JavaScript Jam Live Open Mic - October 18 2023
A talk on frameworks, dev tools, and community, featuring updates on Astro, Next.js, Pipedream, AI reveals, and more
Episode Description
JavaScript Jam hosts discuss LaunchFast, infrastructure-as-code tools, Solid 1.8, framework migrations, and AI-powered reading of ancient scrolls.
Episode Summary
This JavaScript Jam episode opens with Rishi Raj Jain showcasing LaunchFast, his Astro boilerplate for quickly launching startups, which includes integrations for payments, authentication, analytics, and deployment. The conversation shifts to developer career roles, touching on developer experience engineering and recent hires at Clerk. Bro Nifty shares his work with Wing Lang, an infrastructure-as-code tool built by the creator of the AWS CDK, sparking a broader discussion about CloudFormation abstractions and tools like SST. The group then covers the week's newsletter highlights, including Solid 1.8's improved serialization capabilities and its implications for server-to-client interactions, TanStack Query v5's framework-agnostic rebranding, and Astro 3.3's new picture component for image optimization. A discussion about framework competition with Next.js leads into how shared tools like Vite and Nitro create useful commonalities across meta-frameworks, and how AI could assist with large-scale migrations between them. Scott introduces Pipe Dream, a developer-focused API connector with AI-powered capabilities. The episode's standout moment comes when Anthony describes a breakthrough project using particle accelerators and machine learning to read ancient Greek scrolls preserved under volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius, funded in part by GitHub co-founder Nat Friedman. The show wraps with Abdul sharing his subscription-based backlog-cleaning service DQ and Toby teasing upcoming developments with Million JS.
Chapters
00:00:00 - LaunchFast Demo and Developer Career Paths
The episode kicks off with introductions before Rishi Raj Jain presents LaunchFast, his Astro-based boilerplate designed to help developers launch startups quickly. He walks through its features, including Google authentication, PostHog analytics, Lemon Squeezy payments, Firebase document storage, and Resend email integration, noting the project has already generated $400 in revenue at $75 per license.
The conversation naturally transitions into a discussion about developer career paths, with Anthony and Scott suggesting Rishi would be well suited for developer experience engineering roles. They reference recent hires at Clerk, including Rachel Neighbors, who worked on the React documentation site, and Jacob Evans, highlighting how the developer relations landscape continues to evolve with overlapping titles and responsibilities.
00:06:56 - Wing Lang and Infrastructure as Code
Bro Nifty shares what he's been working on, including a CJS/ESM bug and his exploration of Wing Lang, an infrastructure-as-code tool created by the inventor of the AWS CDK. He explains that Wing provides an abstraction layer that can write Terraform configurations for deploying applications across AWS, GCP, and Azure, complete with a local simulator for testing.
Anthony expands on the infrastructure-as-code ecosystem, clarifying how CloudFormation serves as the foundational layer beneath CDK, with tools like Amplify and SAM acting as additional meta-languages. He draws the analogy that CloudFormation is like assembly language for AWS, explaining why so many abstraction tools have emerged. The discussion also touches on SST as another notable project building on CDK, showing how competitive and active this space has become.
00:12:06 - Solid 1.8, TanStack Query, and Astro 3.3
Anthony introduces the week's newsletter, leading with the Solid 1.8 "Bifrost" release, named after the Norse mythological rainbow bridge. He explains the release focuses on serialization improvements that bridge server-to-client interactions, with the project now participating in Google Chrome's Aurora program. The improved serialization approach promises data deduplication benefits for islands architecture and recursive structures.
The group also covers TanStack Query v5, noting its evolution from React Query to a framework-agnostic tool, and Astro 3.3's new picture component. Rishi shares his perspective on Astro's image optimization capabilities, arguing they effectively cut costs compared to Next Image. The conversation touches on how native browser primitives like lazy loading for iframes and srcset are making some framework-level image components less necessary, with Rishi encouraging developers to consider using standard img tags with native features.
00:18:01 - Framework Competition and Shared Tooling
The discussion turns to whether any framework is surpassing Next.js in production, with Anthony acknowledging that while some frameworks offer smaller bundles and better hydration defaults, none come close to Next's market share. Rishi points out that migrating large-scale production applications from Next to alternatives like Astro remains a significant barrier for companies.
Anthony suggests that AI tools could become powerful aids for large-scale framework migrations, noting that LLMs are already effective at translating components between React and Vue. Rishi mentions Builder IO's Mitosis project as an existing tool for converting between component syntaxes. The conversation also highlights how shared underlying tools like Vite and Nitro create valuable commonalities across meta-frameworks, with Rishi noting that even Analog JS and MarkoRun leverage Nitro, making it easier for developers to move between ecosystems without relearning everything.
00:24:08 - Pipe Dream and Developer Tooling
Scott introduces Pipe Dream, a developer-focused API connector similar to Zapier but with deeper customization options through Node.js. He explains that Pipe Dream stands out by allowing developers to write custom code for integrations and even push their connection configurations to GitHub, enabling open-source sharing of unique automation setups.
Anthony adds context about an upcoming JavaScript Jam podcast episode featuring a Pipe Dream developer advocate, noting the platform's new AI capabilities that use Puppeteer and Playwright for form filling and web scraping. He highlights how platforms with extensive integration data can fine-tune models on specific APIs, potentially automating the repetitive glue-code tasks developers frequently perform, like forwarding GitHub pull requests to Discord bots.
00:28:30 - AI Reading Ancient Greek Scrolls
Anthony shares the episode's most unexpected story: a breakthrough project using particle accelerators and machine learning to read ancient Greek scrolls preserved under volcanic ash from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. He explains that the scrolls are too fragile to unroll physically, but researchers developed a method of shooting neutrons through them to detect ink locations, then training algorithms to reconstruct the text.
