This One Was So Much Fun

Episode Description

JavaScript Jam Live discusses framework opinions on Next.js vs Remix, edge functions, state management, Web3/Web5 concepts, and advice for developers at all levels.

Episode Summary

This JavaScript Jam Live session opens with casual community building, including shout-outs to Jen's new Teach Jenn Tech stream and Scott's upcoming 100 days of code challenge. The conversation gains momentum when Matt Gilbert, a Navy veteran transitioning out of the military, shares his experience working with a Mr. Beast-affiliated Web5 startup and his ambitious capstone project rebuilding YouTube API primitives in Bun across multiple frontend frameworks. This sparks a wide-ranging discussion about the tradeoffs of Next.js, with Matt and others noting that while Next is excellent for standardized team workflows, its opinions become limiting for non-standard use cases — citing frustrations like mandatory domain scoping for images. The group explores the value of returning to fundamentals, understanding React internals rather than relying on abstractions like Next and tRPC, and the merits of Remix for server-side rendering. A beginner named Joseph asks about setting up Linux for the Odin Project on Windows, receiving practical advice about PowerShell and browser-based dev tools. The session also touches on edge functions, with participants from Solid, Astro, and Edgio weighing in on when edge deployment genuinely adds value versus traditional serverless. The final segment covers Web3 and Web5 concepts, with Matt explaining his startup's approach to decentralized identity using browser extensions and the shadow DOM rather than blockchain technology.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Community Warm-Up and Introductions

The episode kicks off with host Scott Steinlage welcoming regulars and newcomers to the JavaScript Jam Live space. Anthony Campolo highlights Jen's new Teach Jenn Tech stream, where she livestreams her coding journey as a beginner, and the group discusses the value of learning in public. Jen encourages others by sharing how she works through homework live, normalizing the struggle of learning to code.

Scott announces his own commitment to a 100 days of code challenge and shares a humorous anecdote about reading HTML markup from a tweet by James Quick, which made him feel like a real developer. The segment sets a welcoming tone, emphasizing that JavaScript Jam is open to developers of all skill levels every Wednesday at noon Pacific, and promotes the upcoming Composability Summit at composability.dev scheduled for late July.

00:06:47 - Matt's Journey from the Navy to Web5 Development

Matt Gilbert introduces himself as a Navy veteran who served as a nuclear technician on submarines and is now transitioning into civilian tech work. He describes leaving MetaMask to join a Mr. Beast-affiliated startup in the Web5 space while simultaneously returning to school for computer science. His capstone project involves rebuilding YouTube API primitives using Bun, which he chose specifically because it's brand new and technically challenging with virtually no existing documentation.

Matt opens up about feeling stuck at the junior-to-mid-level range as a freelance developer and expresses a desire for mentorship through pair programming with senior engineers. Other speakers relate to this experience, with one describing similar feelings around the three-to-four-year mark, and another suggesting contractor roles on established teams as a way to get that collaborative growth experience. The group also mentions Vets Who Code as a resource for military veterans entering tech.

00:15:25 - Next.js Opinions, Framework Tradeoffs, and Going Back to Basics

The conversation shifts into a deep discussion about Next.js and its limitations. Matt describes working with a senior developer who is a vanilla JavaScript purist, which has opened his eyes to how Next's abstractions can hinder growth at more advanced levels. He shares specific frustrations like the image domain configuration requiring full redeployment, and the group debates when Next's structure helps versus when it gets in the way.

Daniel advocates for minimalism and cutting unnecessary complexity, while Dax cautions against diving into React or Next source code to learn SSR, recommending cleaner codebases like Solid or Hyper App instead. Matt discusses discovering Recoil for state management and his plan to build the same project frontend in multiple frameworks — React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, and Solid — to broaden his skills. The discussion highlights a recurring theme: the importance of understanding what frameworks abstract away rather than just using them as black boxes.

00:33:07 - Vue vs React, Room Reset, and Beginner Advice on Windows Setup

Dax plays devil's advocate by arguing that React's state management is unnecessarily complicated compared to Vue's built-in solutions, suggesting that React developers don't question whether its approach is ideal simply because they're immersed in its ecosystem. Scott then pauses for a mid-session reset, welcoming newcomers and re-promoting the Composability Summit scheduled for July 27-29.

A beginner named Joseph Samuel asks for help with the Odin Project's requirement to install a Linux virtual machine on his Windows computer. The group offers practical alternatives: Dax recommends PowerShell setup guides and browser-based tools like CodeSandbox and StackBlitz, while Matt reassures Joseph that most beginner web development coursework doesn't require anything that wouldn't work natively on Windows with Node. The advice centers on not letting environment setup become a barrier to actually learning to code.

00:40:15 - Edge Functions and Framework Integrations

Raees from Edgio asks the group about their experience with edge platforms like Cloudflare Workers and Netlify Edge Functions. Dax explains that both Solid and Astro have strong edge integrations but notes the challenge of understanding when edge functions provide meaningful benefits over traditional serverless functions, suggesting that if there's no extra cost or friction, they're worth using by default.

Anthony adds nuance by explaining the migration pain points between serverless lambdas and edge runtimes, particularly around ESM compatibility and library support. Matt teases upcoming developments at Vercel around edge functions specifically designed for Web 3D applications. The discussion captures the current state of edge computing adoption — promising but still navigating compatibility gaps and unclear value propositions for many use cases.

00:46:07 - Teach Jenn Tech, Web Nostalgia, and the Return to HTML Primitives

Jen promotes her Teach Jenn Tech show and reveals that the creator of Angular will be an upcoming guest, arranged through Anthony's networking. The conversation takes a nostalgic turn as the group discusses the return to Web1 principles, with Dax championing Astro's approach to simple HTML-first development and Chris bringing up the deprecated HTML marquee tag as a classic Web1 relic.

Matt highlights Tanner Linsley's work on React Table using original table tags with virtual scrolling as evidence that web development has come full circle back to 90s HTML primitives. The group reminisces about the era when developers tried to build data tables with everything except actual table elements, using canvas and flexbox workarounds before returning to semantic HTML. The lighthearted discussion underscores a broader industry trend toward simplicity and native web standards.

00:54:14 - Web3, Web5, Decentralized Identity, and Closing

The final segment explores Web3 and Web5 concepts in depth. Matt explains his startup's approach to building a decentralized multiplayer internet layer using browser extensions and the shadow DOM rather than blockchain, focusing on first-party data tools for content creators. The idea involves keeping user identity and data within the browser while enabling shared web experiences across any website.

Raees asks for beginner resources on Web3, prompting recommendations including ConsenSys Academy, Three Blue One Brown's cryptography series, and Crypto Zombies. Anthony breaks down current Web3 use cases — fund transfers, NFT collectibles, and portable identity — while Chris jokingly suggests someone should build blockchain queried through SQL. Scott wraps the session by thanking all participants, reminding listeners to follow speakers they found valuable, and promoting next week's JavaScript Jam along with the Composability Summit at composability.dev.

Transcript

00:00:00 - Scott Steinlage

And I'm connected. Oh my goodness. Can everybody hear me? Hello, hello. How we doing, everybody? Let's see. Let me get some people brought up here. Invite to speak. There we go. Daniel, bam. Hey, Matt Gilbert. Look at that. What's up, brother? Let's bring you up. If you want to speak, you can come up. All right, there we go. Got some people here. There we go. Very good. Cool, Daniel's in. There we go. It always takes a minute for these to go through. All right, cool. Hey, what's up, man? We just got off talking together on Zoom. How are you doing? I have to speak to you too.

