CHUCK:
Updates to the system.
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CHUCK:
Hey everybody and welcome to episode 77 of the Adventures in Angular Show. This week on our panel we have Joe Eames.
JOE:
Hey everybody.
CHUCK:
John Papa.
JOHN:
May the force be with you.
CHUCK:
Lukas Reubbelke.
LUKAS:
Hey everybody.
CHUCK:
Ward Bell.
WARD:
Hi everyone! Ready, oh!
CHUCK:
I’m Charles Max Wood from Devchat.tv. Quick shout-out for Freelance Remote Conf. It’s too late for JS Remote Conf. Angular Remote Conf will be later in the year. This week, we’re going to be talking about 2015 and 2016 and what’s coming in the Angular World and what has come in the Angular world.
So 2015; I remember the beginning of the year, we were still in the throes of dealing with the RIP stuff from 2014.
WARD:
Dun, dun, dun, dun.
CHUCK:
And everybody was freaked out about Angular not being so Angular anymore.
JOHN:
That was awful.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JOHN:
That was awful. There was no better way to say that, right? So what was 2015 for everybody? It was the year of the Angular tombstones and the reboot with Angular 2.
CHUCK:
Yup.
JOHN:
We all had to get to speed and learn this. We had some great podcasts on what the heck is it, what should we be learning and – what about all the stuff around it? I don’t know about you guys, but I dove into typescript harder last year, deeper last year than I’ve ever done before.
CHUCK:
Yeah, I remember that and the announcement, too, the whole typescript announcement at ng-conf and our discussion about that. I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to dig in to it as much as I like.
JOHN:
I think it’s funny. There’s things that we thought last year would be big. We all knew Angular 2 could be big last year because they’re working on it and get it moving. But I don’t think going into the year, any of us thought that typescript would be as big as it was last year. Then things kind of came out of nowhere. We’re getting pretty hot, too, in my mind; things like reactive extension started getting a lot of steam in the second half of last year. As well as things like React, obviously, was the big year for them as well.
CHUCK:
Yeah, a lot of movement in React. We did several React episodes on JavaScript Jabber and five of them are five of the top 20 episodes that we’ve ever had on JavaScript Jabber, so React took off in a big way.
JOHN:
I was looking the other day at Pluralsight and they had over 70 courses that were related to Angular 1. Not entirely Angular 1 in some ways but basically a large portion dedicated to Angular 1 up on their library. [Crosstalk]
WARD:
And they had no React courses. They had one old one from a year prior to that.
JOHN:
Yeah, and there was very few React courses even still right there, and everybody’s perspective author for Pluralsight. Huge app [inaudible], right, because React is hot.
WARD:
Well no, it’s not. It was hot in 2015 but it’s going to disappear. [Chuckles] That’s just me predicting but we haven’t got to our predictions.
JOHN:
Right. You look back and see what was there and what was big, some things are obviously very much predictable that they’d be hot. But honestly, I was kind of surprised to how fast everybody adopted ES – what is it now, 2015? [Chuckles]
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JOHN:
ES 6. A lot of people complained and whined during the year than they last but leading in that direction that are TypeScript. The second half of the year, it seemed like they [inaudible] have to talk about it. People are just like, “Yeah man, I’m using TypeScript. I’m using ES 6.”
CHUCK:
It’s interesting. I think there is a little bit of what is that – I don’t know what the right name for the bias is that’s out there, but the people that I talk to or typically, the people that are active in the community; I don’t know if a lot of the “dark matter developers” are really out there adopting it. The other thing is that I know a lot of people say in the Rails community and other communities that are only adopting some of these because the communities that they’re paying attention to are pushing them that way. For example, they’re getting into React and the React community is adopting some ES 6 stuff or they get into Angular and they start paying attention to TypeScript. But I think a lot of people are still out there doing jQuery Spaghetti in ES 5 and I don’t think they’re going to move until they get pushed off the bench.
JOHN:
Ah. That was me last night, even. I’m going to do an early prediction of 2016. One thing I predict early here is as Angular 2 unfolds – and I think we’re all expecting this year to be released at some point though I don’t really know – when that happens, there’s going to be a big gap and it’s going to be a short term gap but it’s an opportunity for people to develop widgets and libraries and all that ecosystem that Angular 1 needs time to firm up around Angular 2; things like Firebase and all that or Ionic, the animations or Angular Material.
What I spent last night doing, for example, is something everybody who’s in Angular or any new tool in things like Aurelia are going to be doing this year. That’s taking code that was written in things like jQuery or even Angular 1 directives and re-developing those to work themselves into rewriting those into Angular 2 components.
LUKAS:
To jump into that, even as content creators, I’m finding that I’m revisiting some of the stuff that I blogged about in 2015 and re-doing those applications in Angular 2. For instance, I had a series on creating a simple rest web application and I’m going back and doing it in Angular 2and ngRx then I write about that. So revisiting some of my old content and updating it to the new concepts.
WARD:
In 2015 also, some saw some changes in tooling and some migrations. Certainly for me, personally when the big ones was Visual Studio code arrived, it has become my editor of choice displacing Sublime, and to a certain degree for me, WebStorm, although WebStorm remains strong for a number of people. But that came out in – that did come out of nowhere. [Crosstalk]
JOHN:
Really, yeah.
WARD:
And I think the sudden precipitous decline of Bower by the end of the year with everybody saying what they can do with just standard NPM has been interesting.
JOHN:
I think that’s neat, Ward. I bet you if you asked, nine or the ten people you’ve asked – developers – probably don’t know about that. The hottest, latest, coolest new developers are on the leading ends heard the rumblings about Bower going away. Actually, I look at that more as a prediction for 2016.
WARD:
Yeah. Well they should listen to our show more [chuckles] because we know what’s hot and what’s not, right?
JOHN:
Yes.
JOE:
Browserify’s the same thing. I was surprised to see NPM become as popular for front end as it has become, and now Angular 2. Their official delivery channel’s NPM. Feel free to comment on that. [Laughter]
JOHN:
I think you're wrong. You’re wrong, man.
LUKAS:
I haven’t heard that at all.
JOHN:
I go to the browser, I right click, say, view source. I then copy everything and I paste it into a file and press save.
JOE:
I do that, too.
LUKAS:
Pro tip. [Chuckles]
JOHN:
I predicted that [crosstalk].
WARD:
I told you that this year. [Chuckles]
JOHN:
But I think tooling’s a big one, Ward. That’s a good one to hit on because that’s just one of the feature [crosstalk].
WARD:
It’s just a lot in play there. I hear text on Gulp; people talk about how you should do everything in NPM scripts. You know what, we’ve done much more with NPM scripts than ever before and it’s very convenient thing to do. But I’m still finding that there are complex tasks that I wouldn’t know how to do yet as NPM scripts.
I think what you're seeing is people saying, “Enough already with all the choices. Can we just widdle this down?” That would be great but it’s not entirely possible.
JOHN:
I agree. I think the build systems are a great place to look at that with Gulp and Grunt were really, really hot, but then it seems like everybody was like, “You know what, we can do all this in NPM scripts or even webpack or JSPM. I don’t think – my prediction this year is it’s not going to be resolved. I still think there’s going to be many ways you can build and there’s going to be no clear winner.
WARD:
Yeah. I have a feeling that’s true. I also think people stress to – this is an observation. People stress so much on packaging and loading and all that tooling stuff. To me it’s like, “Hey, when are you going to get around and write in that application?” Some of that stuff just sits on the periphery. Give me a formula that can get me developing and then I’m going to wait until somebody comes along and sifts through it but there’s just so much stress about that and I’d rather focus on building that to-do app I’ve always wanted to make.
LUKAS:
I know somebody who can teach you how to do that. [Chuckles] Joe? Joe will help you.
WARD:
Because I want to figure out how many different frameworks I can do it in.
JOHN:
I’m also going to predict that this year, there is going to be a swarm of Angular 2 courses coming out from every one of these providers – the Eggheads, the Pluralsights, the everywhere. I think you're going to be just inundated thee whole industry with Angular 2 learning material. I think that’s going to cost a good thing. A lot of ways to look at it but it’s also [inaudible] cause a bad thing in that. Where are people going to go to get their content? I think you're going to see so much choice that people would be paralyzed by how many ways they can do everything.
WARD:
That’s why they should come here, come to our show; we’ll tell them where to go. Tell them which courses they should listen to [chuckles], who they should listen to, who should they ignore.
JOHN:
And maybe – I predict this year, Ward Bell will author his very first course at one of these different providers.
WARD:
It could happen. It just could happen.
CHUCK:
I thought you already have Pluralsight courses, Ward?
WARD:
I have – is a lot of chatting around once some – what do they call those things, John, up here?
JOHN:
Uh, play with Ward or something like that.
WARD:
Yes, play by play [crosstalk].
CHUCK:
Oh, okay.
WARD:
Which I love doing, by the way. I can’t wait to do some more of those this year. But yeah, I think it’s time to do some video courses.
JOHN:
Yeah. I think there’s a lot of things coming down to play, but last year we saw quite a bit with Angular 1 and learning Angular 2. I think this year, a lot of people are going to be trying to make that migration leap with their skills, not necessarily with the apps but with their skills and figuring out is Angular 2 where they want to play? If so, how do we play that game? But I’m also going to predict that this year is going to be a lot of angst over not having a style guide the day that Angular 2 was released. [Chuckles]
WARD:
Yeah. Well, somebody’s got to do something about that.
CHUCK:
I think I know a guy.
JOHN:
Yeah, I’ve already been getting hate mails from some people of why this is already out, which is kind of funny. There was a great tweep; I think it was Joe Hooks. The other day, somebody asked me about him and Joe replied, “Take your time, John. The reason it –,” [inaudible] of reason – “the reason that the other one was so well-liked is because it was after you built many apps with it based on experience.” Building something like that without actually having Angular 2 finished – I haven’t built many apps in Angular 2 yet. Nobody has. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to say ‘here’s my experience’ when there is none.
CHUCK:
Yeah. I’m wondering a little bit when we talked about some of the things that are coming up. I’ve heard a lot of people saying that they’re leaving Angular for React. Do you think that’s going to continue or do you think that’s going to stabilize now that we have a solid beta, and hopefully, an actual release this year.
JOHN:
I think people will still do React subliminally. I think they're both going to grow this year. That’s my prediction. I think Angular 2 is obviously going to grow. People who love Angular are going to stick with it; I think some new people will come to it as well. I think it’s that good. But the React side, there’s to me two reasons to use React. One, you just really love it and if you do, great, it’s really awesome. The other reason to use it is there’s a small group of loud, vocal people, people like us, who love to go find the hottest, coolest, newest thing and are only happy if they're using the latest thing that’s out.
JOE:
That’s Magpie developers.
JOHN:
Yup! And you know what, React was this year; what’s going to be next year? Maybe it’s the Joe Eames network application. [Chuckles] Maybe it’s Electron; who knows? I’ve been hearing a lot about that app lately.
JOE:
Well, I’ll tell you the minute I see it glinting in the corner of my eye. [Chuckles]
JOHN:
It’ll happen, man. Every [crosstalk].
CHUCK:
Joe.js. You heard it here.
JOE:
Right. I love shiny things. I think it’s the same reason that developers love Apple products. They're shiny.
CHUCK:
The thing is there are a lot of things to like about React and there are a lot of things to like about React that they pulled over into Angular so go try it out. If you like it but you wish it was a little bit more Angular-ish then let the core team know. “Hey, I would really like this feature.”
WARD:
Actually, I’m going to make a bold prediction that there will be no new frameworks of consequence in 2016.
JOHN:
I don’t think it’s that bold because I agree with you.
CHUCK:
I agree, too.
JOHN:
I absolutely agree.
WARD:
I think we have enough to chew on. I think that there are interesting variety of choices out there now. It’s not like – I just wonder who’s going to come along with a truly brand new paradigm because if you look at it, you can start at the bootstrap end which is down the dirty nuts and bolts of super simple lightweight. Then you’ve got these – I guess next scale is React which means you have to plug and play it with other things but it certainly got a good ecosystem and it has a point of view. It has a very clear point of view.
Amber has a really clear point of view about how you should build applications. Angular has a very clear point of view and Aurelia has a clear point of view. If you’ve touched that set there, you kind of covered – it seems to me – the range of ways we approach the problem of building a single page app. Everybody else’s maybe – there are others out there but they just don’t seem to me to be paradigm shifts.
LUKAS:
I want to push back on that just a moment if you don’t mind.