The discussion captures genuine excitement as Anthony reveals that hundreds of new Greek texts could become available within months. Scott and Anthony explore the testing methodology and implications, while noting that Nat Friedman, a GitHub co-founder, offered significant prize money to incentivize solving the final technical challenges. The conversation reflects on how the intersection of science and technology can solve problems no one anticipated, with the data having been made available on Kaggle for researchers to analyze.
00:37:02 - Community Updates and Wrap-Up
Scott announces an upcoming Twitch stream with Nicky T, noting that Nicky is moving his streaming schedule from Wednesdays to Mondays to avoid conflicts with Open Sauced community events. Abdul joins to discuss DQ IO, his subscription-based service where he handles backlog bugs that companies can't prioritize into sprints, offering consistency by being the same dedicated developer for each client.
Toby returns after audio issues to praise JavaScript Jam and tease upcoming developments with Million JS, mentioning new features around activation are in the works. Anthony announces the show will shift to a biweekly schedule going forward while continuing the weekly newsletter. The episode closes with the hosts thanking listeners and promising more content, including the upcoming Pipe Dream podcast episode.
Transcript
00:00:00 - Anthony Campolo
Hello, welcome to JavaScript Jam. Looks like I got my man Rishi up here with me. What's up, Rishi?
00:00:08 - Rishi Raj Jain
I'm good. How about you, Anthony? How's your day going?
00:00:12 - Anthony Campolo
I'm doing all right, yeah. Happy to have some people show up. Oh, looks like we got Scott and Bro Nifty as well. So we do got a crew here. What you been up to recently, Rishi? I see you're shipping like usual. What are you building right now?
00:00:29 - Rishi Raj Jain
Yeah, so I'm building LaunchFast, which is an Astro boilerplate that gives you literally everything to launch your startup right away.
00:00:41 - Anthony Campolo
That's right, yeah. You sent that to me and I said I'd take a look. So you said customer support?
00:00:50 - Rishi Raj Jain
Yeah, I mean, it's just an example of integrating Crisp into your website. But then there's so much that you can do with LaunchFast Astro boilerplate. So I recently added this section where you can, you know, have components for accepting payments or authorizing users, admin functionalities, dashboards, and there's a lot of things that you can just do with that. I have a tweet. Can I share my tweet here?
00:01:23 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, go for it. I'm adding a link as well, just to your homepage.
00:01:28 - Rishi Raj Jain
Sure thing.
00:01:32 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:01:34 - Rishi Raj Jain
So this is just one of them. How do I... Yeah, okay, let me post it as well.
00:01:38 - Anthony Campolo
Yes, if you just respond to the thing on the bottom right where the little speech bubble is, then that'll get it on the jumbotron.
00:01:51 - Rishi Raj Jain
Thanks, man. So I just started this design where I show deployment platforms. Edge is yet to be added, so yeah, pardon me for that.
00:02:04 - Anthony Campolo
Why bother?
00:02:08 - Rishi Raj Jain
And then, yeah, so it comes in with Google auth, user analytics, so PostHog analytics. I'll be adding Simple Analytics as well. And then we have Lemon Squeezy for payments, Firebase for uploading and storing documents, then sending emails using Resend, and a lot of inbuilt components. And literally you can deploy it anywhere, to any Node.js platform. So yeah, this was a weekend side project and yeah, I think it took off nicely. So I've been building in public, or at least learning to, and generated $400 out of it till now. So yeah, I've been focusing on my...
00:02:44 - Anthony Campolo
Wow. So what does it cost just to get it?
00:02:49 - Rishi Raj Jain
Yeah, just a template. So right now it's running a discount: $75 for forever access and updates.
00:02:56 - Anthony Campolo
Okay.
00:02:57 - Rishi Raj Jain
Yeah, that's what it is right now. But yeah, with Next.js Conf coming in, I'll be launching a Next.js template. Don't get the secret out to anyone, okay?
00:03:09 - Anthony Campolo
Don't worry. Just between you and me.
00:03:14 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:03:14 - Anthony Campolo
What's up, Scott?
00:03:16 - Scott Steinlage
What's up? Yo. How's it going, everybody? The usual. Okay.
00:03:22 - Bro Nifty
It's good.
00:03:23 - Anthony Campolo
What's up, Bro Nifty?
00:03:25 - Scott Steinlage
Hey, Bro Nifty. Yo. Yeah, LaunchFast. Right on, Rishi. This looks pretty cool, man.
00:03:39 - Rishi Raj Jain
Thanks, guys.
00:03:42 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, that was cool. I'm always inspired by how much you're hacking on the weekend. I used to do this a lot more when I had more free time.
00:03:53 - Rishi Raj Jain
Yeah, I'm still, you know, sitting free right now and that's why I'm all into this. So I'm still applying and trying to find my next role.
00:04:02 - Anthony Campolo
What are you trying... Are you applying for engineering roles? Are you applying for devrel roles as well?
00:04:10 - Rishi Raj Jain
So I've, as you would know, worked with different teams, so I'm up for both devrel and, specifically, developer success engineer roles, because that's like an intersection of customers, users, developers, and your core product. So that makes a lot of sense to me. And yeah, I like to play along multiple verticals, so I feel like...
00:04:35 - Anthony Campolo
Developer relations engineer would be the type of role that you would be well suited for. So usually they want to lean a little more toward engineering, but also it's kind of a devrel thing because you're really good at just sharing what you're doing and posting stuff, having examples. It's stuff that's really, really valuable, and not all devrel people can do it as consistently and quickly as someone who has a lot of experience doing it, you know?
00:05:02 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, I agree. And also, like, which this probably falls right in line with too, pretty much the same thing, just probably worded differently, but like developer experience relations engineer.
00:05:16 - Rishi Raj Jain
Yeah, I appreciate those kind words, Anthony. And yeah, totally, I'm all in for it. And I've been applying to Y Combinator startups as I see them coming up and throwing a bunch of money at me. So yeah, cool.