00:01:00 - Matt Gilbert

Also.

00:01:00 - Scott Steinlage

Anthony, my homie.

00:01:02 - Anthony Campolo

I love Facundo.

00:01:04 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, man, I saw him at, where were we both? Yeah, well, you did too. It felt like Remix Conf. He was there. And then also I saw him at Render ATL too. Dude, it was crazy. Like, what's up? He's everywhere. So, yeah.

00:01:20 - Anthony Campolo

Oh, also Jen is here. She is starting her own new stream called Teach Jenn Tech.

00:01:28 - Scott Steinlage

Oh, I saw that. Yeah. That's all you did.

00:01:30 - Anthony Campolo

Bring her up as well. I'm sure she would.

00:01:32 - Scott Steinlage

You guys did a live build of something like a week ago or so.

00:01:36 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I showed her how to create a React app and then deploy it to Vercel.

00:01:41 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, that was it. Awesome. Welcome, Jen.

00:01:44 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

Welcome, welcome. And thank you for all the help that I've been getting for it.

00:01:52 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, yeah, I'm writing up a [unclear] for her right now.

00:01:55 - Scott Steinlage

Oh, man.

00:01:58 - Anthony Campolo

For me, it takes like three seconds, but I know that just going through the steps and actually internalizing them is so hard. So I totally get it. And I was not there that long ago, so it's kind of fun for me getting to watch all this stuff.

00:02:15 - Scott Steinlage

Way to help, way to bring others up around you. That's awesome.

00:02:18 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

Yes. And it's so embarrassing, like on homework days, because I'm working on remembering what I was taught. It's something that I'm excited that I'm doing live, and I would suggest, for anybody that really wants a self-esteem booster, watch me struggle through this. Because I know that so many of us do struggle, and yet it's not live where you're like, damn it, everyone can see I'm not getting it.

00:02:50 - Scott Steinlage

Yes. No, this is beautiful. I love it. Jen, thank you so much for doing this because, you know, I mean, honestly, you're inspiring so many other people out there. In fact, I have some crazy news too that I'm going to be doing, and I've got to set an actual commit date here, but I'm going to be doing 100 Days of Code, and it's going to be insane.

00:03:15 - Brad

Do it.

00:03:16 - Scott Steinlage

That's my, that's my challenge for myself. Yes, absolutely.

00:03:22 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

If it's one of those days of being on Teach Jenn Tech, you totally can.

00:03:27 - Scott Steinlage

Oh, let's do it. Yes, I would love to. That would be so much fun. Absolutely. Hey, Brad joined us. What's up, man? A regular. I'll bring him up anyway. Here, let's see. Kabam. Oh wait, I think I invited him. Let me try JavaScript Jam here, right? Either way.

00:03:47 - Matt Gilbert

Scott, are you just coding for 100 days, or are you doing like a program?

00:03:51 - Scott Steinlage

Say it again, Matt. I couldn't hear you, bro.

00:03:54 - Matt Gilbert

Are you just coding random projects for 100 days, or are you doing like a structured program?

00:03:59 - Scott Steinlage

So I'm just doing my own thing, and I'm gonna throw some projects together that I want to work on. That way I'm passionate about it at least, and then I can figure things out on my own. I don't want to do some program because I feel like I'm going to learn more if I'm doing my own thing, you know? Because I'm going to have to research things and go against the grain a little more. So, yeah. What are your thoughts? What do you think about that?

00:04:25 - Daniel

I mean, the independent thought process of creating your own projects is really how you get there the fastest. I mean, you know, you got to learn, you got to get to the point where you can do that. But that's really where the biggest growth comes from, the independence.

00:04:39 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, absolutely. And you know what's funny is, everybody probably in here knows who James Quick is, right? Well, he posted a tweet the other day, and it was like some sort of e-commerce site or something. He had posted the code up on it, and he's like, "I know all my dev friends and myself can read this, but I doubt anybody who isn't a dev could read this." And I was just looking at it, and I'm like, oh, I know exactly what that is. Like, that's a list. We've got a title here. It says strong. Oh, that means it's bold. Okay. And then we've got a list of this, this, this, and this. Okay. Yeah, I know exactly what this is. And it's so funny that I remembered that from memory. And I wouldn't even consider myself, quote unquote, an engineer at this point or anything. But according to James Quick, I am. And so I said, well, I guess I can consider myself an engineer now or a developer. And he replies, "Oh yeah, you've made it, man."

00:05:39 - Scott Steinlage

You've made it. All right, I made it. So anyway, it was really kind of funny, but more comical than anything. But hey, you know what? It kind of excited me a little bit that I was able to read through that and understand what that looked like. I could paint the picture visually in my head, which was cool. So anyway, we haven't even gotten into the intro yet, but man, talk about awesome content right off the get-go here, adding value to the group. Everybody's having a great time today. I'm loving this. So let's get into it. So this is JavaScript Jam, right? JavaScript Jam Live that we do every Wednesday at 12 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. And this is where we talk about anything and everything JavaScript or web development related. Whether you're brand new, a beginner, or you've been doing this for a long time, we'd love to hear from everybody. It doesn't matter who you are. If you're in the audience there and you want to speak up, please let us know and we'll bring you up to the stage here to participate in the current conversation or bring up a new topic or whatever it might be we want to talk about.

00:06:46 - Scott Steinlage

Because that's honestly where the most value comes from on these, when everybody is kind of participating. Someone asks a question, and then someone from the audience comes up and participates and answers that question or gives a piece of it. So, you know, we love it when everybody is involved, and guess what? We get that pretty much every week. So it's awesome. I love it. And yeah, also, you know, the main people that are here all the time. By the way, if you get any value from anybody that comes up here and speaks, please feel free to click on their face and follow them. Because guess what? If you got value from them now, you're probably going to get value from them later, right? I promise you. And by the way, come on, give JavaScript Jam a little follow too. That wouldn't hurt. We love it. We are growing like crazy. By the way, don't miss out on being a part of everything that we do. One little shout-out and we'll get going here. If you haven't checked out composability.dev, okay, which is the Composability Summit that we are hosting, it's coming up at the end of July.

00:07:52 - Scott Steinlage

You need to go check it out. We have some awesome speakers. In fact, one, two, three, at least two of them are here in this room, right? Which is awesome. So maybe we'll get a little shout-out from one of them on why they're excited for the Composability Summit coming up. Maybe not to put you on the spot there or anything, Anthony. Maybe you'll say something, or maybe even Facundo, on what you think is going to be fun for everybody with the composable architecture and Composability Summit at composability.dev that is coming up. Feel free to shout out anytime. It doesn't have to be now, it can be later. All right, let's begin. I have someone requesting. Go ahead, go ahead, please.

00:08:34 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I was gonna say that I'll be talking some Web3 stuff. So if you want to learn about how composability fits into things like smart contracts and blockchains and all that kind of stuff, that'll be pretty interesting. There's a couple people who are talking about this idea of modular blockchain design, so it's in the water.

00:08:53 - Scott Steinlage

Awesome. Yes. So Web3 stuff. If Web3 excites you, if going from Web2 to Web3 excites you, Anthony is going to be the guy that you want to listen to during that time. And we do have a couple other Web3 people talking too, but we also have many other different types of things going on as well, and we're just so excited for that. All right, feel free to raise your hand if you do want to speak. I think we, let's see, let's bring you up. I know I saw you with your hand up there and requested to speak, so I'm gonna click on you. It may take a second. There's always a little delay usually. Jason, by the way, welcome, man. Let's get you up here too, man. If you want to speak at any time, feel free. Love to hear from you. A regular in the room, Jason Klein. Good guy. Okay, cool. So what are some hot topics, things that are going on besides the Composability Summit and all that? Dax Dev, what's up? Hayden, what's up, dude?