WARD:
Go for it.
LUKAS:
I think one framework that you're going to hear more about is Cycle.js by André Staltz. It’s essentially a new pattern that I never heard of, a model view intent, but it’s more of a functional reactive framework and I have immense respect for André. The stuff that he’s doing around, also programming, observables, et cetera; I think you are going to see that framework get bigger and more [inaudible] share as well as some of the concepts adopted into other frameworks.
WARD:
That’s a good point. I think a thoroughly end to end, front to back reactive approach is a different paradigm so there’s room for that. Paul bets did something like that with Reactive few years back and it disappeared beneath the waves probably because it was too soon, but it should be interesting to see what happens to Cycle.js.
JOE:
Well we can’t mention this without mentioning what, for me, was other big, huge surprise in 2015 and that was Elm.
CHUCK:
Yeah, but that’s a transpiled language more than [crosstalk].
JOE:
Don’t poo-poo that.
CHUCK:
I’m just saying it’s not a framework as much as it is.
JOE:
It’s not a framework but it is a framework at the same time. Sorry, I said it is not a framework. It is a framework at the same time that it’s a transpiled language. You can’t do Elm and not do exactly Elm – Elm is like the pure version of React. Cycle is trying to be more Elm-like than React is. Elm is like the pure version of those things.
WARD:
What’s the traction on that, Joe? Do you have any sense of that?
JOE:
I think it’s the same thing that’s keeping people in React and making people go check out Cycle and that is this whole functional one-way workflow paradigm – state change paradigm is really making people think, “Wow, this is” – I’ve said this before, the functional programming neckbeards have been laughing at us down their noses for years saying, “Huh, you guys don’t even know how to build a maintainable app.” Now, we’re seeing these sort of things come along and I think that’s the attraction; it’s this whole ‘hey, it’s easy for me to understand how my application changes’ and two and a half years later down the road, it’s still easy for me to figure out changes and tests are a secondary part of that.
WARD:
I can’t wait to put a stake in the heart of this whole overreaction [chuckles] but that’s what I predict in 2016 is we’re going to see a lot of people saying, “What? Yeah. So what.”
JOHN:
About what? Sorry. React or reactive?
WARD:
Yeah, the whole reactive so-called functional programming movement. I’m expecting a counter reformation.
JOHN:
Hm. I think that’s amazing because I know you and I especially, we’ve been inundated with reactive programming fans for the last couple of months and it’s pretty cool. I learned a lot about it, you more than I have. I think it’s neat but I also feel in some ways, people are going to swarm to this because it’s the next cool thing that people are starting to gain popularity, but is it really that much better than what we had? I think there’s going to be a push back. I agree.
CHUCK:
In my opinion, a lot of these things go way too far and then dial back. We see this not just in programming; we see it in politics, we see it in Economics, we see it in all of these other areas where people get really gung-ho about something. They go and they explore to the fullest extent then they come back to where it really makes sense.
JOHN:
I had a great friend one time. I taught him – this was years ago so you know how old I am. I taught him how to use stored procedures with SQL server. I left to go away from work for a couple of days and came back. When I came back, he had converted all of our SQL into over 1,000 stored procedures. He was amazed and wonderful, was thrilled. Everything was awesome and then he ran the apps that are in his company and all of a sudden, everything was a lot slower because he had made stored procedures, call stored procedures and call stored procedures all over the place and it was just nuts.
So my lesson from that story I often tell people is just because you learned something new and just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should do it in every single case. I feel that way with React, reactive programming, with Rx, [inaudible] with Angular 2 – just anything you use, you shouldn’t be using the same tool for every single job. You wouldn’t bring a hammer when you need a screwdriver would you?
CHUCK:
And that’s what I tell people a lot when I’m talking to podcast listeners or new programmers is that what you're doing is you're solving problems and you're managing trade-offs for your employer and you just happen to have a skillset that allows you to do that and write the code at the same time. But that’s what makes you an expert is the ability to look at Reactive programming, look at functional programming, look at procedural programming, look at object-oriented programming and be able to take those paradigms and say, “Here are the trade-offs with each one and so I’m going to go with the one that makes the most sense.”
WARD:
I want to say this; I wouldn’t mind being wrong and I know – because I think it would be fascinating that if there was a way for the functional programming movement and reactive programming movement to make serious strides. But it’s not like this haven’t been around for a while and struggled to push aside the existing modalities or even the end of the consciousness.
It just reminds me a little bit of the way we’re all supposed to use Linux on every desktop and it was going to wipe out Windows and [chuckles] because it was so much better and that just never played out. So I’m going to be curious but the good news – whatever good piece in [inaudible] here is that Joe, you're a big fan of that movement and I’m expecting you to show me up in 2016 and make a monkey of me.
JOE:
I hope I can. I will look forward to that.
JOHN:
But I think we should mix in challenges, too, for this year. I challenge people whether it’s for reactive or not, whatever your topic is and you're trying to get it across to people, I challenge everybody to communicate that in a way that shows why. Why for God’s sake is it the right thing to do? I am so tired of listening to people, especially last year. It seems like it was the year of ‘my thing is awesome’. Why? It’s just awesome. Why is it better? It just is.
So I challenge everybody; if you’ve got a great idea or you think your framework’s better or your library’s awesome or you just love Joe Eames, tell us why.
JOE:
That’s such a challenging thing to do.
LUKAS:
No one knows why they love Joe Eames. Not a single person.
JOE:
That is so much more challenging than it sounds like. It’s not just about [inaudible]; just take the time and explain it. Just explaining something well in a realistic census, especially when what you’re trying to explain maybe has to do with topics that are complex. We see this before, the to-do syndrome; whatever makes a to-do app easy to build, everybody gets all excited about it. But we don’t build to-do apps; we build big, huge, complex, a hundred and thousand line apps in this industry and 500,000 line apps occasionally.
We don’t build to-do apps and so the things that make a to-do app cool are not – to a small extent, I think Angular 1 is a perfect example of this. I believe that Angular 1 makes – its to-do apps shines out but we also know that it has some big performance problems and those were never really encountered until people started building 50,000 line apps and 100,000 line apps and now we see Angular 2 as a response to that.
JOHN:
I think you’re right. It is very hard and people aren’t explaining why [inaudible] up because they don’t want to. Maybe they're not the best communicators in some cases; in other cases, maybe they can’t figure out why they like it. Maybe it’s just because they do and that’s okay.
CHUCK:
Right.
JOHN:
Right? Sometimes it’s usually just because we like it better. But I think that when it’s something that’s like, “Hey, here’s a better way of doing it.” For example, doing RxJS over promises for getting data; let’s show some use cases. Show it side by side with the thing you used to do. Start walking through the pros and the cons. Show an unbiased approach and I think you’ll get more people to receive you than if you just say, “Hey, if I code in bullets, it’s so much better than [inaudible.”
CHUCK:
Right.
JOE:
There’s some great examples of the difficulties that – imagine a paradigm that work great for 50,000 line apps but didn’t work great for 1,000 line apps. Well, everybody can see the 1,000 line apps and see that it doesn’t work great for those, but not everybody is going to go through the process of building a 50,000 line app with it.
Another great example I think of that, a concrete one is pair programming. I’ve talked to many people about pair programming who have been very resistant. Managers are often; developers are often, too. Although I think most developers get resistant not because they believe that it’s more productive to program by yourself but because they want the ability to open up the news or sports website and look at it.
I’ve pair programmed for eight hours a day, for weeks on end and I got out of touch with the world because I couldn’t spend my time, my little five-minute breaks opening up whatever website was my favorite website to go check out. I just was working constantly. It was tiring.
But we were more of – in my opinion we were more effective so I told them, “People, I can explain to you why pair programing is more effective but until you come and do it with me for a couple of weeks, you really won’t know.”
JOHN:
Here’s another prediction for this year from me and that is we are going to have a whole [inaudible] of blog posts from people, saying things like, “Angular 2 sucks and React is great.” “React is awful and Aurelia’s wonderful.” “Aurelia’s terrible. Angular 2 is the way to go.”
Those posts are going to just feed memes all over the place, and most of them quite frankly, I’m betting, aren’t going to be based in fact but more so an opinion.
WARD:
I’m hoping to write a couple of those myself. [Laughter] Both pro and con. Expect a ‘React is great, everything else sucks’ post from me and that Angular’s great [inaudible] I expect to write those issues.
JOHN:
Sensationalism sells, man. Sensationalism. [Chuckles]
JOE:
There was a really virulent blog post written just very recently. I [inaudible] do the dignity of talking about it or linking to it because it was mostly a whole – a big, huge rant about how – everything in the last year. It was really complaining about React, about the idea of, “Hey, if you put little pieces together, that sucks. Don’t do a SPA for everything. SPA sucks.” It was just a rant about everything that we considered to be part of modern web development.
One particular guy who was finger pointed at in the article tweeted. He was upset and [inaudible] and read it. Even though he actually makes so many interesting points – I think I’m seeing the first of this, people who are over – well, not overreacting – reacting to different things that changed over the last year. We’ve already seen all this stuff about JavaScript fatigue and the tool chains and all the difficulties that people are having there and just setting up a modern JavaScript application. You can’t just open up a text editor, write some CSS, HTML, JavaScript; open up in your browser, hit refresh and it works. We’ve moved on to a new place where we need a compile step and definitely a lot of reaction to that as well.
I agree. I think this going to be the year where we’re going to see a lot about that sort of thing; people rallying against what the leading edge of the industry is pulling us towards.
CHUCK:
[Crosstalk] I completely agree.
WARD:
Meanwhile, while they're ranting, things will actually be getting better because that is actually one of the trans of 2015 that I expect to see continuing. At the beginning of the year, the tool change were really in a rough [inaudible]. The rest of these were putting things together were really in a rough [inaudible]. But as the year ended and the New Year has begun, I’m seeing more and more CLIs that seemed to hold things together. I’ve seen more and more of the sequence of things that you have to do being encapsulated and useful tools bring them together. I suspect that the ability to put together applications of this nature is going to be easier in 2016, by far than it ever was before.
JOHN:
You know where this is all going to lead to as well. Everybody’s going to be bashing JavaScript this year, I think. I really believe that because while all the different JavaScript factions are talking about who’s thing is better than somebody else’s thing, the people who aren’t in the JavaScript are starting to think about how – what a mess we live in today with this world. So I think we should all take stock and go – state we’re in right now with the web and how it is a lot better and how the tooling is getting better. I think it will improve more this year. It’s wonderful that we have great choices like Angular 2 and React because there are people out there who are going to take advantage of it.
I really think there’s – as developers, we spend way too much time thrashing each other instead of trying to improve things.
CHUCK:
So I have a prediction for this next year. I think that we are going to see a much larger contingent of mobile developers using technologies like JavaScript and Angular to build up mobile applications with the native options that we have out there like Angular and [inaudible] and friends.
JOHN:
I think that’s pretty bold. I don’t see that personally. I would love to see that but I don’t see it.
WARD:
It could be like nuclear power, like fusion. It’s five years away and always will be. [Chuckles]
CHUCK:
I’ve been talking to a lot of people that seem really excited and gung-ho about the technology and I think it’s something that really could take off.
WARD:
For me, one of the biggest obstacles to that – to what you were just describing is not technological. To me, the biggest obstacle is finding a reason to write mobile apps. I look at [chuckles]. I am dead serious. Look at what stands for innovation and mobile apps today. How many more survey or chat apps or whatever do we need? Particularly when you give – given that – you can’t take any more Facebooks and stuff like that. When we look at what businesses want to do, how many fit into a mobile form factor? Because most developers – most people who are getting paid to develop work for businesses. They're not creating these new consumer facing apps.
I may be a grumpy Gus here but to me, it’s like, look around. You talk to clients and they talk about how they're supposed to be in the mold but not one of them has a clue what it is they want to build. So it’s kind of hard to get a mobile movement going if you don’t have the application ideas to go with it.
CHUCK:
I guess we’ll just have to see. You're talking to different people than I am. Yeah, but Chuck, bring them on. What are the paradigms we’re missing? What are the opportunities that are missing? Do you have a few – for example, can you go beyond that [inaudible] of say, “And these are the kinds of mobile apps that I think we’ll be seeing in 2016?”