00:05:28 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:05:29 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I think you're right, Scott. Developer experience engineering is the term I was looking for, not developer relations. So yeah, you're right.
00:05:34 - Scott Steinlage
It's very similar. But yeah, same thing.
00:05:37 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, it's all word soup at this point. Yeah, I know.
00:05:41 - Scott Steinlage
That was like last week our conversation was...
00:05:44 - Anthony Campolo
Totally.
00:05:46 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah. Or even the other night when we were chatting with our dear friend Jacob Evans.
00:05:55 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. New devrel person at Clerk.
00:05:58 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah. Senior developer experience advocate, I think was his role or something like that. Yeah. That's cool.
00:06:07 - Bro Nifty
That's amazing. They got the whole family over there, everybody. Everybody over there at Clerk, yo. Great place. The docs lead, Rachel Neighbors, she worked directly with Dan Abramov, I think, to make react.dev. I think that's the story.
00:06:28 - Anthony Campolo
That's correct.
00:06:28 - Bro Nifty
Oh my God.
00:06:29 - Anthony Campolo
She was on the React core team for a while, and then they were working on that for a long time, and then she left the core team, I think, when it was at like 95% complete. And then after it got actually released, she had already been kind of working at a different company. Like, that was the timeline.
00:06:46 - Bro Nifty
Okay. Yeah. That's amazing. She's just absolutely... Yeah, that's great. It'd be great to... Yes, that's fabulous.
00:06:56 - Anthony Campolo
What are you hacking on these days, Bro Nifty?
00:07:03 - Bro Nifty
Sorry, my reminder alarm for JavaScript Jam went off for some reason.
00:07:09 - Anthony Campolo
Well, time for JavaScript Jam.
00:07:11 - Bro Nifty
It's time for JavaScript Jam. Yeah, I had it set for five minutes or maybe 15 minutes before, and then I kept on missing it because I'd say, oh, it's five minutes, and then I'd dismiss it and...
00:07:23 - Anthony Campolo
Then just set it for exactly two. We're pretty consistent. We usually launch right at two. So that's true. Or set it for 2:01.
00:07:34 - Bro Nifty
As I said, let me update the time to the exact time so that I don't dismiss it and then look away, and then half an hour later I forgot that I was engrossed in something and, you know, the kind of absent-minded professor. What am I hacking on? I'm working on a CJS and ESM bug currently, and something that is infrastructure as code in Winglang.
00:08:02 - Anthony Campolo
So it's [unclear] Winglang.
00:08:04 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:08:05 - Anthony Campolo
How's Wing Lang?
00:08:06 - Bro Nifty
It is cool. It is amazing. It's the creator of the AWS CDK, so he made Wing. It's an abstraction that basically writes, if you make a website, an API endpoint to serve requests... Like, if you wanted to deploy, I don't know, Next or Remix or just a Create React App or Vite on AWS directly with Terraform, it writes everything. And you have a, you know, maybe server, like you have API requests or something serving it. That's what it'd be for. Or just anything that you could deploy with Terraform. It's CDK for Terraform, though, so it'll work with AWS, GCP, and Azure. And then there's a local simulator, and then I think probably other clouds will be rolled out later. But anything that Terraform supports. But it's not just Terraform, it's like anything.
00:09:05 - Anthony Campolo
It's more like... It's just kind of... I think it's probably aiming at AWS and then kind of adding on providers from there. That's usually how these platforms go. Yeah. I had a friend who was interviewing there who then had a very public mental breakdown and never ended up working there. So it probably wasn't going to work out, but it looked like a pretty cool tool. And there's a lot of different things like it that are going for this infrastructure-as-code thing. I want to see if I can get Toby up here. That'd be cool. What inspired you to try Winglang over any of these other infrastructure-as-code things?
00:09:47 - Bro Nifty
It just immediately jumped out to me as being the most direct and minimalistic solution to provide an abstraction upon CDKTF, which is what I was already working with in my own personal free time. I just like CDKTF a lot. It's a lot of fun and it helps in the learning process. Like, I've been working with Docker since, I don't know, 2015 or something, but then not really so much with the actual Kubernetes deployment style. Basically, Kubernetes is like Docker but with replicas, and they changed the style of networking a little bit. And so I haven't really worked that much with it. So it's helping me kind of get more into the nuts and bolts of that, because it's really foundational for deploying containers and different microservices, right. So yeah. So anyway, yeah, I was just doing it in my own time and then I saw this and I said, oh, the creator of AWS CDK, who's foundational for IaC, where it comes from, is creating this system. So, okay, well, you know, let me just hop on that and let's see.
00:11:03 - Bro Nifty
See what I can see over there. And I started talking to these people and they're just amazing. Just the smartest guys that exist in this whole software space, in my opinion, besides, you know, the Rust and the WASM people.
00:11:15 - Anthony Campolo
SST guys are pretty good too. They do a similar thing because they're building on CDK as well. And technically, you said CDK was the foundation for infrastructure as code. CloudFormation is really more fundamental than CDK. CDK is already an AWS meta-framework, along with Amplify and SAM, that all basically are meta languages on top of CloudFormation. And CloudFormation is not the first one to do it either, but that's kind of the one that everyone has to do it now because AWS CloudFormation is so ingrained and so complicated and verbose and hard to work with that you need all of these abstraction tools, because CloudFormation is like assembly language for AWS. Yeah, sure. I love this stuff, though. I think infra as code is so, so interesting.
00:12:06 - Scott Steinlage
Word.
00:12:07 - Anthony Campolo
Let me post our newsletter for this week. So the main topic was Solid 1.8 Bifrost, which I think is a Norwegian term. Yeah, a really epic description of what it means. It's in Norse mythology. It is a burning rainbow bridge that reaches between Midgard, which is Earth, and Asgard, which is the realm of the gods. That's pretty cool. I went into Norse mythology there. I don't know anything about it, but I think this stuff is just fun. And I like when different projects have cool names. Like, I know Vue, they do anime shows and movies. Like, they had a One Piece release.