00:10:02 - Matt Gilbert

Yeah, what's up?

00:10:03 - Scott Steinlage

Let's hear it.

00:10:05 - Matt Gilbert

So actually, it's been chaos for me personally and professionally lately. Getting out of the military, I don't quite have the degree yet, so I'm actually going back to school. And being a dev, having worked with MetaMask, it was super funny working with them. It was super fun. I love Eric and all those guys, but I just got picked up by a Mr. Beast startup that's actually in the Web5 space already. But going back to school, I'm actually rebuilding all of the YouTube API primitives inside Bun for my capstone project, and I'm having a nightmarish time. It's great. I mean, it's dog poo-poo when it comes to, like, it doesn't support anything right now. You have to do your own Alpine Docker image in order to get it to work anywhere in deployment. But I wrote a really basic Next.js app in it, and it returned data from the server faster than the client could render the CSS. It was, wow, it was crazy. It's super, super fun to play with, and I'm kind of obsessed with it, and I'm in love with it. And I basically am picking this so that I have something actually technically challenging for the next couple years as I go back through college.

00:11:17 - Matt Gilbert

So I don't know if anyone has any suggestions or opinions for me because I have found, being like junior to mid-level and freelance, that I have really learned as much as I can on my own. And I'm really ready for that pair-programming-with-a-senior position, and someone to tell me right away that my opinion is stupid because I've been forming some bad ones lately.

00:11:42 - Scott Steinlage

Well, first of all, before anybody else jumps in, I just want to say thank you so much for your service. Greatly appreciate that.

00:11:51 - Matt Gilbert

Well, thank you for your taxes. I bought plenty of beer with it, I promise.

00:11:56 - Scott Steinlage

That's awesome. Yeah. What were you in, by the way? Air National Guard. Guard our reserves?

00:12:02 - Matt Gilbert

No, I was actually a nuclear technician on naval submarines. I rebuilt and maintained reactor control systems.

00:12:11 - Scott Steinlage

Cool. You were in the Navy?

00:12:16 - Matt Gilbert

Yes, sir.

00:12:18 - Scott Steinlage

Awesome, man. Cool, cool. Yeah, I was Army, so that's really cool though. I appreciate every service member and everything they do. Everybody plays a huge role in making this all work. So thank you so much again for your service. That's really cool. Yeah. And there's actually, you know what, who was it? Anthony and I were talking the other day, or just very subtly, it might even have been just over a tweet. What was that nonprofit called? I can't remember what the heck it is now, Anthony. I think Ken Wheeler was posting something about it too.

00:12:55 - Anthony Campolo

Oh, that's Vets Who Code.

00:12:58 - Scott Steinlage

That's Vets Who Code. Have you checked that out, man?

00:13:01 - Matt Gilbert

I have not. I've been kind of sucked into my own open source world and...

00:13:06 - Anthony Campolo

Oh yeah, you definitely want to look it up.

00:13:09 - Scott Steinlage

That'll be a camp thing, but it's really cool and it's geared toward vets, man. And I think your benefits might even, you know... well, I know you're probably already using your benefits for school, but they may still utilize that for Vets Who Code, and it might give you a little faster path to where you want to get to. I don't know. I would check it out. I have a friend who did it, and he's an engineer for MasterCard now, and he's been doing it for like four years or five years. So it's pretty cool. He enjoyed it. And that was around the time that Vets Who Code first came out, so pretty cool.

00:13:47 - Matt Gilbert

That's super cool. That's super sick. I'll have to put it on the list. Sorry if it's loud in here. I'm in the middle of a co working space and a startup accelerator, so it's always loud.

00:13:56 - Scott Steinlage

You're good. You're good. Way to network, man. Get out there, meet some people, you know. Awesome.

00:14:03 - Matt Gilbert

For sure.

00:14:05 - Scott Steinlage

Well, thanks for speaking up. It's always good. Anybody want to give him some advice? Anything as far as how he's been feeling lately? You know, I know we got lots of people with experience in here, so we would love to get feedback if possible.

00:14:22 - Speaker 8

Hey, yeah, I could drop something in on this, coming from the freelance angle that you said. I was in more freelance roles for a while where, say, me joining a team that didn't really have developers, maybe someone maintained a WordPress or something, but not someone writing code, and I'd come in, do a landing page or whatever, and drop out. Then more recent projects have been more contractor roles, joining a team. And there I've got, say,

00:14:53 - Matt Gilbert

that experience

00:14:54 - Speaker 8

that you were talking about, right? Being able to do some pair programming with more senior developers, things like that. So I don't know if that's of any help to you, but maybe try looking for more things. I don't know if your freelance roles are on teams or you're solo, but maybe something like that, looking for something still similar to a freelance role where, you know, say self-employed or something like that, but you're joining a team for 6 to 12 months or something and still getting that nice team-building experience.

00:15:24 - Matt Gilbert

Yeah, I'm super excited. I actually just signed on to, like I said, that startup, and it's a team, but it's interesting because even being kind of mid-level junior, I'm seeing some of the things that some of the main engineers on the project are doing. It's a browser extension, and they're using Next to build it, and it's not even regular Next. It's this one particular engineer's entire branch and opinion on Next. And this same engineer likes to work in our checked-out branches while we're still making changes. And they're not good changes. They are feature-breaking changes, and I'm ready to lose my noodle. So that's kind of my point of contention. I would love to join a team if I am joining a team under a good senior dev. And I've had no complaints with open source. I love open source to death.

00:16:30 - Scott Steinlage

Awesome. Anybody else have advice for our man here speaking up? I know we've got some, some more people that just joined the room. What's up brother? Good people in Jen. Hey, what's up? Haven't heard from you. Hey Jason, if you want to, I don't know, anybody want to give some more advice? Here we go. Joseph, let's bring you up dude.

00:17:02 - Brad

Well my Internet is quite the crowd today.

00:17:06 - Scott Steinlage

Yo, what's up Jen?

00:17:07 - Anthony Campolo

You're all over the place. Jen. We got two gens. This is going to get confusing.

00:17:12 - Scott Steinlage

Oh, I'm sorry.

00:17:13 - Brad

Oh dear.

00:17:14 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, yeah. My goodness. What is wrong with you?

00:17:16 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

Really quick, really quick, new Jen, which is probably like the previous Jen, I think she spells her name with one N. Do you spell your name with one N, correct? Okay, I'm two N's, so just make

00:17:29 - Anthony Campolo

sure pronounce them differently.

00:17:30 - Brad

We got it. Yeah, that's Jen with one N. But

00:17:33 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

Jen no matter what. So I'm just excited you're here as well Jen.

00:17:39 - Brad

Yeah, I just wanted to respond to Dax Dev Eth. Yeah, I could totally relate. I joined right when you were speaking, and yeah, only having been in dev like five or six years myself, I find that everyone's specializations and breadth of knowledge are in different areas. So yeah, I'm just getting to that stage where I do realize there's people that direct whole teams and companies and might not know all there is to know about the ecosystem, like in front end, for example, or particular best practices. There's a lot to learn from each other. And I don't know, at the same time I go on YouTube and then I see there's people that have been coding since they were like 10, and I'm learning GraphQL from them. So it's all over the place. And I try to see how, you know, after about the first three to six months working with them, it's like trying to see, okay, maybe trying to ask why. Like, why are we doing things this way? Not to invite a combative response, but in a curious way, because it's hard.