CHUCK:
Well, the thing is what we’re seeing is we’re seeing a lot more people taking advantage of basically being able to build native-type applications using – taking advantage of JavaScriptCore and the JavaScriptBridge. I’ve talked to several mobile developers; I should bring somebody on to talk about JavaScriptCore maybe on JavaScript Jabber, not necessarily on this show since it’s a level up from Angular. At the same time, that’s what NativeScript’s taking advantage of; that’s what React Native’s taking advantage of and that’s what [inaudible] is taking advantage of. I’ve never heard of it until we did the show. But there are so many options and so many great things going on with that that it’s going to be the same kind of application that you’re seeing written for other things. The only difference is that the logic is going to be implemented in JavaScript instead of in Objective-C or Swift or Java.
WARD:
I’m with you. I[‘m feeling you on the technology shifting such that it becomes viable to build applications in JavaScript on mobile devices that you would otherwise have to have written in Native. I’m really calling focusing the spotlight on a different thing which is that I don’t know that we know what to build on these mobile platforms.
CHUCK:
Yeah. Also the business is that I see actually building mobile apps. It tends to come down to taking advantage of either APIs that allow you to be a little bit more aggressive in getting people’s attention or just having an icon on the launch screen. I can definitely see that; a lot of companies just want to be present in the app store. So we see a lot of that and it has some basic or seen some more advanced functionality from the device that you can’t get going over the web. Mostly that’s just offline and so there are a lot of applications that you need regardless of whether you’re online or not.
However, a lot of them require you to be online on those functional mobile page; it’s good enough. At the same time, people then have to launch the page or launch the browser and then browse to the page as opposed to just tapping an icon and having a do instinct.
It reduces friction basically is what I’m saying. It gives you a presence on the phone, the phone gives you some opportunities that you don’t otherwise get. One example of this is that there is a mobile API on iOS that if you have an application in the app store, you can actually basically set up meta tags on your webpage. Apple has a crawler that when you swipe down on the home screen, it will actually search your website as well or their index of your website as well as the actual app. So there are some advantages to being on the mobile device beyond just having a presence on the launch screen. But then again, being on the launch screen reduces the friction that it takes to get to the application in the first place.
JOHN:
I’m going to change topics on both of you guys. I want to throw up something controversial. I would like everybody on this show to take their best prediction on when Angular 2 will go live this year. [Chuckles]
CHUCK:
Best prediction without going over or just best prediction?
JOHN:
Just best prediction. When it comes out, we’ll see who is right or wrong because none of us in this call actually know so let’s just take a stand. When do you think it’s going to go golden release?
Lukas, let’s start with you. Just because I can.
LUKAS:
I’m going straight down the middle; I’m going with June.
JOHN:
How do you know that’s down the middle? Yeah. Middle of what?
CHUCK:
The year, I guess.
LUKAS:
Yeah.
JOHN:
Ah.
LUKAS:
April, May, June. Six [inaudible].
JOHN:
So June 30 if you're picking?
LUKAS:
Some time in June. June 15th we’re going to be.
JOHN:
I’m going to pick May 4th [chuckles].
LUKAS:
I’m hoping.
CHUCK:
Pulled that one right out of the air, did you?
JOHN:
May the fourth be with you, and something else might be happening that same week.
JOE:
There might be something else happening that same week. A reason for it to come out.
CHUCK:
So I have a prediction based on that thing, that week of May 4th. They were trying to get the beta out for AngularConnect and they didn’t do it, and they overshot it by two months. So I’m going to say that it’s going to come out in the middle of July.
JOHN:
May 4th, just for folks who may not be aware is ng-conf. Joe’s big conference, right? I’m assuming it’s going to come out then but you might be right, Charles. Maybe they will oversee it [crosstalk].
WARD:
Charles hit my number. My first one would’ve been June but then when that was taken, I would’ve taken July. I know nothing; we all agree we have no insight into this, a real insight into this.
CHUCK:
Even if you have the list of things that they need to fix and you take into account the other things that are come up, there’s still no way of knowing how long it’s going to take to fix those problems.
WARD:
Right. We know it is being used in production apps. So this is clear; Angular 2 will be used in production apps whether it’s in beta or whether it’s in full release. That will simply happen. But yeah, if I can’t have June and I can’t have July, I’m leaning to August then. And that’s a shame; I would rather be something earlier, but I think it’s hard. And I think that it won’t – on the other hand, I don’t think it will matter that much because I think people will start building production apps much sooner.
JOE:
Alright. I want to take for my date, April 1st. [Chuckles]
WARD:
Alright.
CHUCK:
And then when are they going to really release it? [Chuckles] It’s out! Oh, never mind.
JOHN:
In all seriousness, that would really suck. Releasing a framework on April Fool’s Day? What a joke!
CHUCK:
My brother doesn’t do anything serious at all. So when his first child was born on April 1st, he sent out, “She’s here. She weighs this much, she’s this long,” and everybody sent back, “Yeah right.” [Chuckles]
JOE:
Cried wolf one too many times, huh?
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JOHN:
Alright, so Joe was April, I was May. Who was June, was that? Lukas?
LUKAS:
It’s me.
JOHN:
Charles is July and Ward is August. So nobody thinks it’s going to go later than August? Let’s turn it around. Can you guys think or will you be shocked if it was [inaudible] in August?
CHUCK:
Not terribly. Oh, did that [inaudible] that out loud? [Chuckles]
JOHN:
I actually would be. I’m looking at the state that it’s in now, I think – I hope I don’t cause predictions to come true – I’d be shocked if this thing didn’t get out there at least in one of those timeframes we just talked about.
WARD:
Yeah, I think it’s about polish, right? Again, after I kept coming back to it, you can use it in production now. You don’t have to know too much but there’s so much that goes into a product that isn’t just a technology. It has to do with the packaging and the tooling, all the documentation and all the things that really make for a solid product and I think that they really want it to be polished, that’s why I’m leaning later rather than earlier because polish takes time. Of course, it could have to do with competitive pressures, too, right? We don’t know if some other framework really starts to take off then that can change the drill.
CHUCK:
The other thing is they have pretty consistently done this where they’re saying, “We want to be at this point by this conference or this Google event or this date,” and they almost always overshoot it, which I’m not angry about. I’m just saying that it seems to me that that’s the reality.
WARD:
Yeah, they're not like Microsoft which says by God we’re going to deliver it and [inaudible] whether it’s useable or not.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JOE:
I’ve seen that beta tend to be very – they don’t care too much about competitive pressures so I don’t know but I feel that’s going to make much of a difference to them/
CHUCK:
I agree.
JOHN:
I think they're trying to do the right thing [crosstalk] which I think is the right thing to do as odd as it says but yeah.
JOE:
Yeah. They seem to be a little bit more like Blizzard than Electronic Arts.
CHUCK:
I like that though, doing the right thing is the right thing.
WARD:
The problem with doing the right thing all the time is that you don’t release. I’ve seen that happen in a number of places but Microsoft resist that, too. They – you have somebody who draws out a plan for two or three years – you can’t do that. You have to [crosstalk].
JOHN:
Doing the right thing doesn’t mean make it perfect, right?
WARD:
Right. Part of the ideal release is you say, “This is the feature set, this is a released one and we’re going to deliver that and it has to be a reasonable timeframe. It has to be this year.”
JOHN:
I also think that this is year is going to be the year where people will stop worrying about transpolation and that they will really jump on board with it. Not only for ES 2015 but for ES 2016, using tools like Babel and TypeScript.
JOE:
I predict this is the year that people will finally – well not finally. I believe this is the year that people will stop using the words ES 2015 and 16. I revolt against that stupid idea. [Chuckles]
JOHN:
It’s so hard to remember, isn’t it? What are we on now? Give me a version number, man.
WARD:
Yeah. That’s a good one, Joe. I would put money on you on that.
JOHN:
I have to pause and think about it every time I say it. ES – oh, God. What version is it?
WARD:
Particularly since there’s ES 5. You got to go ES 5, 4. ES 5 and ES 2015? No.
JOHN:
Yeah.
WARD:
Do you think they’ll actually – here’s the question. The reason I started to do that was because they wanted to start having a release every year. Does anybody think that ES 7 is going to release in 2016?
JOHN:
That’s a – I would be surprised if it did. Just based upon the history of what they’ve done, are they really going to come out with a yearly release?
CHUCK:
The other thing is that ES 6 or ES 5 to ES 6 – huge leap. They keep saying, “Well, ES 6 to ES 7 are –“ 15-16 I think are the right years. They keep saying, “That’s not going to be as big of a release,” but it’s going to take the browser and other JavaScript engine vendors years to move to ES 6. I just – I don’t know.
JOHN:
Yeah. I also think this is going to be the year that bootstrap starts taking a backseat to other kinds of libraries. I think something else will come out, something we’ve probably haven’t talked about yet and having thought about. I think there’s going to be a really awesome CSS framework coming out this year and I’m not talking Angular Material. I’d love it if it was Angular Material; I think that’s just phenomenal and we’re looking forward to that with Angular 2, but I think there’s going to be something else.
JOE:
As opposed to CSS.
JOHN:
Yeah. It could be any of the ones that are already there that just gets bigger or could be something all new.
JOE:
I think the other thing that [inaudible] me about 2015 was inline styles becoming popular. React has this motif for everything in inline styles, right? You can just sort out an object with what your style should be for the dom object and they’ll just go inline. You don’t have to worry about conflicts anymore and cascading conflicts.
WARD:
Hey John, didn’t you have a pal, a colleague who said that inline styles are security risks?
JOHN:
I don’t recall that.
WARD:
I do.
JOHN:
Of course, I didn’t quite understand it. [Laughter]
WARD:
Because I was asking [inaudible] explain it, but somewhere you heard that it was. God, inline styles are ugly to look at though, aren’t they?
CHUCK:
Yeah.
WARD:
So Joe, curiously, why do you think that’s going to be a big medicine?
JOE:
I don’t think it’s going to be a good medicine. I think it surprised me that it has been as big as it is. I don’t know that I – I think that it’s not going to be big medicine; I just was surprised that inline styles in [inaudible] but I do see how inline styles actually solve a big problem, that is, cascading style sheets suck. I hate them. The cascading part of it is one of the parts that’s the worst, but without a system in place to – the idea that hey, the framework will figure out what you need where and then just put it in line for you. But since it’s JavaScript, it doesn’t put the page. It’s the JavaScript that’s throwing it in line so your pages are getting gloated with a whole bunch of styles that has to be downloaded that turns your page sites from 20K to 100K. I guess it’s a very interesting solution.
CHUCK:
So it has management for styles, it’s just – it’s inserting them in line instead of loading another set or asset [crosstalk].
JOE:
Right. Exactly. It has all the same manager features. A lot of people that are using it are really getting happy with it. I don’t have a strong opinion about it because I really haven’t done it much but I think it’s just an interesting solution and it certainly blindsided me.
JOHN:
Let’s play a little bit of buzzword Rango criminate and just take a couple of hot topics and you guys shout out where do you think these things are going to go – up in tread or down in trend this next year. You guys game for this?
JOE:
I’m game.
LUKAS:
Sure.
JOHN:
Alright. Let’s start with an easy one. Containers.
JOE:
Up.
WARD:
Up.
CHUCK:
I’m not sure what you mean by containers.
WARD:
Docker and the light [crosstalk].
LUKAS:
Docker. It’s [crosstalk] up, up, up.
CHUCK:
Up.
LUKAS:
Up.
JOHN:
Alright, there was the easy brawl. How about NOSQL databases?
CHUCK:
I think they're going to hold. I think they're going to stay about where they are. I think the people who have adopted them and know where the problems are and then unadopted them are going to go – they’re going to stay where they are and the people who love them are going to stick with them.
JOE:
I’m going to say continue up. They're going to get more popular.
JOHN:
I would say up as well I think seeing more and more of it and hearing more of it and these places ii never heard about before. What about Java?
JOE:
Is that a buzzword? [Laughter]
WARD:
Yeah, it’ll continue to dominate the number – the charts of how many programmers are there and where the drops are but it’s not going to garner any excitement.
LUKAS:
Flat.
JOE:
Yeah, I’ll go flat.
CHUCK:
It’s not going to move in any significant way.
JOE:
It’s too big to move.
JOHN:
I’d say flat but if I had to force to pick up or down, I would actually say down but not a lot.
CHUCK:
No.
WARD:
Alright, I’ll throw one out there at the same category. Ruby?
JOHN:
Down. Decline.
LUKAS:
Down.
CHUCK:
I think it’s going to hold about the same. Maybe go up a little.