00:13:02 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, it's interesting. I think it's cool when they have something unique to them or where they're from or where things were created or whatever. I think it's cool to be unique like that. Absolutely. And I'm sure there are people that can relate with it and others that just think it's neat like we do, so that's cool.
00:13:22 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I'd be curious. I'll have to ask Ryan who exactly picked that, if it was him who picked it. But the kind of headline thing is it's setting things up for SolidStart and working on things like serialization, bridging server-to-client interactions. And now they're in the Google Chrome Aurora project. They have benchmarks specifically for this, and they're saying that they're shifting toward a more flexible and generic serialization approach, which offers deduplication of serialized data, which benefits things like islands and recursive structures. I'm not sure what recursive structures is referring to, but I would imagine this is a lot of the stuff that would make it more competitive with something like Qwik, which is able to do really sophisticated serialization stuff. Yeah. Be curious, Rishi, do you use Qwik or SolidStart much at all, or are you all in on Astro right now?
00:14:28 - Rishi Raj Jain
Right now it's all on Astro. But I've already worked with SolidStart. And what was the other one?
00:14:35 - Anthony Campolo
Qwik?
00:14:35 - Rishi Raj Jain
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not worked much with Qwik, but SolidStart was easy to grasp and get started with. I mean, I saw it after Remix, so it kind of went with the flow and it was super easy to understand and just get started. The thing that stood out was signals.
00:14:58 - Anthony Campolo
Right.
00:14:58 - Rishi Raj Jain
And that took some time to grasp, but it was amazing with the number of renders it saves. So yeah.
00:15:09 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome. Yeah, it seems like most people, if they're already familiar with React and then they kind of jump into Solid, they're usually pretty hyped about it and they think it's pretty cool. And the most I hear is like, you know, there's one or two things that are kind of counterintuitive that might be a gotcha, but as soon as you figure those out, it's pretty smooth sailing. So I'm pretty bullish on the future of things like SolidStart, especially now that they seem to have ironed out the underlying implementation. Going for Nitro. And Rishi, you're actually one of the first people I saw who used Nitro. You had an Edgio Nitro demo, and so now that's becoming the underlying implementation for SolidStart. So I'm sure you probably think that's a good choice, I would assume.
00:15:57 - Tobiloba
Sure.
00:15:58 - Rishi Raj Jain
I mean, we also have AnalogJS running on Nitro, and I did the Edgio integration for that.
00:16:04 - Anthony Campolo
Really? I actually didn't know Analog was also using Nitro. That's interesting.
00:16:09 - Rishi Raj Jain
Yeah. And I developed an integration for Edgio as well, so you should know it. But yeah, I think Nitro has a great base layer for any framework to have Vite, have server-side routes, and yeah, the DX is amazing for having that base layer. It's like added goodies on top of Vite to help you launch a framework within a day or two, I think. Yeah, AnalogJS was amazingly built on top of the Nitro servers.
00:16:39 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. And I do remember you building the Analog example. I just didn't look at what the server was that it was using, so that's pretty cool. Yeah, I like also just how a lot of meta-frameworks, if you have JSX and Vue and Angular and they're all using Vite and Nitro, then even though they have these different template syntaxes, there's a lot of commonalities between them. So when stuff breaks and you have to get into those underlying implementations, if you're in one or the other, you don't have to learn a whole new build tool and a whole new server every time you have to switch from one meta-framework to another. It's really nice to have these shared tools between different frameworks, I think.
00:17:25 - Rishi Raj Jain
Yeah. I'm not sure if people are aware about it, but Marko also has their own meta application framework that's using Vite right now in production. So they might want to switch to Nitro soon.
00:17:43 - Anthony Campolo
You talking about Marko Run? Yeah, yeah, Marko Run. I worked with that one a little bit, and that's a pretty sweet framework as well.
00:18:01 - Rishi Raj Jain
I do see a lot of frameworks coming up, but is there anyone, any framework, surpassing what Next.js is doing in production right now?
00:18:13 - Anthony Campolo
I think it depends what you're looking for. There's ones that maybe have smaller bundles, that are more performance-focused, and that can kind of give you better out-of-the-box defaults around things like hydration. But, you know, in terms of market share, no. None of them are even close. Next is still the go-to for so many people.
00:18:39 - Rishi Raj Jain
Yeah, I definitely have to launch that template as well.
00:18:43 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. I think with Astro, as Astro has added server-side rendering and stuff like that, it's really pretty competitive with what you could do with Next. I find if you want to slap an ORM and a database on either, it's really not that different at this point.
00:19:07 - Abdul
Yeah.
00:19:08 - Rishi Raj Jain
But I still see, you know, moving out of Next.js from, let's say, Pages or App Dir to Astro is something big companies, or someone using Next.js in production at scale, might not be comfortable with to start.
00:19:25 - Anthony Campolo
I think, yeah, there would be a certain amount of understanding how to translate one to the other, and the components would be able to transfer pretty easily because you're still able to do JSX. It's the data-fetching stuff that could be a bit complicated. But I think this is where AI tools are going to be really useful for large-scale migrations. I think if it has enough training to understand what something in Next versus Astro is, it can kind of do that translation for you really, really quickly. At least, I've noticed it translate components between React and Vue. Some of the LLMs are actually particularly well suited to do that. So I'd be curious to see if any companies are going to try and do something like that.
00:20:12 - Rishi Raj Jain
I do remember seeing something like this from Builder.io. I think they built something which translates according to all...
00:20:20 - Anthony Campolo
That's Mitosis. Mitosis, yeah.
00:20:26 - Rishi Raj Jain
Mitosis, yeah.
00:20:26 - Scott Steinlage
Correct.
00:20:27 - Rishi Raj Jain
So yeah, but this is not built for meta-frameworks right now, which is what we are aiming at.