00:18:54 - Brad

And I started getting these feelings maybe two or three years in. Yeah, I don't know if that helps or not.

00:19:01 - Matt Gilbert

Yeah, I'm right at that point. I'm coming up on year four here as well. So it's a lot, and yeah, I totally agree and totally understand where you're coming from, and I'm glad I'm not just crazy. Like, it's not just me experiencing it. You know what I mean?

00:19:15 - Brad

No, no, I completely feel it. And it's the same because for the longest time, and I cycled through like four or five jobs, where I would meet someone with more experience than me and they had a computer science background or they were working in tech for about 20 years, and I'd be like, oh yay, are you my mother? Yes, you know more than me and you have this opinion, and I just didn't know or try any of the frameworks or languages that you've worked with. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. And then I would go and much later on try those things and then be able to reflect that, oh yeah, you had this opinion. That's your opinion. So now I feel like I have this little grain of salt in the back of my head about that, and I feel like I would try to be generous or kind about asking them to inspect their pre-existing ideas about a particular thing because I've caught myself feeling overconfident about CSS scaling and all that kind of stuff as well. So sometimes I feel like it takes just a probing question.

00:20:18 - Matt Gilbert

Oh, that exactly has been happening to me over the last couple months. I fell in love with working in Next and all of that, and I actually got to meet some of the people over at Vercel and their core team, and actually one of them gave me a handwritten recommendation. They were like, he's an amazing Next engineer. And in the last couple months I've been working with, her name is Victoria French. She's been a developer since Windows 95 and drank the Kool-Aid and then became one of the first React developers. And she's insane. And she's one of those vanilla purists. Pure, functional, don't give me TypeScript, don't give me opinions. And I'm like, you're just really experienced, and that's really hard to do.

00:20:59 - Scott Steinlage

And.

00:21:00 - Matt Gilbert

And now that I've been around her, I'm realizing, wow, the opinions in Next are getting in the way now that I'm using it in more advanced ways than they are helping me. And I am falling out of love with the thing that I used to love.

00:21:14 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, that's so good. That's interesting you bring that up. And I think, I don't know if Daniel wants a shout-out here, but Daniel is a huge vanilla guy, I feel like, and loves sticking to that. You know, many times we'd be going through a certain process and then it'd be like, you know what, let's just use vanilla for this because we're gonna have less issues with this.

00:21:39 - Daniel

I mean, I'm all about cutting out the fat. I mean, I love Next. I think Next is great. The opinions in Next are great for standardized work, and it's good for teams who need them. But, you know, I'm all about keeping it vanilla and trying to expand where you are. In your case, I feel like you're in a tough situation because you're in the most experimental area that anybody could be in. And there's nothing standard about what you're working on in the team that you're working with. And at that four-year mark, that's a rough place to be. And it's a good time to just, like I said, ask questions, get a control of what the group's contributor mindset is, help understand why they're making these changes that are so experimental and what the benefits are. But absolutely, being a minimalist is essential.

00:22:26 - Matt Gilbert

Totally. And I think you will actually like the capstone project I picked because, you know, having done this for four years and then just going back for comp sci for that easy A, it's like I could just do an easy capstone that I could crap out in two or three weeks and have it count wonderfully. And I'm like, well, I have a few years to do this. So I picked out Bun, and I'm not only rebuilding all of the API primitives for Twitch and YouTube, I'm going to use Bun to build a completely agnostic backend so that I can do all the calls I want on the API and build my own fantasy YouTuber league, and then build the front end over the next couple of years in all the different frameworks I want to try. So I'll do one in Vite, I'll do one with plain old React because I'm a React purist as well, do a React Native one, do an Angular one, do a Vue one, Svelte, and a Solid one as I have time to just, you know, make it hard on myself because I got to find something to push me.

00:23:25 - Matt Gilbert

Absolutely.

00:23:26 - Daniel

No, I mean that's a great, great approach to it.

00:23:30 - Brad

That's incredible. And I wonder, maybe I missed the first 15 minutes here, I'm wondering what you hear the most in terms of questions and complaints, right? Because you're working at the forefront of this and engaged directly with the development team. So you're in a unique position to really attend to what people's mental models or misinterpretations of Next are. To be honest, I started learning it two or three days ago. I'd heard a ton of stuff about it. I was comparing it, you know, on a spike level with Remix and, yeah, I mean I really, really like it. So I'm in the honeymoon phase right now. But I could see, as you're working very deeply with a group of people that are very opinionated, what their whole ideas around building the perfect framework are, for sure.

00:24:26 - Matt Gilbert

No, I can answer that. I actually agree with Dan, pretty much spot-on with what he mentioned earlier, which is that for teams that are going to follow the paradigm that Vercel and Next have laid out and need that structure, it's fabulous. But the moment you try to do something non-standard or unique, or you try mixing some tools even, it gets complicated really quickly, and there are exceptions. One of the biggest things, I understand from a security standpoint why they did it, but it drives me up the wall, is that in the config file you have to scope out allowed resource domains. So you can't just automatically add someone's profile pic to your application. You have to either save a copy of it to your own database and approve your domain, or every time you want to add a profile pic from a new domain or a new resource, you have to take down the app, change the config, and redeploy. My brain broke when I saw that because I was like, I get the security reason for that, but you're having me redeploy an application to add a new picture or a new domain scope, and it's one of my biggest nitpicks to this day.

00:25:36 - Matt Gilbert

And I have to say I do love the things that we get to do on the edge and partial hydration and all the super fun crazy stuff. And as I've been looking at it, I've been realizing that all of those specific features are really designed to be focused on either Vercel's CDN or some really, really big application that you're building with a team for, like, your Cloudflare edge deployment. Or if you really want to spin up your own crazy EC2 kind of thing, you can do that. But then I'm realizing for most mid-level teams, you're right, Remix is absolutely fabulous. You don't necessarily need partial hydration. Static site rendering is fabulous. And I'm just doing the opposite of you. I am also just picking up Remix at the suggestion of my desk neighbors, and it's been weird. The syntax is a little different and the logic flow is different from Next, but it's something I'm getting more comfortable with. And I would say you should look at Remix as the option when you want to do anything that's server-side rendering because that's really all you need for mid-level teams. And when you want to do non-standard things or introduce new novel features that can be framework-breaking in Next,

00:26:53 - Matt Gilbert

you can do that easily with Remix, especially with Express and all of that. So that's kind of my two cents on it.

00:27:03 - Brad

Wow, thanks a lot for offering that. I kind of picked Next for my side project partially because I wasn't sure whether or not I was definitely going to do the whole static site generator thing. And I had a feeling that I might have certain parts of my views be dynamic, and so to be able to go between server-side rendered pages and requests and also dynamic content was part of the appeal, just the flexibility of it. But yeah, I have yet to really get into more of the nitty-gritty stuff, and like you mentioned, the security aspect I could see was maybe put in there for people, or sorry, companies that handle more sensitive information but still need that high volume of content

00:27:52 - Matt Gilbert

delivery, for sure, and they have the budget to spin up their own copy of it within their own domain and all of that scope. Kind of feeding off that, I actually do have a little bit of spicy feedback. What I've been noticing too is I fell in love with tRPC. At the same time, Alex is one of the coolest human beings on the planet.