JOE:
Says the only guy who has any knowledge of Ruby. [Laughter]
CHUCK:
The thing is that – so if you're talking percentage market share, it will go down. However, the size of the community has continued to grow subtly.
WARD:
That mean that the entire pie of developers has gotten bigger, too?
CHUCK:
Yes.
WARD:
Wow. Where are they coming from?
LUKAS:
PHP. [Chuckles]
CHUCK:
Among other things.
JOHN:
PHP; what do you guys think about that one?
WARD:
It’s got nowhere to go but down. [Chuckles]
LUKAS:
Well, I don’t know. The new PHP is – I don’t know a lot about it but it’s a pretty significant update and I know there’s actually some pretty passionate PHP developers.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
LUKAS:
Out there and a lot of the stuff that you find in Rails and these hot frameworks, there are PHP analogues and I think that – I think it will continue to – I think it will decline but I don’t think it’s going to precipitously drop off especially with the new PHP.
JOE:
So I will say that this recent announcement that the future of WordPress is in JavaScript will have a significant effect on PHP.
CHUCK:
Yes.
JOHN:
For those who don’t know that, that’s huge that the WordPress folks [inaudible] said, “Basically, we’re going to write the next version of this with JavaScript.”
JOE:
I’m involved in a WordPress conference and JavaScript is going to be a hot topic for it.
CHUCK:
Yup. I want to go back really quickly. Maybe I can throw a word out and you guys could say whether it’ll go up and down. I know we talked about it, but bootcamps or coding camps?
JOE:
Up.
LUKAS:
Up.
JOHN:
I think both are going up. Code camps and bootcamp workshops.
CHUCK:
Yeah. The thing is that that’s where some of the new developers are coming from, but also, there’s
so much information out there now to where I’ve talked to any number of people who are selftaught over the last year or two or three depending on how much time they have to commit to it and how quickly they picked it up. They’re coming in to the profession now and they’re picking up a significant portion of things. So a lot of them that I talk to – of course, my sample size’s probably biased. I’d say the majority of them are picking up JavaScript, the next majority of them are picking up Ruby.
I hear a lot about Python as well but that’s where I see a lot of people coming in and so I think all of those communities are going to grow. I think they're also going to have a lot of the same growing pains that we see in some of the larger communities.
WARD:
Going back to bootcamps, I think we’re going to see even more experimentation on that formula of bootcamps because I think people are starting to see that a three-month bootcamp only work for the top few percent of people that go into them. As much as you can create a business that operates by people paying you money for something that you promise and then not deliver very well in that promise, why don’t you just move through a lot of people and promise them things, that businesses that actually do deliver are going to do significantly better. I think we’re going to see a lot more experimentation. We’re not going to see – we’re going to see more bootcamps that are different than just three months.
We’ve already got Bock.io which is online only – not only, they’re online and there’s the one Thinkster [crosstalk].
CHUCK:
Thinkful.
JOE:
Thinkful, there you go.
CHUCK:
They're pretty similar.
JOE:
Yeah, very similar, these online ones. I think we’ll see even more experimentation on this. I hope that we see some bootcamps that are six months long and do a better job at taking people from zero to sixty and getting them jobs.
CHUCK:
I’ve seen a few that are six months and they definitely tend to place better. They also tend to put out people who are more job-ready. It’s not just because they have more time to teach them more technology; they have more time to teach them the skills that they need to actually excel in the job.
So Git and other technologies as well has had a work in the team and things like that.
JOE:
Right. Yeah, I think that – and I really hope that we do because we need this. The University system sucks and it’s only getting worst. It’s a terrible way to get into programming; it just so happens to be that it’s one of the only railways to get into programming and bootcamps are finally coming out as a real alternative. I really hope that we see a major shift there because Universities are terrible overall.
CHUCK:
On that same count then, it seems like going through a four-year degree, getting your Computer Science degree or something related, and then applying to a coding job, it’s a much better bet. They have much better placement rates. Of course, you’re in for four years instead of six months, but do you think that’s going to flip flop or you're going to have a better chance getting in off of one of these bootcamps or being self-taught than getting in off of a college degree?
JOE:
I wouldn’t be surprised because I do think there are still a reasonable number of people that are coming out of CS degrees and not getting jobs and going in to something else.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JOE:
Because we are an industry that doesn’t care if you have a degree. We are an industry that cares what you can do and that’s what’s great about this industry, one of my favorite things about it.
LUKAS:
At the same time, I would be shocked if somebody with any kind of pedigree or skills could not find a job in this industry. I read an article today that there’s going to be two million programming jobs that are not going to be filled in 2016 because we don’t have the resources to do that. If somebody’s even mildly competent, they can get a job.
JOE:
Right. [Crosstalk]
CHUCK:
You still have things that you need people to be able to do and it’s expensive to teach them on the job. I think that will become more true but I don’t think it’s going to be completely true.
WARD:
Does any – I guess I don’t know because I didn’t go to CS – I never got a CS degree but I wouldn’t have – if I have to go to the University and going for a four-year degree, I’d be really thinking about – recommendation is there to get a well-routed education in which we have a major in CS, not as a job factory. And if you're going to make CS your major, I would like to think that you are going there because you’re going there because you’re really interested in Computer Science, not because you thought that that was the best way to get a job.
I don’t think of CS as a professional training – job training so much as it is a degree in a subject matter of great intellectual interest, but is that not how it’s played?
JOHN:
I don’t think that’s not how it’s played. I think there are definitely people who go into that and for that purpose, it is great. If you go and you are interested in Computer Science, then Universities are a great place to go.
WARD:
Yeah. You’re not going to get that at a bootcamp because they're not teaching you Computer Science; they're teaching you how to do it.
JOE:
Although Block.io now has – they call it a software for an engineering degree, but it’s a lot more like Computer Science. They may not have like a compiler’s class but a lot more the stuff that you might consider to be closely related to Computer Science.
We might see some other variances on that, but I think you’re still right that you shouldn’t look at a CS degree first and foremost as a job training as much as it is the opportunity to study. But I think that’s also a problem across Universities. Many Universities are only trying to make it – job training and then they do a terrible job, but then you get people to go into a CS degree. I’m going to pick Evan Czaplicki as my example for this; he went in, got a CS degree and while he was at it, he wrote Elm.
Now regardless of your opinion on Elm, he’s made a major contribution to the industry because he wrote an entirely new way – he had a new paradigm, he figured it out and put it together, and it’s something that nobody else has done. We really wouldn’t have had that if he hadn’t decided to go to school. So that was a great benefit of him going to the University; it’s just not the right place for most people to go if you want to go get into Java programming.
CHUCK:
Yeah. I can tell you that the University that I attended – my degree’s in Computer Engineering so I was over with the Electrical Engineering nerds, but that’s why where they sold their Computer Science program was a great place to go if you wanted to get a job as a programmer or you wanted to go in the Academia and get your PhD.
JOE:
Well it’s hard to go in there and say – these Universities, they're trying to attract students. So what are they going to do? They’re going to align the fact that, “Hey, there’s two million jobs. Do you want to fill in those two million jobs that are paying higher than just, on average, than most other disciplines?” Certainly, nothing else that you can get – very few things you can get a four-year degree on average pay as well.
CHUCK:
Yup.
JOE:
So they need to recruit. They're constantly going up; of course, they're turning themselves into day spas with masseuses and all that sort of thing as well.
CHUCK:
Yeah, let’s not go into that.
JOE:
The reason why their costs are sky rocketing. They need that. It’s pure economics. They're an organization that needs to survive so they're going to pander to whatever they can do to survive.
Sorry, if you haven’t – we can’t tell. I have a furry little opinion in general University system.
CHUCK:
Yup. So I want to throw one more thing out there. I was talking to AJ O’Neal from JavaScript Jabber the other day and he mentioned that he thought everyone was going to revolt on ES 6 itself and force the industry back to ES 5, then make reasonable changes to ES 5 instead of overhauling it.
Now I disagree with him. I think things are going to move ahead in the direction they're heading, but I definitely see a contingent of people out there, wishing that they could stay on ES 5. I would love to hear your thoughts on it though.
WARD:
I want to take his money. Is he willing to put money up on that one? [Chuckles] Because that’s a sure loser. Of course, I was the one who went for the 1.5 billion and they [inaudible]. I could be wrong.
LUKAS:
The thing is, if you spend any time in an enterprise environment, whether it’s JavaScript or .net, ES 5 is really weird and quirky to those kind of developers. At the same time, it’s a very – it’s a large majority but they're not vocal. My experience is 100%, when I’m showing them ES 6 and more importantly TypeScript, they're eyes light up and they get it.
WARD:
Exactly.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
LUKAS:
So I think that you're going to see a lot of ES 5 jQuery types like, “Oh, this is hard. Ugh.” But once you start showing enterprise line of business, app developers – stuff that they are familiar with and that they build a lot of apps on already, in those constructs, they're just going to gravitate towards it and they're going to start taking JavaScript as a platform seriously. So I 110% disagree with that opinion.
WARD:
Yeah. This is a no brainer. He’s wrong.
CHUCK:
Okay. The other one that I want to just quickly get your opinion on and then we’ll wrap up is web assembly. Is that going to come out this next year and is it going to become a thing? Or is it just a nice idea that may someday get some attention implemented?
WARD:
I had a good [inaudible], particularly when there are so many better ways to get improved performance. Web workers and things like that, that’s the way in which people are going to improve performance for their applications.
JOE:
Alright. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s going to take off not because I have any idea that it will, just because it’s more interesting if one of us goes out on a limb on this.
LUKAS:
You’re dumb.
JOE:
Yup. [Chuckles] And that way if it does, then I can say [crosstalk].
WARD:
You’d look like a genius.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JOE:
And if it doesn’t, then I can say, “Well, I didn’t really think that it was going to happen but I just wanted to play the odds.”
LUKAS:
I was being sarcastic, bro.
JOE:
Just wanted to be wild. Yeah, sarcasm. Couldn’t you tell I was being sarcastic?
CHUCK:
I can edit that together and make it say whatever I want. Thank you, Joe. [Chuckles]
JOE:
Don’t edit this together to make it sound like I murdered my brother.
WARD:
You got the phrase right there, Charles. You got the confession. It was there. It’s done. Send in the cops.
CHUCK:
Alright, let’s go ahead and do some picks. Ward Bell, you want to start us off with picks?
WARD:
I saw a movie that is so much better than Star Wars.
JOE:
Star Wars? You’re talking about [crosstalk] Star Wars? Because Star Wars, nothing is better than Star Wars.
WARD:
It’s so much better.
JOHN:
He’s trying to say Star Wars 7 but [inaudible] Star Wars 6.
CHUCK:
That’s right.
WARD:
I’m saying I saw Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s hard to figure out how to merchandise that. I got to give [chuckles]. It’s not like you're going to have a whole lot of figurines with that stuff.
JOE:
Their cards are really cool but I don’t think I’d buy models of them for my 8-year old son.
WARD:
Yeah, exactly. I don’t think you're going to have a lot of pictures of skinhead kids with black eyes. But the movie was so much more exciting, so much more entertaining that – it made Star Wars look like a daytime soap. [Chuckles]
LUKAS:
That was frightening words.
WARD:
Which by the way, none other than George Lucas described Star Wars from beginning to end as a soap opera which I think pretty much says it all. But I digress. My pick is Fury Road for those who are action movie inclined.
CHUCK:
Alright. Lukas, what are your picks?
LUKAS:
My pick this week is a song that I’ve actually been really digging on. It’s just so hype and it’s called Key Engine by Luca Sestak. He’s just this young, German kid who plays boogie woogie piano and the song is off the hook. Check out the link in the show notes. It’s a great video of him doing it as a live performance.
CHUCK:
Alright. Joe, what are your picks?
JOE:
I saw this movie that was so amazing. I’ve got to tell you; it was action packed. It was so much better. [Laughter] It’s called Star Wars Episode 7.
WARD:
Never heard of it.
JOE:
From start to finish, it was non-stop, amazing fun action – the most fun I’ve had at the movie theater all year. It was an amazingly enough better than this other really awesome movie called Mad Max which I also saw which I loved, but it was even more fun. So I’m going to pick that as my first pick. [Chuckles]
JOHN:
I predict that for this year, we will all continue to make fun of Ward about Star Wars. [Laughter]
JOE:
And I predict that it will not bother him one bit and [crosstalk].
WARD:
It won’t.
JOE:
Every bit as good as it gets.
JOHN:
In fact, he would give it back even more. [Chuckles]
JOE:
Yeah.