00:20:34 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Mitosis is kind of like a universal representation that can go between all component syntaxes, I think, is the idea. So I'm not sure how that would factor into something like a migration, but it could potentially be useful. I'm not sure.
00:20:54 - Rishi Raj Jain
Yeah.
00:20:58 - Scott Steinlage
Word.
00:21:00 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. So that was kind of the big story of the week, was the Solid 1.8 announcement and a couple other links. We had TanStack Query v5 come out. That's pretty exciting. This is sort of a rebranding of what was React Query. Now it's TanStack Query because it is more framework-agnostic, and so that's a big release. And then also Astro 3.3, which comes with a picture component. This might be relevant to you, Rishi. I know that Astro has gone through having an image component and then having this experimental assets folder, and now there's the picture component. So do you know what's up with all this?
00:21:50 - Rishi Raj Jain
Right. Yeah. I still need to experiment with this new picture component, but sometimes I think with local images, Astro still needs to have better DX and there's still some open issues around it. But yeah, apart from that, optimizing it on the fly is something Astro does very smoothly, and I've been using it in [unclear], the project that I launched when I was at Edgio there. I use that functionality. I think it does save a lot of time in cutting the costs from Next Image because I'm seeing frameworks out there which aim at cost-cutting Next.js images. An in-house integration of image optimization is something Astro has really cracked. And yeah, definitely users should use it more in production, I think.
00:22:44 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:22:46 - Scott Steinlage
Cool.
00:22:46 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, for my blog I just convert all of my images to WebP automatically, so for me I was just throwing regular image tags. But I do think it's cool that they have these things, especially for people who need to migrate from Next and have all these other fancy components to deal with. And I know Gatsby had one. This was something that I remember years ago talking with Chris Burns about. He was saying how Next getting an image component was such a big deal because Gatsby had had this amazing image component. He was just gushing over it, and I was like, okay, I just use an img tag.
00:23:32 - Rishi Raj Jain
If that's now the primitive these days. I recently discovered that you can lazy load an iframe as well. What I think is the Chrome team is really working to have those primitives out for you. I think there is this srcset that is underlying in all of these image optimizations, and that should be used directly, natively, if you want to use the img tag directly. So that's, like, totally... You can do it. Just use the img tag. Ditch those image optimization components.
00:24:08 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, definitely, definitely. Is there any news that any of you guys have seen that you're interested in, or things that have come out, or just projects that you think are cool?
00:24:20 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, I just put something in the comments that just launched today.
00:24:26 - Anthony Campolo
Pipedream. Yeah. You want to talk about that? I don't know, explain what it is.
00:24:31 - Scott Steinlage
It's a thing that people use. I'm kidding. Yeah, so Pipedream is an API connector, like Zapier, if you've ever used that before. But it's more developer-friendly and really just focused on developers because you can go in there and use Node.js and do a lot of custom stuff that you can't do in Zapier or whatever. So lots more use cases for folks like us developers, and some really cool things going on there with that right now. Actually, we have a podcast coming out, I don't know when, I think Anthony was working on that, but soon enough, where we actually talk with one of the developer advocates with Pipedream, and we're discussing their new AI stuff and utilizing Puppeteer and Playwright to be able to fill out forms and kind of scrape some information and do some really cool things with it. So pretty awesome. If you want to know more about that, obviously I just linked that there. If you want to put that in the jumbotron. I don't know if you did.
00:25:54 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, it's already up there.
00:25:55 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, cool. Awesome. So you can check that out, but we'll actually have some more cool insights and information on that coming out on JavaScript Jam with the podcast.
00:26:07 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, that was fun. I think that's going to, for a platform like that, they have all these integrations and different ways of gluing services together. And once you have a lot of that data already, if you can kind of fine-tune some models on those specific APIs and integrations, then you can start doing these little glue-code tasks that developers typically have to do to pipe one thing from one thing to another. Like, you got your Discord bot that needs to forward GitHub pull requests or things like that. Everyone has done these kind of tasks before, so I think automating those can really unlock a lot of productivity a lot of times, saving time for people who spend a lot of time doing stuff like that.
00:26:52 - Scott Steinlage
Totally. And another cool thing you can do with it is you can actually create... So when you create one of these connections, per se, you can actually push it to GitHub so you can have a repo for this particular thing, which is super cool. So then you can kind of make it open source. If you come up with a really unique way of doing something and other people are like, man, I wish I had that set up, you could be like, you can just go and grab this and you can easily do it too. So anyway, super dope.
00:27:27 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, totes. Let's see, what else do we got? I found this cool website that I saw linked in a couple newsletters called servercomponents.dev. It's kind of like how you have web.dev, this website that explains a lot of complicated acronyms and stuff with Core Web Vitals. This is a similar thing where it's just like, you know, someone... I'm not sure who exactly. It was made by Ricardo Nunez, not sure who that is, but it's just a website where they explain what React Server Components are and how they work and how to adopt them incrementally. I'm assuming there's going to be a lot more content they'll be creating in the future. So this is something else I linked to in the newsletter. We had some other interesting articles about hydration and WebAssembly, so check those out if those sound interesting to you. And yeah, were there other topics that anyone wanted to talk about or that they saw that was interesting? I have one more about AI and ancient Greek scrolls, but I'll save that unless no one else has anything.
00:28:45 - Scott Steinlage
Was this from your trip to Italy or something?
00:28:48 - Anthony Campolo
No, no. So there's been a project going on for a while. I listened to a podcast about this a long time ago, about these scrolls that were recovered from when there was a volcanic eruption in Rome in, like, the 70s. Mount Vesuvius exploding is something that is one of the more well-known historical events in Roman history. There was a whole bunch of scrolls that were covered under volcanic ash and then preserved for thousands of years that were eventually found. And there was no way to read them because if you tried to unroll them, they'd basically disintegrate instantly because they were so fragile and they were so old and they were deeply damaged. But if you kept them just the way they were, they would stay in their current shape. So they realized that there was a way to read them by using particle accelerators that would shoot microscopic neutrons through them that would then be able to detect where the ink is. And then a machine learning algorithm could reverse-engineer where the ink is detected to turn it back into words.