00:28:13 - Anthony Campolo

I've been going so deep on tRPC

00:28:15 - Matt Gilbert

recently. I did, and then once again I got around my friends that are all like, the least opinionated approach is the best opinion to have. And I was realizing that at my level, it's great to have these tools to spin up, but it's not healthy for me to rely on them because even Next itself is abstracting me away from what the code is actually doing. And the biggest jump in my skills, aside from the fact that I started with React Native and I didn't even know that I could be babied by the DOM until I transitioned into React, the other biggest leap that I've had is going back to not necessarily basics, but going through React source code and actually learning what useMemo is doing, what useEffect is actually doing, rather than the use cases that I've just been doing surface-level so that I can make informed design decisions. And Next, tRPC, and stuff like that abstract not only those concepts away from you, but they bring you out of practice with them and out of sync with them. And it takes a little bit of time to get caught back up.

00:29:19 - Matt Gilbert

And like I said, rebuilding these primitives, right now I'm getting back to render-type architecture, and I completely forgot how to do that since I moved out of React Native. And those really, really functional and procedural methodologies are really rusty to me, and it's upsetting because it used to be my bread and butter.

00:29:42 - Dax

I don't know if it's, like, I understand that you can get a lot of value from diving down into what Next.js is doing, but it's probably not good advice if you're trying to learn SSR, to learn what Next.js is actually literally doing by going through the codebase. Because the SSR stuff for rendering React is some of the most complicated hellscape code you'll ever see. I mean, the React codebase itself, if you want to learn how to build a framework like React, check out something like HyperApp or Solid, where it's actually clean and small. Like, don't throw yourself in the deep end for no reason.

00:30:24 - Matt Gilbert

Oh, no, 100%.

00:30:25 - Scott Steinlage

And I.

00:30:26 - Matt Gilbert

You hit the nail on the head with that, is that you shouldn't go into Next for its deep dive. And that was my whole point. It's a tool to spin things up easily. It's meant for you not to think deeply. It's meant to be that instinctive tool that you can just reach for and use. But when I, at least personally, feel like I want to grow as a developer and I want to use a core framework like React, I need to go back to what React is doing or, like you said, what Solid is doing.

00:30:54 - Scott Steinlage

Or.

00:30:54 - Matt Gilbert

I just found Recoil. I don't know how I have been a developer for four years and not heard of Recoil, but this is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

00:31:03 - Brad

Why?

00:31:05 - Matt Gilbert

Oh, you haven't seen Recoil.

00:31:07 - Brad

I have not. I probably wasted 1.5 years of my life working with Angular and going between the different versions. But yeah, tell me more.

00:31:16 - Matt Gilbert

Oh, it's a state management library for React, and you can think of it as lifting state out into three dimensions, and you have setters. So now you don't have to follow all the really convoluted state logic rules and useEffect rules if you don't want to. And I'm just digging into it myself, but it's been eye-opening because I was like, oh, I can do all these different things. I'm opening the docs right now to go back through again.

00:31:47 - Brad

I love this about React, actually, just how much you can tool it and how, if I go and ask a question, it's just super well documented. Someone's going to have tried something with it. If I need to go and do something else with Angular or Vue, there's fewer tools.

00:32:04 - Matt Gilbert

Right, right.

00:32:05 - Brad

In the framework kind of thinking, right? I mean, at this point with the deadlines, like time constraints, I don't think I'm going to write a vanilla thing.

00:32:15 - Matt Gilbert

But yeah, no, for sure. So they have atoms and selectors, and atoms are units of state, and you can update and subscribe to them so that you can update state without passing to parent or kind of what you would say out of order. So it's super, super duper fun. But like you said with the time-constraint things, that's why right before that you also mentioned not building vanilla, because there was so much support. The ability to reach for an example kind of anywhere. That's another reason why I'm pushing myself with Bun, because there are no examples in existence. Version 0.1 came out three days ago, and it's something that I get to learn with and file PRs for and be a novice like anyone else on Google.

00:33:07 - Anthony Campolo

When people search for something,

00:33:10 - Dax

I want to play devil's advocate since people mentioned Vue. I think React is too complicated. The state management is too complicated, and that's why you have so many state management solutions. When you pick up something like Vue, you can actually go a lot further with what Vue has built in. And yes, there are more examples and a bigger ecosystem for React, but I don't know, the Vue docs are pretty good. You can go pretty far. It's almost like I feel like people live inside the world of React, so they know all the different, you know, three million state management solutions you can use, but they don't question whether the state management that React has built in is sort of the ideal solution.

00:33:53 - Scott Steinlage

All right, y'all, hold on. Hold that thought for just one second. Man, this is getting fire. I love the conversation that's going on here, but because we're about halfway through here, I just want to take a little room reset. We got a lot of new people that just joined in. I just want to thank you all for joining us today. Welcome to JavaScript Jam Live. This is where we talk about anything and everything JavaScript and web development, which is happening today. Yes, it is. This is awesome. We love it. Whether you're a beginner, you've been doing this for just a little bit of time, or whether you've been doing this for a very long time, we love to hear from everybody. So if you're in the audience, you want to come up, you want to speak, please just request it. I'll bring you up here and you can partake in this too, and even ask some questions. Don't be afraid to get up here. That's when the most value in this room happens, is when everybody's talking and everybody is participating. So really love it.

00:34:40 - Scott Steinlage

Thank you all so much for joining us today. Don't forget, don't forget, we have some awesome speakers in here. They're going to be speaking at Composability Summit coming up at the end of July, July 27th, 28th, 29th. Go to composability.dev and check it out. If you haven't registered, you don't want to miss it. We love y'all. All right, let's continue the conversation. Thank you so much for kicking it off again, Dan. Let's hear some feedback.

00:35:07 - Anthony Campolo

You sound like you just got that recorded. You got it so down pat.

00:35:10 - Joseph Samuel

Hi everyone. Good evening. Scott and everyone out there.

00:35:17 - Anthony Campolo

Hey, did you have a question?

00:35:20 - Joseph Samuel

Yeah.

00:35:20 - Dax

Okay.

00:35:20 - Joseph Samuel

I want to thank you for hosting this space. Yeah, this is my first time actually here. My name is Joseph Samuel. I'm currently learning HTML and CSS. I recently embarked on the Odin Project. I don't know if you have heard about it, the Odin Project. So my fear is that I'm using a Windows system, but the project requires me to kind of use a virtual machine where I have to install Linux, and I've not done such before. So I wanted to get some clarification. Does it really have any negative effect on my Windows? Like, if I install the virtual machine, will I still be able to use my Windows at will?

00:36:12 - Anthony Campolo

Are you talking about wsl? Is that what you're talking about?

00:36:15 - Matt Gilbert

I think he is. And I'm actually an aspiring kernel contributor. I have Tux tattooed on my arm, so I have strong opinions about the NT kernel, none of them positive, so I'll save them.

00:36:27 - Dax

As a non-kernel contributor, I want to just take a step back. If you're learning web development on a Windows computer, I highly recommend not actually messing with the operating system and using one of the many in-browser learning tools that you can use to learn these things. So one of them is CodeSandbox, another one is StackBlitz. There's also Gitpod, right? These are free in-browser solutions that can really just get you up and running so you can focus on learning and not focus on messing with your machine.

00:36:55 - Joseph Samuel

Okay, but they were kind of saying on their site that if I don't do all they have said, like installing the virtual machine, I won't get any support from the community in cases where I get stuck or something. So that was why.

00:37:18 - Anthony Campolo

What are you trying to develop exactly? Like, are you just doing web stuff, or are you building with specific languages? Can you give us a little more context on what you're trying to develop?

00:37:29 - Joseph Samuel

Okay, I want to go into web development. So there's this course they call Udim Project. So I kind of enrolled in the course.

00:37:40 - Anthony Campolo

Oh yeah, I'm familiar with that course.

