GraphQL. And then in the last few years, specifically with GraphQL, there wasn't really anyone creating content specifically on that. There were a lot of content creators being paid to create content around different products and platforms, which is great. But I thought, why not spend a few years just building content around GraphQL? And to be honest, it's kind of worked.
00:57:35 - Jamie Barton
It's been good. I've had some amazing discussions with people, and some really interesting ideas have come out of that. It's given me some great opportunities in the process. So my advice, if anyone is keen to do something like that, is just stick it out. When I started creating content in the early days, no one was really watching it, no one really cared. But the more you are persistent about it and you get over that hump, the passion just grows and grows and grows because you start to see the rewards of all of that hard work.
00:58:18 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome. Awesome. Cool. We're getting close to the top of the hour now. Is there anything people want to throw out about Remix Conf or anything else we've talked about before we start closing it?
00:58:30 - Ishan Anand
I have one for Remix Conf, and maybe we can follow up on it later. But I'm curious if there are any on-the-ground themes or hallway-track conversations that seem to be consistently about a certain topic you guys are seeing there that may not be apparent, or are apparent, from looking at the talks. I'll give you an example. At Jamstack Conference, I felt like one of the not explicit, but implicit, themes was about the diversity of frameworks in the ecosystem, as in other alternatives. People should know about the other frameworks out there. And I don't know if you feel like there's something like that emerging as a theme. It could be edge, it could be data at the edge, it could be functions at the edge, it could be something else. But is there an underlying theme that you keep hearing coming up in hallway conversations with folks?
00:59:28 - Anthony Campolo
I've not been involved enough in the hallway conversations to give an answer to this. I don't know about Jamie maybe.
00:59:38 - Jamie Barton
Yeah, quite a few. It's getting quite noisy down here in the hallway track now, so apologies for that. But yeah, there's a lot of people talking about data and where data lives. Edge is more important these days, so I'd just say data in general is still a very popular topic. And edge, anything at the edge, we're all interested in. And a lot more with React and the server-side components and all that stuff. That seems to be quite a popular topic amongst people, I think.
01:00:05 - Ishan Anand
Okay, great. Thank you. As an edge computing platform, I love hearing that. So thank you. Anthony, do you want to take us out?
01:00:17 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Thank you so much, everyone. This was a super great conversation. If anyone on this stage gave you value, go ahead and click their face and follow them because they're going to give you more value in other places. And unfortunately we do not have our closeout music here, but really appreciate everyone who came to join us. We will be doing an actual live podcast interview with the Turso people tonight at 7:30 at Remix Conf. And yeah, I'm just having a blast here hanging out with everyone at the conference, and we hope to see you on the next one.
01:01:02 - Ishan Anand
Thank you.