00:30:00 - Anthony Campolo
This is the craziest thing ever, I know. And it just works. A week ago, they got it to where they're able to read the words.
00:30:10 - Scott Steinlage
That is legit. Oh, that would've been cool to see, the testing phase process of this whole thing, and then get super excited when it started working.
00:30:19 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. So I'm hyped. There's hundreds of new Greek texts that we might get within the next couple months to a year, and all of a sudden it's giving a massive increase in what we have. There's articles written about what could be in them, but it's all kind of speculation at this point. It could be 600 copies of the same thing, which would be very unlikely but extremely depressing.
00:30:42 - Scott Steinlage
How funny would that be? Oh my God, that's so cool. That is dope. Oh my gosh. It's also kind of scary because if they want to steal some documentation, just shoot some particles through it or whatever the heck.
00:31:01 - Anthony Campolo
Well, you have to get those close enough to an actual document.
00:31:05 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, and so, yeah, it would take probably a long time to gather the information too, I would assume, but I don't know. Or it's very fast. Who knows?
00:31:14 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, so that's the thing. I'll share a link to that. There's one of the original founders of GitHub, so there's Tom Preston-Werner, and then Nat Friedman was another early dude. So Nat Friedman was someone who was putting up, I think, like a million dollars or something for someone who could solve this problem because he saw that the technology had gotten to a certain point where we were like, if we're really close, we should just give a massive financial incentive to someone who can kind of get through that last final-mile part.
00:31:44 - Scott Steinlage
Of the final-mile part, and somebody solved it. Who was it?
00:31:51 - Anthony Campolo
I mean, not anyone you'll hear of. It's a team of people who are academics, you know? Got it.
00:32:00 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah. One person at $1 million.
00:32:04 - Anthony Campolo
Jason Langstorf. I did it. It was me, right? I did it on stream.
00:32:12 - Scott Steinlage
That would be funny. I mean, that would be amazing, really. Jason Langstorf: this will support my business for a while. All right, be funded.
00:32:26 - Anthony Campolo
Well, there used to be this thing called, or there still is this thing called, Kaggle, where they would put data sets online for people to run machine learning things on. So this is one of the nice things. Once you have something in a specific data format, you can kind of just give it to people and be like, here, try and analyze this huge chunk of data and just figure out what to do with it. Yeah, so that's more...
00:32:51 - Scott Steinlage
So what was the problem then?
00:32:53 - Anthony Campolo
Well, the problem is, like, they had the data from the particle accelerators basically. But then you have to train a model on that data so it can extract what is...
00:33:07 - Scott Steinlage
Oh, you're saying that... you're saying this million dollars was for that?
00:33:11 - Anthony Campolo
I mean, I'm not sure exactly which part they had the million dollars for, but I know that there's a Nature article now that explains how it's done. And I've been seeing a lot of the places that I follow sharing stuff about this. So we're at the point where the hardest part, the part where we can actually figure out whether we can analyze the data or not, has been proven. We can turn it back into human-readable text. So that was kind of the most important, I think, thing they still had to crack, because now it's like, all right, now we just gotta get the data for all these scrolls, feed them into all these algorithms, this single algorithm, and then that will get us the text for all these. Now we'll see the individual text, we'll give it to scholars, they'll figure out what to do with it.
00:33:50 - Scott Steinlage
Right. So that was my question, I guess, was the testing process, which sounds like that's part of the testing process, which is basically you would take a scroll yourself, and then you know what's written in it, and then shoot the particles at it, bring it back, get the data, and then have someone try and crack the code. And then you would know if they're right or not because you know what's already written in it, and then now you know it works, right? So then you would run it through the process with actual scrolls. But yeah, that's interesting. But then you would need to, freaking... how would you replicate the scrolls as they are? You know, like, okay, let's put this in some volcanic ash real quick and then, you know. That's interesting. I would have loved to know the details of the project. That's super cool.
00:34:38 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, no, I'm sharing some links to it, so feel free to read those. They might go into greater detail about the way they did it.
00:34:45 - Scott Steinlage
I'm a sucker for the details.
00:34:48 - Anthony Campolo
Totally. Yeah, you should also listen to the podcast that Nat was on. That's... Yeah, I shared. Yeah.
00:34:56 - Scott Steinlage
Okay, cool. They did it. Awesome. Oh, dude. Oh, the scrolls are crazy-looking. It's just like a chunk of freaking charcoal.
00:35:07 - Anthony Campolo
Exactly. Yeah. Because it was like a volcano, basically.
00:35:11 - Scott Steinlage
Right. I mean, that makes sense. Geez Louise. And then they're gonna lose some text, though, too, because the ink, it's so hot. There's no way the ink survived on layers and layers of the outside, right?
00:35:24 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I guess we'll find out as they continue to read them.
00:35:29 - Scott Steinlage
I guess so. Man, that's nuts. The frick. Super cool. What, did Twitter make it to where you... or X? Whatever.
00:35:47 - Anthony Campolo
Make it to what?
00:35:50 - Scott Steinlage
Ah, there it goes. Never mind. For some reason I thought it was not allowing me to open up in a browser and it's just only in X, but it must have been a weird thing that was going on.
00:36:01 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. So that was the cool story of the day.
00:36:06 - Scott Steinlage
That one is super cool. I love that. I love unique things like that. That's super interesting.
00:36:12 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, it's inspiring when science and technology solve extremely specific and weird and unexpected problems that no one would have really anticipated.
00:36:23 - Scott Steinlage
Right. That's so true. Definitely wasn't anticipated, I'm sure.
00:36:31 - Anthony Campolo
Unless you're someone who is following the process of them trying to do it, in which case this news wasn't necessarily surprising so much as like a nice, clear verification that it was even possible.