00:37:44 - Joseph Samuel

Okay. Odin. ODIN Project. That is the name of the course.

00:37:47 - Dax

It's like a freeCodeCamp-type thing.

00:37:50 - Joseph Samuel

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:37:52 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, yeah. I mean, if it's just Node, then you can do it on Windows. It's just gonna be harder. But then an operating system is also hard. So there's no real good answer here.

00:38:04 - Dax

There's a middle road here. So there's something called PowerShell on your computer. And what PowerShell does is it emulates the experience of using a virtual machine without actually doing it. And there's a great article you can find online right now by Corbin Crutchley called something like "setting up PowerShell for development." I don't know how Twitter Spaces really work, so I can't link it, but if you Google "set up PowerShell for web development," you will find this solution, and it's a great middle-road approach.

00:38:35 - Matt Gilbert

I totally agree with that as well. I would say, though, for something more basic, especially since you're just learning, you're not necessarily doing anything non-standard. I am constantly installing Bun or Deno or something brand new that has to interact with some sort of system-level call, like brew install, and is really reliant on the Unix-style or Unix-like kernel system. And if you're not doing anything non-standard, there's no reason why general community support can't do this. Because starting the college classes, they literally just did that. One of the first classes was how to install VMware to get Linux up and running. And I was kind of like, well, I have a Linux machine, and I don't have enough room on my Mac to do this because it's full of client Docker containers right now. So I'm not going to do this. Sorry, professor. But I found that when I was talking with other students, they had this exact same question, and I found that going through the course syllabus and reading up on it, most of these programs that people are going through aren't asking you to do anything novel or non-standard that wouldn't be generally supported by Node on Windows or the JavaScript runtime on Windows.

00:39:46 - Matt Gilbert

So I agree that you should get off of it when you can and give yourself that challenge to do so. But I don't think you should be overly concerned about trying to architect a solution right now because that maturity and that knowledge will come as you learn more about Node and the packages and React and whatever you're going to be building in. And when that maturity and that knowledge come, you're going to be like, okay, now I know what tool to reach for, now I know how to fix this problem, and it's an exciting journey to be on.

00:40:15 - Joseph Samuel

Okay, well, thank you very much. I really appreciate. Thank you.

00:40:24 - Raees

If I can ask a question. Sorry, this is Raees. I am Head of Developer Experience with Edgio. So since we have a lot of people who are very engaged in a lot of different frameworks, have any of you worked with a product that is deployed on edge platforms like Cloudflare Workers, or Netlify has their own edge functions now, or for example Deno has their own edge functions? So what's people's take on edge functions and building your website on the edge and running it on the edge?

00:41:14 - Dax

Yeah. So I'm at Solid and Astro, and both of those frameworks have really great integrations with edge functions. So there's a great demo that the creator of Solid, Ryan, put out of quickly deploying your Solid site to Netlify Edge Functions, and Astro has built-in integrations for getting it out on these edge functions. It's great. The hard part is actually internalizing what and where the benefit of using an edge function is over a traditional serverless function. And in a lot of cases there isn't really enough of a difference to justify it. However, if there's no friction, if it's just I click one button or the other and I'm not paying extra to do edge functions, then why not?

00:42:06 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, the cost you're going to run into is if you're trying to migrate from serverless lambdas to the edge and you have stuff that would only really work in a lambda that's more kind of Node-y, because all these edge things are more ESM-based, so they're using basically newer JavaScript and slightly different syntax. So sometimes you try and port code over from one to the other, it just breaks. And some of it you can rewrite and it'll work and it'll fix it. Some of it you try to rewrite and the libraries just haven't figured it out yet. That's becoming more rare, but we're still kind of in this weird middle ground between not everything can run on the edge, but almost everything can. So people try and run everything on the edge and then just find those weird edge cases where it breaks, and they're like, ah, now what do I do?

00:42:51 - Dax

Yeah, if there's a layer in between, like in Solid, it's just a front-end framework and you don't really think about the runtime, then it's easy.

00:42:59 - Matt Gilbert

And I'm actually excited that, between you and me and the fence post, some people at Vercel are going to build out their edge function functionality in the CDN specifically for Web3D apps. And there'll be a free tier, but then there'll be a decentralized edge function paid tier with what they're building out. So just like you said, there are weird use cases where it doesn't work or it hasn't been done yet. I'm excited to see that gap start to be closed.

00:43:30 - Anthony Campolo

That's cool. I'll check that out. What did you say that was called?

00:43:33 - Matt Gilbert

I didn't say that's what it's called because it was told to me in DMs by the person who's going to build it.

00:43:39 - Anthony Campolo

Well, all right then. Cool. Yeah, no, that sounds very interesting, but

00:43:42 - Matt Gilbert

I will definitely tweet about it and if funding comes along, I'll probably just be joining that company instead.

00:43:49 - Anthony Campolo

Good deal.

00:43:52 - Dax

Anthony likes Web3.

00:43:54 - Matt Gilbert

Yes, Anthony does love Web3, if you

00:43:58 - Anthony Campolo

can tell by the donut.

00:44:02 - Scott Steinlage

Right, right. Well, oh my gosh, you guys, the value, the amazingness that's going on in this room today. Can we get hands up from everybody in this room? Some high fives, some claps, some, yeah, like, no joke. Seriously, it's been insane in here. Look at all those hands go. What? Bam. Yes. Loving this. So, by the way, looks like a lot of people are getting value from this. They are having fun. Well, guess what? What you should be doing is clicking on the face of the person that you get value from. Maybe it's multiple people. And then follow those folks because you're probably going to get value from them in other places too. So do it. We love it. Thank you all so much. We are almost coming to a close here. We got about 15 minutes or so less left, and man, I just don't want it to end because it's so amazing. But I will say, two people with

00:44:55 - Anthony Campolo

their hands up, it looks like.

00:44:56 - Brad

Sorry, I didn't mean to put my hand up. I was doing a high five. I see Jen has her hand up. And I also saw that Jason unmuted himself. And I've had super interesting talks with Jason. I just wanted to hear from him, while I was talking, didn't get to say that. So yeah, genuine Jason. All the J's.

00:45:20 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

We all the coolest J's. You know, I was just gonna say, something I really appreciate about the tech Twitter world and just getting into coding, y'all.

00:45:32 - Daniel

All.

00:45:32 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

I think I've been doing this for maybe three weeks now, which is just kind of bananas. Yet shout-out to so many people here, or a few people here, who have already been on Teach Jenn Tech. And for the newbies out there in the world, it's a great place to watch me get destroyed on homework days trying to figure out stuff by myself. And then also just kind of getting an idea of who might be good to reach out to in the Twitter world, of who may know more about what you want to get into.

00:46:07 - Anthony Campolo

Definitely a lot of people on here will be good for your show. For people who don't know, she's going to have the creator of Angular on soon.

00:46:15 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

Yeah, that. Thanks, Anthony. That one was all you.

00:46:18 - Dax

How did that happen? That's amazing. I have the creator of Angular on my show. Like, how do we get...

00:46:23 - Anthony Campolo

I literally recommended YouTube to him.

00:46:26 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

Actually, he followed my podcast too. I saw that, and I was like, okay, cool. He DM'd me and I'm like, so nervous, y'all. I was screenshotting stuff to Anthony going, what did he just say? I don't even know what that is yet.

00:46:43 - Anthony Campolo

He was like, let's build hacker news. And I'm like, no.

00:46:48 - Dax

It's so funny because with Angular, really basic examples are actually extremely hard to set up because there's so much scaffolding when you start a project.