CHUCK:
Yup.
JOE:
Ward is not the kind of guy that backs down from a challenge. If you’ve ever seen him ask important question that a presenter [chuckles].
CHUCK:
[Crosstalk] Well on the show.
JOE:
So I’m just going to pick Star Wars again. Then while I’m at it, I’m going to pick littleBits which are little snap together magnetic circuitry that you can buy little kits of and then build things with, these little builders-type kit.
I have an 11-year old son. We’ve been – I’ve blown 280 bucks now on their kits. I bought the Arduino Kit which has a few pieces plus the Arduino piece. Then I bought their basic $200 kit which has a bunch of more pieces. And we built this remote control car that he absolutely loves way more than the really cool remote control cars that he might have access to because he built it himself. We only need one more power supply and then he can give it a horn.
That’s crazy because there’s these two levers. To make it go forward, you have to put one lever all the way down, the other lever all the way up. [Chuckles] For some reason, the polarity is reversed when – the way that it transfers wirelessly. But it has this wireless transmitter piece that came with it, so you put that in, you put the power in; hook them up to wheels. We took a little bit of – not glue, but the sticky glue pieces that – these little sticky pieces that they have, like poster sticky.
We put – take some of those Legos and give it to make the car part have other wheels. He’s just been having absolute blast and it’s been so cool playing around with that so I want to pick littleBits because it’s been amazing and a great thing to have. I’ve really had a lot of fun playing with my son. Those are my picks.
CHUCK:
Alright.
JOE:
Oh, by the way, the CFP for ng-conf is out so go submit to talk.
CHUCK:
Okay, I will.
JOHN:
I’m going to submit a talk at ng-conf, Joe. Just [inaudible], I’ll give you a heads up. It’s going to be about how awesome Star Wars is. [Chuckles]
JOE:
It already has my vote.
LUKAS:
You're in.
WARD:
That’s brutal. We will not be attending that session. [Crosstalk]
CHUCK:
I thought it was a single track.
JOHN:
It’s got to be the Keynote just so you’ll have to be there.
WARD:
Right.
CHUCK:
Is it multi-track this year?
JOE:
No, it’s single track. Although there’s a day in the middle. Instead of two days we’ve done on the previous one, we’ll have three days. There’s a day in the middle which will be not so much multitrack but just a lot of stuff going on that’s called [inaudible] and there’s tons of stuff going on, all of it going on simultaneously. Not all that, but lots of things going on simultaneously and you could choose what you want to go do.
CHUCK:
Awesome. John, I think we’re still waiting on picks.
JOHN:
I pick something non-technical. I have been enjoying spending a lot of time with my little girls and my boy lately. Sometimes I work too hard, I bet you guys do, too. It’s good to just step back once in a while and spend a little time with your family and the whole reason we do this.
CHUCK:
Yeah, I got a bad case of that.
WARD:
And then you wouldn’t take them to Star Wars and ruin the whole thing.
CHUCK:
I took them to Star Wars and then I took my wife to Star Wars, and then I took my father-in-law to Star Wars. I’m doing well. I’ve got a few picks here myself.
The first one that I’m going to pick is – I’ve been playing with this for a while. Clash of Clans; if you want to find me on Clash of Clans, I’m cmaxw. I’m playing on my phone and I just enjoy it. Nice thing to do, nice fun thing to have.
One other thing that I want to point out is that I do have other conferences this year. If you're interested, for example, freelancing, Ruby, iOS or React, those are coming up within the first half of this year so go check those out. I think I’ve also got a Git conference in there.
I’ve also been playing around with Swarm Simulator. That’s swarmsim.github.io which is fun so I’m going to pick that as well.
Finally, I went to CES last week and there was a lot of cool stuff there and I’m really curious to see what we’re going to be able to do with programming as far as the internet of things over the next year. They had smart shirts and smart pants, smart shoes and smart socks and smart – I have a zillion smart watches but that’s kind of old news. I don’t know that any of this is going to come out anytime soon, but it’s definitely interesting to look at. There are also all the smart home stuff and things like that. 3D printer; it was way cool. So if you're in the industry which. As programmers, they count us as part of the industry, you can get a ticket and go. You can get your ticket – you want to get your hotel room early because it fills up. Yeah, then let me know that you're going and we’ll hang out in Las Vegas for a while. Yeah, I’m going to pick that.
I’m also going to pick The Venetian Hotel just because it’s really cool. It reminded me a little bit of Venice. I do have one beef though; they have St. Mark’s Square and the reason they call it St. Mark’s Square is because they have the big cathedral, St. Mark’s cathedral and The Venetian left that off. But anyway, really fun. Really cool.
Anyway, kind of all over the place with my picks but that’s kind of where I’ve been at. I also want to plus one John’s pick because I’ve been going out of my way to spend more time with my kids and it really does come down to that that’s why we do this.
Anyway, I don’t think there’s anything else. Is there anything else you want to share with us about ng-conf, Joe, before we wrap up?
JOE:
No. the CFP’s definitely the big news right now. So hopefully, if you haven’t got a ticket, that’s probably your best shot for getting in is to get accepted as a speaker. If that doesn’t work, you can maybe find one of the couple of Easter egg tickets. They're hidden on the internet. Or your company to sponsor; information about that’s on the website as well. But it should be lots of fun. 1,400 of your best Angular friends all hanging out together for three days, as many as five days depending on if you go to workshops and stay after for some fun at the amusement park.
CHUCK:
Awesome. Alright, we’ll go ahead and wrap up the show. May the force be with you and we’ll catch you all next week.
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CHUCK:
Updates to the system.
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CHUCK:
Hey everybody and welcome to episode 77 of the Adventures in Angular Show. This week on our panel we have Joe Eames.
JOE:
Hey everybody.
CHUCK:
John Papa.
JOHN:
May the force be with you.
CHUCK:
Lukas Reubbelke.
LUKAS:
Hey everybody.
CHUCK:
Ward Bell.
WARD:
Hi everyone! Ready, oh!
CHUCK:
I’m Charles Max Wood from Devchat.tv. Quick shout-out for Freelance Remote Conf. It’s too late for JS Remote Conf. Angular Remote Conf will be later in the year. This week, we’re going to be talking about 2015 and 2016 and what’s coming in the Angular World and what has come in the Angular world.
So 2015; I remember the beginning of the year, we were still in the throes of dealing with the RIP stuff from 2014.
WARD:
Dun, dun, dun, dun.
CHUCK:
And everybody was freaked out about Angular not being so Angular anymore.
JOHN:
That was awful.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JOHN:
That was awful. There was no better way to say that, right? So what was 2015 for everybody? It was the year of the Angular tombstones and the reboot with Angular 2.
CHUCK:
Yup.
JOHN:
We all had to get to speed and learn this. We had some great podcasts on what the heck is it, what should we be learning and – what about all the stuff around it? I don’t know about you guys, but I dove into typescript harder last year, deeper last year than I’ve ever done before.
CHUCK:
Yeah, I remember that and the announcement, too, the whole typescript announcement at ng-conf and our discussion about that. I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to dig in to it as much as I like.
JOHN:
I think it’s funny. There’s things that we thought last year would be big. We all knew Angular 2 could be big last year because they’re working on it and get it moving. But I don’t think going into the year, any of us thought that typescript would be as big as it was last year. Then things kind of came out of nowhere. We’re getting pretty hot, too, in my mind; things like reactive extension started getting a lot of steam in the second half of last year. As well as things like React, obviously, was the big year for them as well.
CHUCK:
Yeah, a lot of movement in React. We did several React episodes on JavaScript Jabber and five of them are five of the top 20 episodes that we’ve ever had on JavaScript Jabber, so React took off in a big way.
JOHN:
I was looking the other day at Pluralsight and they had over 70 courses that were related to Angular 1. Not entirely Angular 1 in some ways but basically a large portion dedicated to Angular 1 up on their library. [Crosstalk]
WARD:
And they had no React courses. They had one old one from a year prior to that.
JOHN:
Yeah, and there was very few React courses even still right there, and everybody’s perspective author for Pluralsight. Huge app [inaudible], right, because React is hot.
WARD:
Well no, it’s not. It was hot in 2015 but it’s going to disappear. [Chuckles] That’s just me predicting but we haven’t got to our predictions.
JOHN:
Right. You look back and see what was there and what was big, some things are obviously very much predictable that they’d be hot. But honestly, I was kind of surprised to how fast everybody adopted ES – what is it now, 2015? [Chuckles]
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JOHN:
ES 6. A lot of people complained and whined during the year than they last but leading in that direction that are TypeScript. The second half of the year, it seemed like they [inaudible] have to talk about it. People are just like, “Yeah man, I’m using TypeScript. I’m using ES 6.”
CHUCK:
It’s interesting. I think there is a little bit of what is that – I don’t know what the right name for the bias is that’s out there, but the people that I talk to or typically, the people that are active in the community; I don’t know if a lot of the “dark matter developers” are really out there adopting it. The other thing is that I know a lot of people say in the Rails community and other communities that are only adopting some of these because the communities that they’re paying attention to are pushing them that way. For example, they’re getting into React and the React community is adopting some ES 6 stuff or they get into Angular and they start paying attention to TypeScript. But I think a lot of people are still out there doing jQuery Spaghetti in ES 5 and I don’t think they’re going to move until they get pushed off the bench.
JOHN:
Ah. That was me last night, even. I’m going to do an early prediction of 2016. One thing I predict early here is as Angular 2 unfolds – and I think we’re all expecting this year to be released at some point though I don’t really know – when that happens, there’s going to be a big gap and it’s going to be a short term gap but it’s an opportunity for people to develop widgets and libraries and all that ecosystem that Angular 1 needs time to firm up around Angular 2; things like Firebase and all that or Ionic, the animations or Angular Material.
What I spent last night doing, for example, is something everybody who’s in Angular or any new tool in things like Aurelia are going to be doing this year. That’s taking code that was written in things like jQuery or even Angular 1 directives and re-developing those to work themselves into rewriting those into Angular 2 components.
LUKAS:
To jump into that, even as content creators, I’m finding that I’m revisiting some of the stuff that I blogged about in 2015 and re-doing those applications in Angular 2. For instance, I had a series on creating a simple rest web application and I’m going back and doing it in Angular 2and ngRx then I write about that. So revisiting some of my old content and updating it to the new concepts.
WARD:
In 2015 also, some saw some changes in tooling and some migrations. Certainly for me, personally when the big ones was Visual Studio code arrived, it has become my editor of choice displacing Sublime, and to a certain degree for me, WebStorm, although WebStorm remains strong for a number of people. But that came out in – that did come out of nowhere. [Crosstalk]
JOHN:
Really, yeah.
WARD:
And I think the sudden precipitous decline of Bower by the end of the year with everybody saying what they can do with just standard NPM has been interesting.
JOHN:
I think that’s neat, Ward. I bet you if you asked, nine or the ten people you’ve asked – developers – probably don’t know about that. The hottest, latest, coolest new developers are on the leading ends heard the rumblings about Bower going away. Actually, I look at that more as a prediction for 2016.
WARD:
Yeah. Well they should listen to our show more [chuckles] because we know what’s hot and what’s not, right?
JOHN:
Yes.
JOE:
Browserify’s the same thing. I was surprised to see NPM become as popular for front end as it has become, and now Angular 2. Their official delivery channel’s NPM. Feel free to comment on that. [Laughter]
JOHN:
I think you're wrong. You’re wrong, man.
LUKAS:
I haven’t heard that at all.
JOHN:
I go to the browser, I right click, say, view source. I then copy everything and I paste it into a file and press save.
JOE:
I do that, too.
LUKAS:
Pro tip. [Chuckles]
JOHN:
I predicted that [crosstalk].
WARD:
I told you that this year. [Chuckles]
JOHN:
But I think tooling’s a big one, Ward. That’s a good one to hit on because that’s just one of the feature [crosstalk].
WARD:
It’s just a lot in play there. I hear text on Gulp; people talk about how you should do everything in NPM scripts. You know what, we’ve done much more with NPM scripts than ever before and it’s very convenient thing to do. But I’m still finding that there are complex tasks that I wouldn’t know how to do yet as NPM scripts.
I think what you're seeing is people saying, “Enough already with all the choices. Can we just widdle this down?” That would be great but it’s not entirely possible.