00:36:44 - Scott Steinlage
Or if you drive around in a DeLorean, you probably know what's going to happen next.
00:36:49 - Anthony Campolo
You definitely know. You and Doc, you're betting on sports. Betting.
00:36:59 - Scott Steinlage
Just saying. Yeah.
00:37:02 - Anthony Campolo
It's a good way to figure out whether someone can actually tell the future or not. Okay, who do you say will win the World Series?
00:37:09 - Scott Steinlage
Yep.
00:37:12 - Bro Nifty
Word.
00:37:13 - Anthony Campolo
Any other stories or topics people want to bring up, or cool things coming up that they're excited for?
00:37:25 - Scott Steinlage
I don't know. I'm gonna be hanging out with Nicky T. on the 23rd live, just on Twitch, chatting community and stuff.
00:37:33 - Anthony Campolo
Really? You're gonna be on Nicky T.'s stream? Yeah. You have a link for that?
00:37:38 - Scott Steinlage
Not yet. This is literally just... me and him were talking about it the other day, so it's gonna happen. I just needed to come up with a good title and stuff. I don't know.
00:37:50 - Anthony Campolo
That's great. That'll be fun.
00:37:51 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, yeah, man, totally. Come hang out.
00:37:54 - Anthony Campolo
Oh, I will.
00:37:55 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah. The 23rd is a Monday, of sorts.
00:38:00 - Anthony Campolo
Monday. Okay.
00:38:01 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah. Word. Yeah, he's changing the dates from Wednesdays to Mondays, by the way, I think.
00:38:05 - Anthony Campolo
Oh, okay.
00:38:07 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it interferes with something with Open Sauced, I think.
00:38:11 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I think our community thing with Becca on Wednesday.
00:38:15 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, that'll be fun. Sweet. Anybody else? I know you're just trying to save the world. It never gets old, I mean, really.
00:38:36 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, definitely not. You will clean your backlog with DQ IO.
00:38:41 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:38:45 - Anthony Campolo
DQ. Best way to keep your backlog clean. Software development as a subscription service. You can focus on pushing your product forward. We'll handle the extras.
00:38:56 - Scott Steinlage
Nice.
00:38:56 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:38:57 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, man. How's that job going, dude? I know you're doing full-stack, everything, back to engineering, 100.
00:39:04 - Anthony Campolo
He says it is doing 100.
00:39:06 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, well, it's better than 50 or 60, but I don't know if they have those numbers, so...
00:39:12 - Anthony Campolo
It looks like we did it. We peer-pressured him up here.
00:39:15 - Scott Steinlage
We did. 100 or nothing.
00:39:17 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I thought so.
00:39:21 - Scott Steinlage
Hey, man.
00:39:23 - Abdul
Yeah. New jobs.
00:39:25 - Anthony Campolo
Tell us about your thing.
00:39:26 - Abdul
Job's going well. My thing, the DQ thing...
00:39:31 - Anthony Campolo
Anything, whatever thing.
00:39:32 - Scott Steinlage
You got all the things?
00:39:34 - Abdul
Yeah, yeah. New job's going great. Full-stack development. Been deep in the code. It's been really fun work. I'm actually working as we speak right now. DQ, that's something I'm trying to start. I want to try a subscription-based backlog cleaner, basically, where people get one request at a time.
00:39:55 - Rishi Raj Jain
They...
00:39:56 - Abdul
They give me a list of bugs that they don't have time to get to but that are important, and I tackle them one at a time.
00:40:06 - Scott Steinlage
Huh. That's cool. So, like freelance stuff, I guess, that you'd consider it? Yeah. Is this like open-source contract contribution, or lots of different things maybe?
00:40:15 - Abdul
Yeah, it could be lots of different things, but it's more along the lines of freelance-type work where I won't be working on mission-critical sprint work or anything, but just stuff that doesn't quite make it to sprints because it's not a new feature that the PMs want and...
00:40:32 - Rishi Raj Jain
Stuff like that.
00:40:36 - Scott Steinlage
That makes sense. That's cool. I like it. So you're just giving them an easy platform to be able to submit and utilize your services without... yeah, just a friendly user experience, right?
00:40:46 - Abdul
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I've had to work with hiring and finding contractors a lot, and it's never an easy task because you don't really know what you're going to get. So if you could just be sure that you'll have the same person doing the work and you won't have to go looking for them, that makes things easy for the company.
00:41:04 - Scott Steinlage
But then you're going to sell this to other freelancers to use, right?
00:41:08 - Abdul
No, no, this is just me. It's like a...
00:41:11 - Scott Steinlage
No, I'm saying you could package this up.
00:41:13 - Abdul
I guess so.
00:41:14 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, and say, yeah, because then you'd say x percent more likely to get hired for freelance work when you have this process because they see you as a professional in the industry and they can tell that you're serious about getting their work done because of what you have here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:41:30 - Abdul
Yeah, yeah, I guess I could do that too, for sure.
00:41:33 - Scott Steinlage
You're welcome anytime. 10%. That's all I require. No, that's awesome, dude.
00:41:42 - Abdul
Yeah, should be fun. It's in the early phases. I've talked to a couple people, but I need to do some outreach on it. I've been so busy with some other stuff recently that I haven't been able to get to that part yet.
00:41:58 - Scott Steinlage
Totally understand.
00:42:01 - Rishi Raj Jain
Right on.
00:42:02 - Anthony Campolo
Well, thank you for sharing. Looks like we got Toby up here as well. What's up, Toby?
00:42:07 - Scott Steinlage
You, you, you.
00:42:08 - Tobiloba
What's up, Anthony? What's up, Scott? I know a lot of people in this place.
00:42:14 - Scott Steinlage
Wow.
00:42:16 - Tobiloba
Yeah. How are you guys...
00:42:20 - Anthony Campolo
Doing?