00:46:59 - Anthony Campolo

Yes.

00:47:00 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

Yeah. So we'll see. You know, join in on Friday, y'all. It'll be fun. And I just want to say thank you again. And if you want to be a guest, I'm eventually going to update things and check it out because we're all noobs at some point. We're also going to have somebody on the show to talk about getting into learning a new format or language, like going from React to Express or something like that. So it'll be dope.

00:47:34 - Scott Steinlage

Cool. Awesome.

00:47:35 - Brad

Yeah, right here. Love it.

00:47:39 - Scott Steinlage

Obviously, people can, you know, DM you. Right? But where. Where can they go to connect? Where's the best way place to go to connect with you, Jen?

00:47:48 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

Yeah, definitely. DM me. Follow me on Twitter. If you want to watch the old ones, it's YouTube, and that will all be linked in my profile. Is that what y'all

00:47:59 - Scott Steinlage

All.

00:47:59 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

I barely started Twitter-Twittering like a month ago too, so I don't know how to say anything for Twitter.

00:48:06 - Scott Steinlage

I love the massive action, though.

00:48:12 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

Thank you. Thank you.

00:48:15 - Anthony Campolo

Chris, you want to say something while you're up here?

00:48:18 - Chris (Everfund)

Do I want to say anything? You should get on Web3 too, Jen. Just skip completely Web2 and just go all the way.

00:48:28 - Anthony Campolo

No, I really told her she should wait. I should not tell her anything about web 3. Just make everything way more confusing.

00:48:34 - Matt Gilbert

Yeah, so I should tell her about Web5 then. She's ready for Web5 then.

00:48:39 - Jenn (Teach Jenn Tech)

I mean, you guys can book out a few months maybe, like, we just book it out some. But I do want to understand it at some point, but I'm not even to, like, block three and all that. Y'all, NFTs are all above my head, like hardcore.

00:48:57 - Chris (Everfund)

I would say don't worry because I'm not a crypto, bro, but Anthony is.

00:49:03 - Anthony Campolo

You got a donut, though, Holder?

00:49:05 - Chris (Everfund)

I am. I am a donut holder. And I could say it to my profile picture, but I'm just not that guy yet. Anthony, maybe if you keep poking me.

00:49:14 - Anthony Campolo

It's on Discord. You're rocking the donut.

00:49:16 - Scott Steinlage

So let's hear about it. Because I saw some of your artwork. So let's hear it.

00:49:24 - Anthony Campolo

I'm talking about the donut that you see on my profile picture. Similar, but different donuts.

00:49:30 - Dax

Yeah.

00:49:30 - Brad

That's your artwork, is it?

00:49:33 - Anthony Campolo

No, it's not my artwork. No, it's just an NFT project. So there's like 10,000 of these. They all look kind of like this, but they turn out a little bit different. They're like 30, 40 bucks right now if you want one, called...

00:49:44 - Chris (Everfund)

Yeah.

00:49:44 - Scott Steinlage

Wasn't Chris promoting that?

00:49:49 - Chris (Everfund)

No, no.

00:49:50 - Scott Steinlage

Promoting that. Chris. No, no, no.

00:49:53 - Chris (Everfund)

Anthony got me one. Anthony said I bought one.

00:49:56 - Scott Steinlage

Oh, Anthony got you one.

00:49:57 - Anthony Campolo

You have to get a wallet. Everyone at QuickNode bought a donut. There's like 50 donuts in the QuickNode Slack right now. It's pretty funny.

00:50:06 - Dax

Any love for Web1 Astro makes it really easy to make your Web1 websites.

00:50:14 - Anthony Campolo

Web1 is HTML.

00:50:15 - Dax

Web1 was great. You didn't have to learn React. You didn't have to learn Angular. It was just boring HTML, and it conveyed your point. You could even style it if you wanted to. So come back to Web1.

00:50:26 - Anthony Campolo

Whoa, guys, Moodie donuts are going for $13 right now. That's a steal.

00:50:31 - Scott Steinlage

Hey, by the way, really quick, really quick, if you get booted as a speaker, forgive me. It's just we have people requesting and there's 10 spots available. That's it. So just FYI, if you're not talking a bunch up here, I might move you down. If you want to come back up, please request.

00:50:54 - Matt Gilbert

Remix is trying to bring us back to Web1, I think, given its reliance on the form and native DOM-type constructs.

00:51:04 - Dax

Yeah, Love for, Love for Remix, Remix, Astro, Solid Start, are all kind of learning from each other.

00:51:10 - Matt Gilbert

And even Fresh from the Deno sphere that I think we had on, was that last week or two weeks ago?

00:51:17 - Matt Gilbert

That was.

00:51:18 - Matt Gilbert

That's all Web1.

00:51:21 - Dax

Do you know the meme like, can I have X? We have X at home? So, yes, Fresh. Fresh is Astro at home.

00:51:32 - Chris (Everfund)

Can I just say, when we speak about Web1, Astro has like the most Web1 feature ever, and that's like a marquee, because HTML marquees got deprecated, what, in the 2010s?

00:51:47 - Dax

I don't even know what that feature

00:51:48 - Chris (Everfund)

is, so please tell me it's where the. The text rotates, like carousel, but just like rotating text. Maybe it wasn't a marquee.

00:51:58 - Matt Gilbert

Yeah, marquee was the tag.

00:52:00 - Chris (Everfund)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was marquee. Yeah, yeah, it was like one of the really early tags. It used to have it on every single website. Look at my text go around this div box. It was classic.

00:52:10 - Dax

Oh, I didn't. I don't think that's an Astro thing. I just think that HTML happens to sometimes support that, if you're lucky.

00:52:17 - Chris (Everfund)

Oh, no, you have it on your website? Yeah, yeah.

00:52:19 - Dax

Oh, the website. You're talking about our "yes" at the top, the banner. Yeah, yeah, we don't. I don't think we use the marquee HTML tag for that, do we? Oh, gosh, no, no, it's gone.

00:52:32 - Chris (Everfund)

It's way gone. It's old.

00:52:36 - Anthony Campolo

It was one of the only things

00:52:37 - Matt Gilbert

that was ever deprecated.

00:52:38 - Chris (Everfund)

Right, yeah.

00:52:40 - Matt Gilbert

The original HTML spec.

00:52:42 - Dax

If you go into the markup of our homepage and you inspect it, the tag is called not Marquee.

00:52:51 - Chris (Everfund)

There you go. See, that is some classic Web1. And someone put that there as an Easter egg because that used to be everything. So when you said Astro's bringing the world back to Web1, that's like the number one Web1 thing I think of, marquees and [unclear] all day.

00:53:08 - Dax

This is amazing. Thanks so much for teaching me about this.

00:53:12 - Matt Gilbert

I think on the Web1 front, I think I saw Tanner Linsley posted a thing about React Table and an example using actual original table tags with virtual scrolling. So I think we definitely have come full circle back to some of the original '90s primitives of the web.

00:53:36 - Chris (Everfund)

Well, don't we all still use table tags for building tables?

00:53:40 - Matt Gilbert

Yeah, but we went through this whole thing where we were trying to use everything but the table to build large-scale data tables.

00:53:47 - Matt Gilbert

Very true.

00:53:50 - Chris (Everfund)

Flexboxes.

00:53:51 - Matt Gilbert

I don't know if you remember when people were trying to use canvas to implement high-speed data-scrolling tables. There was a whole thing in the mid-2000s around that. So yeah, we've gone all the way full circle back to, look, we can actually use the table the way it was intended.

00:54:09 - Matt Gilbert

So retro maybe.