JOHN:
I agree. I think the build systems are a great place to look at that with Gulp and Grunt were really, really hot, but then it seems like everybody was like, “You know what, we can do all this in NPM scripts or even webpack or JSPM. I don’t think – my prediction this year is it’s not going to be resolved. I still think there’s going to be many ways you can build and there’s going to be no clear winner.
WARD:
Yeah. I have a feeling that’s true. I also think people stress to – this is an observation. People stress so much on packaging and loading and all that tooling stuff. To me it’s like, “Hey, when are you going to get around and write in that application?” Some of that stuff just sits on the periphery. Give me a formula that can get me developing and then I’m going to wait until somebody comes along and sifts through it but there’s just so much stress about that and I’d rather focus on building that to-do app I’ve always wanted to make.
LUKAS:
I know somebody who can teach you how to do that. [Chuckles] Joe? Joe will help you.
WARD:
Because I want to figure out how many different frameworks I can do it in.
JOHN:
I’m also going to predict that this year, there is going to be a swarm of Angular 2 courses coming out from every one of these providers – the Eggheads, the Pluralsights, the everywhere. I think you're going to be just inundated thee whole industry with Angular 2 learning material. I think that’s going to cost a good thing. A lot of ways to look at it but it’s also [inaudible] cause a bad thing in that. Where are people going to go to get their content? I think you're going to see so much choice that people would be paralyzed by how many ways they can do everything.
WARD:
That’s why they should come here, come to our show; we’ll tell them where to go. Tell them which courses they should listen to [chuckles], who they should listen to, who should they ignore.
JOHN:
And maybe – I predict this year, Ward Bell will author his very first course at one of these different providers.
WARD:
It could happen. It just could happen.
CHUCK:
I thought you already have Pluralsight courses, Ward?
WARD:
I have – is a lot of chatting around once some – what do they call those things, John, up here?
JOHN:
Uh, play with Ward or something like that.
WARD:
Yes, play by play [crosstalk].
CHUCK:
Oh, okay.
WARD:
Which I love doing, by the way. I can’t wait to do some more of those this year. But yeah, I think it’s time to do some video courses.
JOHN:
Yeah. I think there’s a lot of things coming down to play, but last year we saw quite a bit with Angular 1 and learning Angular 2. I think this year, a lot of people are going to be trying to make that migration leap with their skills, not necessarily with the apps but with their skills and figuring out is Angular 2 where they want to play? If so, how do we play that game? But I’m also going to predict that this year is going to be a lot of angst over not having a style guide the day that Angular 2 was released. [Chuckles]
WARD:
Yeah. Well, somebody’s got to do something about that.
CHUCK:
I think I know a guy.
JOHN:
Yeah, I’ve already been getting hate mails from some people of why this is already out, which is kind of funny. There was a great tweep; I think it was Joe Hooks. The other day, somebody asked me about him and Joe replied, “Take your time, John. The reason it –,” [inaudible] of reason – “the reason that the other one was so well-liked is because it was after you built many apps with it based on experience.” Building something like that without actually having Angular 2 finished – I haven’t built many apps in Angular 2 yet. Nobody has. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to say ‘here’s my experience’ when there is none.
CHUCK:
Yeah. I’m wondering a little bit when we talked about some of the things that are coming up. I’ve heard a lot of people saying that they’re leaving Angular for React. Do you think that’s going to continue or do you think that’s going to stabilize now that we have a solid beta, and hopefully, an actual release this year.
JOHN:
I think people will still do React subliminally. I think they're both going to grow this year. That’s my prediction. I think Angular 2 is obviously going to grow. People who love Angular are going to stick with it; I think some new people will come to it as well. I think it’s that good. But the React side, there’s to me two reasons to use React. One, you just really love it and if you do, great, it’s really awesome. The other reason to use it is there’s a small group of loud, vocal people, people like us, who love to go find the hottest, coolest, newest thing and are only happy if they're using the latest thing that’s out.
JOE:
That’s Magpie developers.
JOHN:
Yup! And you know what, React was this year; what’s going to be next year? Maybe it’s the Joe Eames network application. [Chuckles] Maybe it’s Electron; who knows? I’ve been hearing a lot about that app lately.
JOE:
Well, I’ll tell you the minute I see it glinting in the corner of my eye. [Chuckles]
JOHN:
It’ll happen, man. Every [crosstalk].
CHUCK:
Joe.js. You heard it here.
JOE:
Right. I love shiny things. I think it’s the same reason that developers love Apple products. They're shiny.
CHUCK:
The thing is there are a lot of things to like about React and there are a lot of things to like about React that they pulled over into Angular so go try it out. If you like it but you wish it was a little bit more Angular-ish then let the core team know. “Hey, I would really like this feature.”
WARD:
Actually, I’m going to make a bold prediction that there will be no new frameworks of consequence in 2016.
JOHN:
I don’t think it’s that bold because I agree with you.
CHUCK:
I agree, too.
JOHN:
I absolutely agree.
WARD:
I think we have enough to chew on. I think that there are interesting variety of choices out there now. It’s not like – I just wonder who’s going to come along with a truly brand new paradigm because if you look at it, you can start at the bootstrap end which is down the dirty nuts and bolts of super simple lightweight. Then you’ve got these – I guess next scale is React which means you have to plug and play it with other things but it certainly got a good ecosystem and it has a point of view. It has a very clear point of view.
Amber has a really clear point of view about how you should build applications. Angular has a very clear point of view and Aurelia has a clear point of view. If you’ve touched that set there, you kind of covered – it seems to me – the range of ways we approach the problem of building a single page app. Everybody else’s maybe – there are others out there but they just don’t seem to me to be paradigm shifts.
LUKAS:
I want to push back on that just a moment if you don’t mind.
WARD:
Go for it.
LUKAS:
I think one framework that you're going to hear more about is Cycle.js by André Staltz. It’s essentially a new pattern that I never heard of, a model view intent, but it’s more of a functional reactive framework and I have immense respect for André. The stuff that he’s doing around, also programming, observables, et cetera; I think you are going to see that framework get bigger and more [inaudible] share as well as some of the concepts adopted into other frameworks.
WARD:
That’s a good point. I think a thoroughly end to end, front to back reactive approach is a different paradigm so there’s room for that. Paul bets did something like that with Reactive few years back and it disappeared beneath the waves probably because it was too soon, but it should be interesting to see what happens to Cycle.js.
JOE:
Well we can’t mention this without mentioning what, for me, was other big, huge surprise in 2015 and that was Elm.
CHUCK:
Yeah, but that’s a transpiled language more than [crosstalk].
JOE:
Don’t poo-poo that.
CHUCK:
I’m just saying it’s not a framework as much as it is.
JOE:
It’s not a framework but it is a framework at the same time. Sorry, I said it is not a framework. It is a framework at the same time that it’s a transpiled language. You can’t do Elm and not do exactly Elm – Elm is like the pure version of React. Cycle is trying to be more Elm-like than React is. Elm is like the pure version of those things.
WARD:
What’s the traction on that, Joe? Do you have any sense of that?
JOE:
I think it’s the same thing that’s keeping people in React and making people go check out Cycle and that is this whole functional one-way workflow paradigm – state change paradigm is really making people think, “Wow, this is” – I’ve said this before, the functional programming neckbeards have been laughing at us down their noses for years saying, “Huh, you guys don’t even know how to build a maintainable app.” Now, we’re seeing these sort of things come along and I think that’s the attraction; it’s this whole ‘hey, it’s easy for me to understand how my application changes’ and two and a half years later down the road, it’s still easy for me to figure out changes and tests are a secondary part of that.
WARD:
I can’t wait to put a stake in the heart of this whole overreaction [chuckles] but that’s what I predict in 2016 is we’re going to see a lot of people saying, “What? Yeah. So what.”
JOHN:
About what? Sorry. React or reactive?
WARD:
Yeah, the whole reactive so-called functional programming movement. I’m expecting a counter reformation.
JOHN:
Hm. I think that’s amazing because I know you and I especially, we’ve been inundated with reactive programming fans for the last couple of months and it’s pretty cool. I learned a lot about it, you more than I have. I think it’s neat but I also feel in some ways, people are going to swarm to this because it’s the next cool thing that people are starting to gain popularity, but is it really that much better than what we had? I think there’s going to be a push back. I agree.
CHUCK:
In my opinion, a lot of these things go way too far and then dial back. We see this not just in programming; we see it in politics, we see it in Economics, we see it in all of these other areas where people get really gung-ho about something. They go and they explore to the fullest extent then they come back to where it really makes sense.
JOHN:
I had a great friend one time. I taught him – this was years ago so you know how old I am. I taught him how to use stored procedures with SQL server. I left to go away from work for a couple of days and came back. When I came back, he had converted all of our SQL into over 1,000 stored procedures. He was amazed and wonderful, was thrilled. Everything was awesome and then he ran the apps that are in his company and all of a sudden, everything was a lot slower because he had made stored procedures, call stored procedures and call stored procedures all over the place and it was just nuts.
So my lesson from that story I often tell people is just because you learned something new and just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should do it in every single case. I feel that way with React, reactive programming, with Rx, [inaudible] with Angular 2 – just anything you use, you shouldn’t be using the same tool for every single job. You wouldn’t bring a hammer when you need a screwdriver would you?
CHUCK:
And that’s what I tell people a lot when I’m talking to podcast listeners or new programmers is that what you're doing is you're solving problems and you're managing trade-offs for your employer and you just happen to have a skillset that allows you to do that and write the code at the same time. But that’s what makes you an expert is the ability to look at Reactive programming, look at functional programming, look at procedural programming, look at object-oriented programming and be able to take those paradigms and say, “Here are the trade-offs with each one and so I’m going to go with the one that makes the most sense.”
WARD:
I want to say this; I wouldn’t mind being wrong and I know – because I think it would be fascinating that if there was a way for the functional programming movement and reactive programming movement to make serious strides. But it’s not like this haven’t been around for a while and struggled to push aside the existing modalities or even the end of the consciousness.
It just reminds me a little bit of the way we’re all supposed to use Linux on every desktop and it was going to wipe out Windows and [chuckles] because it was so much better and that just never played out. So I’m going to be curious but the good news – whatever good piece in [inaudible] here is that Joe, you're a big fan of that movement and I’m expecting you to show me up in 2016 and make a monkey of me.
JOE:
I hope I can. I will look forward to that.
JOHN:
But I think we should mix in challenges, too, for this year. I challenge people whether it’s for reactive or not, whatever your topic is and you're trying to get it across to people, I challenge everybody to communicate that in a way that shows why. Why for God’s sake is it the right thing to do? I am so tired of listening to people, especially last year. It seems like it was the year of ‘my thing is awesome’. Why? It’s just awesome. Why is it better? It just is.
So I challenge everybody; if you’ve got a great idea or you think your framework’s better or your library’s awesome or you just love Joe Eames, tell us why.
JOE:
That’s such a challenging thing to do.
LUKAS:
No one knows why they love Joe Eames. Not a single person.
JOE:
That is so much more challenging than it sounds like. It’s not just about [inaudible]; just take the time and explain it. Just explaining something well in a realistic census, especially when what you’re trying to explain maybe has to do with topics that are complex. We see this before, the to-do syndrome; whatever makes a to-do app easy to build, everybody gets all excited about it. But we don’t build to-do apps; we build big, huge, complex, a hundred and thousand line apps in this industry and 500,000 line apps occasionally.
We don’t build to-do apps and so the things that make a to-do app cool are not – to a small extent, I think Angular 1 is a perfect example of this. I believe that Angular 1 makes – its to-do apps shines out but we also know that it has some big performance problems and those were never really encountered until people started building 50,000 line apps and 100,000 line apps and now we see Angular 2 as a response to that.
JOHN:
I think you’re right. It is very hard and people aren’t explaining why [inaudible] up because they don’t want to. Maybe they're not the best communicators in some cases; in other cases, maybe they can’t figure out why they like it. Maybe it’s just because they do and that’s okay.
CHUCK:
Right.
JOHN:
Right? Sometimes it’s usually just because we like it better. But I think that when it’s something that’s like, “Hey, here’s a better way of doing it.” For example, doing RxJS over promises for getting data; let’s show some use cases. Show it side by side with the thing you used to do. Start walking through the pros and the cons. Show an unbiased approach and I think you’ll get more people to receive you than if you just say, “Hey, if I code in bullets, it’s so much better than [inaudible.”
CHUCK:
Right.
JOE:
There’s some great examples of the difficulties that – imagine a paradigm that work great for 50,000 line apps but didn’t work great for 1,000 line apps. Well, everybody can see the 1,000 line apps and see that it doesn’t work great for those, but not everybody is going to go through the process of building a 50,000 line app with it.