00:42:21 - Tobiloba
I was following all the amazing stuff, by the way. Sorry if I'm not pronouncing your name. I actually came up here because [unclear].
00:42:43 - Anthony Campolo
Lagging a little bit, Toby. Last we heard was that you said you're coming up here also. I think we can hear your typing.
00:42:51 - Rishi Raj Jain
Come up here because I'm typing, right?
00:43:03 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:43:03 - Scott Steinlage
We might have to come back to you, man. I think it's pretty bad right now. Can't really hear anything you're saying.
00:43:08 - Anthony Campolo
He's right about to start saying it. I know.
00:43:11 - Scott Steinlage
He was like, "Yeah, so the reason why I came up here..." And then it was like, nothing. Sorry, bud.
00:43:18 - Anthony Campolo
Freaking Twitter Spaces.
00:43:20 - Scott Steinlage
I know. Sorry, man.
00:43:22 - Anthony Campolo
Feel free to type it in the chat. We'll pipe it up, or keep trying to... Let me, let me... let's see if we can bring him back up.
00:43:30 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, try one more time. Kick him and bring him back. I don't know if you kick him, if he can request to come back or not. Maybe just leave the stage, Toby.
00:43:41 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, it looks like he's already bounced off, and I sent him an invite.
00:43:44 - Scott Steinlage
Not showing. I don't mind. Sorry.
00:43:46 - Anthony Campolo
It's all good. We're in that Twitter mirror world where no one knows what's happening and everyone has different things showing up on their screen. It's a great time for everybody.
00:43:58 - Scott Steinlage
What's going on? Oh, man.
00:44:06 - Abdul
Word.
00:44:07 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, I have no idea.
00:44:09 - Anthony Campolo
Okay, well, we can start to wrap it up, and then while Toby's trying to figure it out, we will bring him back up or share whatever he shares. Looks like we got a request. We got a request from Abdul. Let's bring up Abdul. He looks like a person, not a bot.
00:44:32 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, he follows me. I think he's been on here before. Cool.
00:44:36 - Anthony Campolo
Looks like we got Toby back up as well. What's up, everybody?
00:44:41 - Tobiloba
Am I audible now or...
00:44:44 - Anthony Campolo
You sound clear. Okay.
00:44:45 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, for now.
00:44:46 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Okay, so quick, say what you're here for before we lose you.
00:44:51 - Tobiloba
Yeah, I decided to be like Anthony. I just saw you declined... Sorry for calling already. I saw you declined this invitation for the coffee chat and stuff. Well, actually...
00:45:02 - Anthony Campolo
What?
00:45:02 - Tobiloba
Yeah, like that.
00:45:03 - Anthony Campolo
That was an accident that I meant to accept. I'm available and I should have accepted it if that was what happened. That's incorrect. I'm switching up some of my Gmail stuff. That may have been an error on my part, but I'm available, don't worry.
00:45:17 - Tobiloba
Yeah, amazing work, by the way, [unclear]. And yeah, I was just following on the conversation on the download, and I see Rishi up here. What's up, Rishi? And yeah, what's up, everyone?
00:45:29 - Rishi Raj Jain
Hey, Toby, how are you?
00:45:32 - Tobiloba
Yeah, I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Rishi is an amazing developer, by the way. You should check out his stuff. He builds on the side. He has amazing, amazing side projects.
00:45:43 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, he does.
00:45:46 - Scott Steinlage
Yep, pretty dope.
00:45:51 - Anthony Campolo
Abdul, hello. Welcome to the space. Can you hear us?
00:46:00 - Bro Nifty
Yeah.
00:46:00 - Anthony Campolo
Hey guys, what's up?
00:46:03 - Abdul
Hey, what's up?
00:46:04 - Tobiloba
I'm fine.
00:46:05 - Anthony Campolo
I'm cool as well. I'm actually just listening to what you guys are saying, trying to catch up on what you're doing. Right on. Yeah, so it's fun to get a weekly hangout to see what everyone's up to. I do want to say that we are going to be doing these now every other week instead of every week. So we will be off next week, but two weeks from now... what is that? I guess in November probably, you will see us again. But yeah. So then we have the upcoming episode with Pipedream, and we'll still be putting out a weekly newsletter, so stick with the JavaScript Jam for some more content. And yeah, feel free, anyone who wants to throw out any links or final thoughts or things you want someone to look at. Going once, going twice. All right. Yeah, we already shared pretty much everyone's project that they're working on, aside from Toby, who is, of course, on Million.js, the hottest newest upcoming framework that everyone is talking about. So congrats on that. Yeah. Something you want to say about that?
00:47:29 - Tobiloba
Yeah, at the moment, I just wanted to give a shout-out to JavaScript Jam because you folks are doing amazing stuff, and I really love what you and Scott, Anthony and Scott, are doing. So yeah, I think that would be my...
00:47:44 - Rishi Raj Jain
Own...
00:47:46 - Tobiloba
What would I say? Recommendation. Cool stuff to drop for you for the week, and I'm glad you guys are going to be doing more spaces moving forward. So Million.js, we're cooking a couple of things and a couple of things are in the pot steaming. So yeah, there'll be some new awesome stuff really soon. And yeah, most of the things are around, at the moment, activation and... yeah.
00:48:12 - Scott Steinlage
Yes.
00:48:14 - Tobiloba
Yeah, that's what I wanted to say. Sorry for the ramble.
00:48:17 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome. I appreciate that very much, so thank you. Yeah, no, it's cool, and we're glad that people appreciate what we do.
00:48:26 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah. Thanks, man.
00:48:30 - Anthony Campolo
All right, but we do not have our closing music, so you have to fade out awkwardly. Oh, we got it. Oh my God.
00:48:43 - Scott Steinlage
Thanks for joining us. Greatly appreciate it. We love y'all and we'll see...
00:48:48 - Anthony Campolo
You in the next one.
00:48:54 - Scott Steinlage
All right, y'all. Peace.