00:54:14 - Chris (Everfund)

Well, you know, it all comes together. It's like Web two plus Web one plus Web three equals Web five.

00:54:24 - Matt Gilbert

It does, yeah.

00:54:26 - Anthony Campolo

One plus two plus three is six, Chris. Yeah,

00:54:31 - Matt Gilbert

it's three factorial. Who's doing the Web5 pseudo-semi joke?

00:54:39 - Anthony Campolo

Is that Jack Dorsey? It's not Dorsey.

00:54:42 - Matt Gilbert

Right. Yeah.

00:54:43 - Anthony Campolo

Well, it's actually based on DIDs, which Chris knows all about. Chris used DIDs with Everfund.

00:54:48 - Chris (Everfund)

Oh, do I?

00:54:52 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, they're using decentralized identifiers, which you probably don't even know this, but that's a magic link used which you were using forever.

00:54:58 - Chris (Everfund)

Yeah, but we're not on magic link anymore, we're on clerk now.

00:55:02 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:55:03 - Matt Gilbert

So the startup I joined actually has a really cool take on this, is that we take the concepts of Web3 and we just build it in Web2. So a little bit of alpha here is we're building first-party data tools for content creators, and we are basically building a multiplayer layer of the Internet. So instead of everyone building their own quote-unquote multiverse and their own platform to support it, we went, holy crap, everybody already has Chrome, so why don't we just use the Shadow DOM to manage interactions with people and build an entire multiverse directly into the Shadow DOM, and then the user data always stays right there inside the browser extension, right inside the browser. And we can look at the connections they make and still use that to monetize data and analytics, but at the same time we can be serving fully featured, completely unique web experiences in a really small, streamlined, multiplayer fashion and bring back Club Penguin, but now on every single website you could ever want, and give this tool to content creators to do it. So we are decentralizing the identity, if you will, because your identity is the source of truth for that and comes from your specific instance of the browser extension.

00:56:21 - Matt Gilbert

But it can be implemented on any part of the web where anyone else can see it, use it, and identify you with it. So it's decentralization without a blockchain, and it's a pretty awesome product that we're going to build out.

00:56:38 - Raees

That's pretty interesting. And, you know, forgive my ignorance, coming from the, I guess, Web1 and Web2 world, I've heard a lot about Web3, but I don't understand the use cases where it would fit and how all the things connect essentially. Can you recommend some getting-started guide for absolute beginners? If they want to build a Web3 product, what would be the place to start?

00:57:16 - Matt Gilbert

I love.

00:57:18 - Anthony Campolo

Go ahead.

00:57:19 - Matt Gilbert

I love everyone over at MetaMask with a burning passion because they are the sweetest human beings, and Infura has some great things. In fact, the parent company of MetaMask, ConsenSys, has an entire ConsenSys Academy that is supposed to be really good. That being said, Moralis doesn't do a half-bad job of putting out tutorials. But I can explain Web3 pretty simply. We just built services on top of reinventing the wheel of distributed ledgers. And the only real use case for distributed ledgers was solved in the '90s, and we just decided to keep building on top of it. And now we have these really cool abstracted layers that we can run services and financial services on. That's how I like to think of it.

00:58:03 - Anthony Campolo

That requires know what a distributed ledger is, though a lot of people probably don't.

00:58:10 - Matt Gilbert

Well, fair point, fair point.

00:58:11 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah. What about CryptoZombies.io? That's a good one.

00:58:18 - Anthony Campolo

There's also the question, do you want to learn the tech, like how to build something? Do you want to learn the philosophy? Do you want to learn all that stuff? In terms of straight use cases, right now it's mostly for transferring funds and for creating financial stuff or doing some sort of image stuff with NFTs. So basically you can use it to associate yourself with a certain artifact, so you can kind of think of it like a collectible, like a trading card or something like that. So those are the main use cases. Also use cases are identity and control over your data, like a social network where you could port, say, all of your Twitter data to another social network. You can't do that right now. So that's the kind of stuff that we're working on in terms of

00:59:04 - Raees

identity on kind of a distributed ledger. Would that be kind of, I guess, public key, private key? You have your private key and then you publish your public key in the ledger.

00:59:19 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, that's exactly it.

00:59:20 - Chris (Everfund)

Yeah.

00:59:20 - Raees

Okay, I see.

00:59:21 - Matt Gilbert

Actually, that just clicked for me. You know who does really, really amazing, and it's a little old-fashioned, but Three Blue One Brown, the math guy over on YouTube, has a short three-video lecture series. It goes fabulous. It builds you all the way from Bob and Alice exchanging their keys all the way through how those keys work together to form blocks and the consensus of the information, and it's fabulous. I love Three Blue One Brown. Great, great channel. Same with Fireship. He cracks me up. I actually got him to follow me. We had a little bit of a Twitter spat, and now we're mutuals on Twitter. It's kind of funny.

00:59:59 - Anthony Campolo

I just dropped that video. I replied to the tweet.

01:00:03 - Chris (Everfund)

My closing comment.

01:00:05 - Matt Gilbert

Well,

01:00:07 - Chris (Everfund)

Someone should make, this is a billion-dollar idea, someone should control the blockchain using SQL query language. Get on it, Anthony.

01:00:18 - Anthony Campolo

I think there's probably someone already doing that if I looked hard enough. But yeah, I think we're about out of time here.

01:00:23 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah. So with that being said, thank you for that. Before I jump, I didn't want to cut anybody off real quick here, but Builders Coins, did you have anything to say? I know you wanted to come up, and I brought you up for a second here, but we are over time here by about three minutes. But if you want to bring something up that would just take a few minutes to discuss or talk about, let's go for it. If not, we will be here next Wednesday. So what say you?

01:00:49 - Brad

Let's say, yeah, first of all, thank you so much for this thing, and I'm literally enjoying this kind of space. It's full of amazing people sharing amazing things. Actually I wanted to ask when this will be hosted again, but you answered it. Thanks. And my second question is to Dax, like, how did you get into Web5, if you can share?

01:01:17 - Matt Gilbert

Yeah. So this specific company, it's because I sit next to someone who has more web experience in her little pinky than maybe this whole panel combined, which is impressive. And she was working on a contract for them. And she was basically like, they need help. They're behind. And the reason I was such a great fit for this was because I was recommended as Next. I didn't know anyone could like me this much, but I have an insane letter of recommendation from MetaMask as well. And I was looking for change. I have a lot of personal stuff going on. And I went, this is perfect. And I have always been in love with creator tools. So it was kind of as the stars aligned for me to find a company that fit my skill set, and it was creator tools. And it just so happened to be Web5, and not Web5 in the Jack Dorsey sense, but the Silicon Valley sense, the old TV show sense of like, this is the Internet we were always supposed to build, and this is the Internet users deserve.

01:02:28 - Scott Steinlage

All right, thank you so much. Yeah, cool. That sounds like it answered your question there. Thank you so much, everybody, for joining us today. Man, wow, this was a fun one, man. We had so much value going on here. Give a big clap for everybody who participated, spoke, came up on stage. Thank you all for doing this. It's been a great, great, great time. And if you want to join us again, right next week, Wednesday, 12:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, as always, join us. And don't forget, we have the Composability Summit coming up at the end of the month, July 27th, 28th, 29th. Can't stress it enough. You don't want to miss out on this. You will have some FOMO, but yeah, it's going to be great. Go to composability.dev, register right now, and you can be a part of the fun there too. All right, y'all, follow these folks up here if you got value from them. We love y'all. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next week. Peace out, y'all.

01:04:06 - Anthony Campolo

It.