Another great example I think of that, a concrete one is pair programming. I’ve talked to many people about pair programming who have been very resistant. Managers are often; developers are often, too. Although I think most developers get resistant not because they believe that it’s more productive to program by yourself but because they want the ability to open up the news or sports website and look at it.
I’ve pair programmed for eight hours a day, for weeks on end and I got out of touch with the world because I couldn’t spend my time, my little five-minute breaks opening up whatever website was my favorite website to go check out. I just was working constantly. It was tiring.
But we were more of – in my opinion we were more effective so I told them, “People, I can explain to you why pair programing is more effective but until you come and do it with me for a couple of weeks, you really won’t know.”
JOHN:
Here’s another prediction for this year from me and that is we are going to have a whole [inaudible] of blog posts from people, saying things like, “Angular 2 sucks and React is great.” “React is awful and Aurelia’s wonderful.” “Aurelia’s terrible. Angular 2 is the way to go.”
Those posts are going to just feed memes all over the place, and most of them quite frankly, I’m betting, aren’t going to be based in fact but more so an opinion.
WARD:
I’m hoping to write a couple of those myself. [Laughter] Both pro and con. Expect a ‘React is great, everything else sucks’ post from me and that Angular’s great [inaudible] I expect to write those issues.
JOHN:
Sensationalism sells, man. Sensationalism. [Chuckles]
JOE:
There was a really virulent blog post written just very recently. I [inaudible] do the dignity of talking about it or linking to it because it was mostly a whole – a big, huge rant about how – everything in the last year. It was really complaining about React, about the idea of, “Hey, if you put little pieces together, that sucks. Don’t do a SPA for everything. SPA sucks.” It was just a rant about everything that we considered to be part of modern web development.
One particular guy who was finger pointed at in the article tweeted. He was upset and [inaudible] and read it. Even though he actually makes so many interesting points – I think I’m seeing the first of this, people who are over – well, not overreacting – reacting to different things that changed over the last year. We’ve already seen all this stuff about JavaScript fatigue and the tool chains and all the difficulties that people are having there and just setting up a modern JavaScript application. You can’t just open up a text editor, write some CSS, HTML, JavaScript; open up in your browser, hit refresh and it works. We’ve moved on to a new place where we need a compile step and definitely a lot of reaction to that as well.
I agree. I think this going to be the year where we’re going to see a lot about that sort of thing; people rallying against what the leading edge of the industry is pulling us towards.
CHUCK:
[Crosstalk] I completely agree.
WARD:
Meanwhile, while they're ranting, things will actually be getting better because that is actually one of the trans of 2015 that I expect to see continuing. At the beginning of the year, the tool change were really in a rough [inaudible]. The rest of these were putting things together were really in a rough [inaudible]. But as the year ended and the New Year has begun, I’m seeing more and more CLIs that seemed to hold things together. I’ve seen more and more of the sequence of things that you have to do being encapsulated and useful tools bring them together. I suspect that the ability to put together applications of this nature is going to be easier in 2016, by far than it ever was before.
JOHN:
You know where this is all going to lead to as well. Everybody’s going to be bashing JavaScript this year, I think. I really believe that because while all the different JavaScript factions are talking about who’s thing is better than somebody else’s thing, the people who aren’t in the JavaScript are starting to think about how – what a mess we live in today with this world. So I think we should all take stock and go – state we’re in right now with the web and how it is a lot better and how the tooling is getting better. I think it will improve more this year. It’s wonderful that we have great choices like Angular 2 and React because there are people out there who are going to take advantage of it.
I really think there’s – as developers, we spend way too much time thrashing each other instead of trying to improve things.
CHUCK:
So I have a prediction for this next year. I think that we are going to see a much larger contingent of mobile developers using technologies like JavaScript and Angular to build up mobile applications with the native options that we have out there like Angular and [inaudible] and friends.
JOHN:
I think that’s pretty bold. I don’t see that personally. I would love to see that but I don’t see it.
WARD:
It could be like nuclear power, like fusion. It’s five years away and always will be. [Chuckles]
CHUCK:
I’ve been talking to a lot of people that seem really excited and gung-ho about the technology and I think it’s something that really could take off.
WARD:
For me, one of the biggest obstacles to that – to what you were just describing is not technological. To me, the biggest obstacle is finding a reason to write mobile apps. I look at [chuckles]. I am dead serious. Look at what stands for innovation and mobile apps today. How many more survey or chat apps or whatever do we need? Particularly when you give – given that – you can’t take any more Facebooks and stuff like that. When we look at what businesses want to do, how many fit into a mobile form factor? Because most developers – most people who are getting paid to develop work for businesses. They're not creating these new consumer facing apps.
I may be a grumpy Gus here but to me, it’s like, look around. You talk to clients and they talk about how they're supposed to be in the mold but not one of them has a clue what it is they want to build. So it’s kind of hard to get a mobile movement going if you don’t have the application ideas to go with it.
CHUCK:
I guess we’ll just have to see. You're talking to different people than I am. Yeah, but Chuck, bring them on. What are the paradigms we’re missing? What are the opportunities that are missing? Do you have a few – for example, can you go beyond that [inaudible] of say, “And these are the kinds of mobile apps that I think we’ll be seeing in 2016?”
CHUCK:
Well, the thing is what we’re seeing is we’re seeing a lot more people taking advantage of basically being able to build native-type applications using – taking advantage of JavaScriptCore and the JavaScriptBridge. I’ve talked to several mobile developers; I should bring somebody on to talk about JavaScriptCore maybe on JavaScript Jabber, not necessarily on this show since it’s a level up from Angular. At the same time, that’s what NativeScript’s taking advantage of; that’s what React Native’s taking advantage of and that’s what [inaudible] is taking advantage of. I’ve never heard of it until we did the show. But there are so many options and so many great things going on with that that it’s going to be the same kind of application that you’re seeing written for other things. The only difference is that the logic is going to be implemented in JavaScript instead of in Objective-C or Swift or Java.
WARD:
I’m with you. I[‘m feeling you on the technology shifting such that it becomes viable to build applications in JavaScript on mobile devices that you would otherwise have to have written in Native. I’m really calling focusing the spotlight on a different thing which is that I don’t know that we know what to build on these mobile platforms.
CHUCK:
Yeah. Also the business is that I see actually building mobile apps. It tends to come down to taking advantage of either APIs that allow you to be a little bit more aggressive in getting people’s attention or just having an icon on the launch screen. I can definitely see that; a lot of companies just want to be present in the app store. So we see a lot of that and it has some basic or seen some more advanced functionality from the device that you can’t get going over the web. Mostly that’s just offline and so there are a lot of applications that you need regardless of whether you’re online or not.
However, a lot of them require you to be online on those functional mobile page; it’s good enough. At the same time, people then have to launch the page or launch the browser and then browse to the page as opposed to just tapping an icon and having a do instinct.
It reduces friction basically is what I’m saying. It gives you a presence on the phone, the phone gives you some opportunities that you don’t otherwise get. One example of this is that there is a mobile API on iOS that if you have an application in the app store, you can actually basically set up meta tags on your webpage. Apple has a crawler that when you swipe down on the home screen, it will actually search your website as well or their index of your website as well as the actual app. So there are some advantages to being on the mobile device beyond just having a presence on the launch screen. But then again, being on the launch screen reduces the friction that it takes to get to the application in the first place.
JOHN:
I’m going to change topics on both of you guys. I want to throw up something controversial. I would like everybody on this show to take their best prediction on when Angular 2 will go live this year. [Chuckles]
CHUCK:
Best prediction without going over or just best prediction?
JOHN:
Just best prediction. When it comes out, we’ll see who is right or wrong because none of us in this call actually know so let’s just take a stand. When do you think it’s going to go golden release?
Lukas, let’s start with you. Just because I can.
LUKAS:
I’m going straight down the middle; I’m going with June.
JOHN:
How do you know that’s down the middle? Yeah. Middle of what?
CHUCK:
The year, I guess.
LUKAS:
Yeah.
JOHN:
Ah.
LUKAS:
April, May, June. Six [inaudible].
JOHN:
So June 30 if you're picking?
LUKAS:
Some time in June. June 15th we’re going to be.
JOHN:
I’m going to pick May 4th [chuckles].
LUKAS:
I’m hoping.
CHUCK:
Pulled that one right out of the air, did you?
JOHN:
May the fourth be with you, and something else might be happening that same week.
JOE:
There might be something else happening that same week. A reason for it to come out.
CHUCK:
So I have a prediction based on that thing, that week of May 4th. They were trying to get the beta out for AngularConnect and they didn’t do it, and they overshot it by two months. So I’m going to say that it’s going to come out in the middle of July.
JOHN:
May 4th, just for folks who may not be aware is ng-conf. Joe’s big conference, right? I’m assuming it’s going to come out then but you might be right, Charles. Maybe they will oversee it [crosstalk].
WARD:
Charles hit my number. My first one would’ve been June but then when that was taken, I would’ve taken July. I know nothing; we all agree we have no insight into this, a real insight into this.
CHUCK:
Even if you have the list of things that they need to fix and you take into account the other things that are come up, there’s still no way of knowing how long it’s going to take to fix those problems.
WARD:
Right. We know it is being used in production apps. So this is clear; Angular 2 will be used in production apps whether it’s in beta or whether it’s in full release. That will simply happen. But yeah, if I can’t have June and I can’t have July, I’m leaning to August then. And that’s a shame; I would rather be something earlier, but I think it’s hard. And I think that it won’t – on the other hand, I don’t think it will matter that much because I think people will start building production apps much sooner.
JOE:
Alright. I want to take for my date, April 1st. [Chuckles]
WARD:
Alright.
CHUCK:
And then when are they going to really release it? [Chuckles] It’s out! Oh, never mind.
JOHN:
In all seriousness, that would really suck. Releasing a framework on April Fool’s Day? What a joke!
CHUCK:
My brother doesn’t do anything serious at all. So when his first child was born on April 1st, he sent out, “She’s here. She weighs this much, she’s this long,” and everybody sent back, “Yeah right.” [Chuckles]
JOE:
Cried wolf one too many times, huh?
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JOHN:
Alright, so Joe was April, I was May. Who was June, was that? Lukas?
LUKAS:
It’s me.
JOHN:
Charles is July and Ward is August. So nobody thinks it’s going to go later than August? Let’s turn it around. Can you guys think or will you be shocked if it was [inaudible] in August?
CHUCK:
Not terribly. Oh, did that [inaudible] that out loud? [Chuckles]
JOHN:
I actually would be. I’m looking at the state that it’s in now, I think – I hope I don’t cause predictions to come true – I’d be shocked if this thing didn’t get out there at least in one of those timeframes we just talked about.
WARD:
Yeah, I think it’s about polish, right? Again, after I kept coming back to it, you can use it in production now. You don’t have to know too much but there’s so much that goes into a product that isn’t just a technology. It has to do with the packaging and the tooling, all the documentation and all the things that really make for a solid product and I think that they really want it to be polished, that’s why I’m leaning later rather than earlier because polish takes time. Of course, it could have to do with competitive pressures, too, right? We don’t know if some other framework really starts to take off then that can change the drill.
CHUCK:
The other thing is they have pretty consistently done this where they’re saying, “We want to be at this point by this conference or this Google event or this date,” and they almost always overshoot it, which I’m not angry about. I’m just saying that it seems to me that that’s the reality.
WARD:
Yeah, they're not like Microsoft which says by God we’re going to deliver it and [inaudible] whether it’s useable or not.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JOE:
I’ve seen that beta tend to be very – they don’t care too much about competitive pressures so I don’t know but I feel that’s going to make much of a difference to them/
CHUCK:
I agree.
JOHN:
I think they're trying to do the right thing [crosstalk] which I think is the right thing to do as odd as it says but yeah.
JOE:
Yeah. They seem to be a little bit more like Blizzard than Electronic Arts.
CHUCK:
I like that though, doing the right thing is the right thing.
WARD:
The problem with doing the right thing all the time is that you don’t release. I’ve seen that happen in a number of places but Microsoft resist that, too. They – you have somebody who draws out a plan for two or three years – you can’t do that. You have to [crosstalk].
JOHN:
Doing the right thing doesn’t mean make it perfect, right?
WARD:
Right. Part of the ideal release is you say, “This is the feature set, this is a released one and we’re going to deliver that and it has to be a reasonable timeframe. It has to be this year.”
JOHN:
I also think that this is year is going to be the year where people will stop worrying about transpolation and that they will really jump on board with it. Not only for ES 2015 but for ES 2016, using tools like Babel and TypeScript.
JOE:
I predict this is the year that people will finally – well not finally. I believe this is the year that people will stop using the words ES 2015 and 16. I revolt against that stupid idea. [Chuckles]
JOHN:
It’s so hard to remember, isn’t it? What are we on now? Give me a version number, man.
WARD:
Yeah. That’s a good one, Joe. I would put money on you on that.
JOHN:
I have to pause and think about it every time I say it. ES – oh, God. What version is it?
WARD:
Particularly since there’s ES 5. You got to go ES 5, 4. ES 5 and ES 2015? No.
JOHN:
Yeah.
WARD:
Do you think they’ll actually – here’s the question. The reason I started to do that was because they wanted to start having a release every year. Does anybody think that ES 7 is going to release in 2016?
JOHN:
That’s a – I would be surprised if it did. Just based upon the history of what they’ve done, are they really going to come out with a yearly release?
CHUCK:
The other thing is that ES 6 or ES 5 to ES 6 – huge leap. They keep saying, “Well, ES 6 to ES 7 are –“ 15-16 I think are the right years. They keep saying, “That’s not going to be as big of a release,” but it’s going to take the browser and other JavaScript engine vendors years to move to ES 6. I just – I don’t know.
JOHN:
Yeah. I also think this is going to be the year that bootstrap starts taking a backseat to other kinds of libraries. I think something else will come out, something we’ve probably haven’t talked about yet and having thought about. I think there’s going to be a really awesome CSS framework coming out this year and I’m not talking Angular Material. I’d love it if it was Angular Material; I think that’s just phenomenal and we’re looking forward to that with Angular 2, but I think there’s going to be something else.
JOE:
As opposed to CSS.
JOHN:
Yeah. It could be any of the ones that are already there that just gets bigger or could be something all new.
JOE:
I think the other thing that [inaudible] me about 2015 was inline styles becoming popular. React has this motif for everything in inline styles, right? You can just sort out an object with what your style should be for the dom object and they’ll just go inline. You don’t have to worry about conflicts anymore and cascading conflicts.
WARD:
Hey John, didn’t you have a pal, a colleague who said that inline styles are security risks?
JOHN:
I don’t recall that.
WARD:
I do.
JOHN:
Of course, I didn’t quite understand it. [Laughter]
WARD:
Because I was asking [inaudible] explain it, but somewhere you heard that it was. God, inline styles are ugly to look at though, aren’t they?
CHUCK:
Yeah.
WARD:
So Joe, curiously, why do you think that’s going to be a big medicine?
JOE:
I don’t think it’s going to be a good medicine. I think it surprised me that it has been as big as it is. I don’t know that I – I think that it’s not going to be big medicine; I just was surprised that inline styles in [inaudible] but I do see how inline styles actually solve a big problem, that is, cascading style sheets suck. I hate them. The cascading part of it is one of the parts that’s the worst, but without a system in place to – the idea that hey, the framework will figure out what you need where and then just put it in line for you. But since it’s JavaScript, it doesn’t put the page. It’s the JavaScript that’s throwing it in line so your pages are getting gloated with a whole bunch of styles that has to be downloaded that turns your page sites from 20K to 100K. I guess it’s a very interesting solution.
CHUCK:
So it has management for styles, it’s just – it’s inserting them in line instead of loading another set or asset [crosstalk].
JOE:
Right. Exactly. It has all the same manager features. A lot of people that are using it are really getting happy with it. I don’t have a strong opinion about it because I really haven’t done it much but I think it’s just an interesting solution and it certainly blindsided me.
JOHN:
Let’s play a little bit of buzzword Rango criminate and just take a couple of hot topics and you guys shout out where do you think these things are going to go – up in tread or down in trend this next year. You guys game for this?
JOE:
I’m game.
LUKAS:
Sure.
JOHN:
Alright. Let’s start with an easy one. Containers.
JOE:
Up.
WARD:
Up.
CHUCK:
I’m not sure what you mean by containers.
WARD:
Docker and the light [crosstalk].
LUKAS:
Docker. It’s [crosstalk] up, up, up.
CHUCK:
Up.
LUKAS:
Up.
JOHN:
Alright, there was the easy brawl. How about NOSQL databases?
CHUCK:
I think they're going to hold. I think they're going to stay about where they are. I think the people who have adopted them and know where the problems are and then unadopted them are going to go – they’re going to stay where they are and the people who love them are going to stick with them.
JOE:
I’m going to say continue up. They're going to get more popular.
JOHN:
I would say up as well I think seeing more and more of it and hearing more of it and these places ii never heard about before. What about Java?
JOE:
Is that a buzzword? [Laughter]
WARD:
Yeah, it’ll continue to dominate the number – the charts of how many programmers are there and where the drops are but it’s not going to garner any excitement.
LUKAS:
Flat.
JOE:
Yeah, I’ll go flat.
CHUCK:
It’s not going to move in any significant way.
JOE:
It’s too big to move.
JOHN:
I’d say flat but if I had to force to pick up or down, I would actually say down but not a lot.
CHUCK:
No.
WARD:
Alright, I’ll throw one out there at the same category. Ruby?
JOHN:
Down. Decline.
LUKAS:
Down.
CHUCK:
I think it’s going to hold about the same. Maybe go up a little.
JOE:
Says the only guy who has any knowledge of Ruby. [Laughter]
CHUCK:
The thing is that – so if you're talking percentage market share, it will go down. However, the size of the community has continued to grow subtly.
WARD:
That mean that the entire pie of developers has gotten bigger, too?
CHUCK:
Yes.
WARD:
Wow. Where are they coming from?
LUKAS:
PHP. [Chuckles]
CHUCK:
Among other things.
JOHN:
PHP; what do you guys think about that one?
WARD:
It’s got nowhere to go but down. [Chuckles]
LUKAS:
Well, I don’t know. The new PHP is – I don’t know a lot about it but it’s a pretty significant update and I know there’s actually some pretty passionate PHP developers.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
LUKAS:
Out there and a lot of the stuff that you find in Rails and these hot frameworks, there are PHP analogues and I think that – I think it will continue to – I think it will decline but I don’t think it’s going to precipitously drop off especially with the new PHP.
JOE:
So I will say that this recent announcement that the future of WordPress is in JavaScript will have a significant effect on PHP.
CHUCK:
Yes.
JOHN:
For those who don’t know that, that’s huge that the WordPress folks [inaudible] said, “Basically, we’re going to write the next version of this with JavaScript.”
JOE:
I’m involved in a WordPress conference and JavaScript is going to be a hot topic for it.
CHUCK:
Yup. I want to go back really quickly. Maybe I can throw a word out and you guys could say whether it’ll go up and down. I know we talked about it, but bootcamps or coding camps?
JOE:
Up.
LUKAS:
Up.
JOHN:
I think both are going up. Code camps and bootcamp workshops.
CHUCK:
Yeah. The thing is that that’s where some of the new developers are coming from, but also, there’s
so much information out there now to where I’ve talked to any number of people who are selftaught over the last year or two or three depending on how much time they have to commit to it and how quickly they picked it up. They’re coming in to the profession now and they’re picking up a significant portion of things. So a lot of them that I talk to – of course, my sample size’s probably biased. I’d say the majority of them are picking up JavaScript, the next majority of them are picking up Ruby.
I hear a lot about Python as well but that’s where I see a lot of people coming in and so I think all of those communities are going to grow. I think they're also going to have a lot of the same growing pains that we see in some of the larger communities.
WARD:
Going back to bootcamps, I think we’re going to see even more experimentation on that formula of bootcamps because I think people are starting to see that a three-month bootcamp only work for the top few percent of people that go into them. As much as you can create a business that operates by people paying you money for something that you promise and then not deliver very well in that promise, why don’t you just move through a lot of people and promise them things, that businesses that actually do deliver are going to do significantly better. I think we’re going to see a lot more experimentation. We’re not going to see – we’re going to see more bootcamps that are different than just three months.
We’ve already got Bock.io which is online only – not only, they’re online and there’s the one Thinkster [crosstalk].
CHUCK:
Thinkful.
JOE:
Thinkful, there you go.
CHUCK:
They're pretty similar.
JOE:
Yeah, very similar, these online ones. I think we’ll see even more experimentation on this. I hope that we see some bootcamps that are six months long and do a better job at taking people from zero to sixty and getting them jobs.
CHUCK:
I’ve seen a few that are six months and they definitely tend to place better. They also tend to put out people who are more job-ready. It’s not just because they have more time to teach them more technology; they have more time to teach them the skills that they need to actually excel in the job.
So Git and other technologies as well has had a work in the team and things like that.
JOE:
Right. Yeah, I think that – and I really hope that we do because we need this. The University system sucks and it’s only getting worst. It’s a terrible way to get into programming; it just so happens to be that it’s one of the only railways to get into programming and bootcamps are finally coming out as a real alternative. I really hope that we see a major shift there because Universities are terrible overall.
CHUCK:
On that same count then, it seems like going through a four-year degree, getting your Computer Science degree or something related, and then applying to a coding job, it’s a much better bet. They have much better placement rates. Of course, you’re in for four years instead of six months, but do you think that’s going to flip flop or you're going to have a better chance getting in off of one of these bootcamps or being self-taught than getting in off of a college degree?
JOE:
I wouldn’t be surprised because I do think there are still a reasonable number of people that are coming out of CS degrees and not getting jobs and going in to something else.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JOE:
Because we are an industry that doesn’t care if you have a degree. We are an industry that cares what you can do and that’s what’s great about this industry, one of my favorite things about it.
LUKAS:
At the same time, I would be shocked if somebody with any kind of pedigree or skills could not find a job in this industry. I read an article today that there’s going to be two million programming jobs that are not going to be filled in 2016 because we don’t have the resources to do that. If somebody’s even mildly competent, they can get a job.
JOE:
Right. [Crosstalk]
CHUCK:
You still have things that you need people to be able to do and it’s expensive to teach them on the job. I think that will become more true but I don’t think it’s going to be completely true.
WARD:
Does any – I guess I don’t know because I didn’t go to CS – I never got a CS degree but I wouldn’t have – if I have to go to the University and going for a four-year degree, I’d be really thinking about – recommendation is there to get a well-routed education in which we have a major in CS, not as a job factory. And if you're going to make CS your major, I would like to think that you are going there because you’re going there because you’re really interested in Computer Science, not because you thought that that was the best way to get a job.
I don’t think of CS as a professional training – job training so much as it is a degree in a subject matter of great intellectual interest, but is that not how it’s played?
JOHN:
I don’t think that’s not how it’s played. I think there are definitely people who go into that and for that purpose, it is great. If you go and you are interested in Computer Science, then Universities are a great place to go.
WARD:
Yeah. You’re not going to get that at a bootcamp because they're not teaching you Computer Science; they're teaching you how to do it.
JOE:
Although Block.io now has – they call it a software for an engineering degree, but it’s a lot more like Computer Science. They may not have like a compiler’s class but a lot more the stuff that you might consider to be closely related to Computer Science.
We might see some other variances on that, but I think you’re still right that you shouldn’t look at a CS degree first and foremost as a job training as much as it is the opportunity to study. But I think that’s also a problem across Universities. Many Universities are only trying to make it – job training and then they do a terrible job, but then you get people to go into a CS degree. I’m going to pick Evan Czaplicki as my example for this; he went in, got a CS degree and while he was at it, he wrote Elm.
Now regardless of your opinion on Elm, he’s made a major contribution to the industry because he wrote an entirely new way – he had a new paradigm, he figured it out and put it together, and it’s something that nobody else has done. We really wouldn’t have had that if he hadn’t decided to go to school. So that was a great benefit of him going to the University; it’s just not the right place for most people to go if you want to go get into Java programming.
CHUCK:
Yeah. I can tell you that the University that I attended – my degree’s in Computer Engineering so I was over with the Electrical Engineering nerds, but that’s why where they sold their Computer Science program was a great place to go if you wanted to get a job as a programmer or you wanted to go in the Academia and get your PhD.
JOE:
Well it’s hard to go in there and say – these Universities, they're trying to attract students. So what are they going to do? They’re going to align the fact that, “Hey, there’s two million jobs. Do you want to fill in those two million jobs that are paying higher than just, on average, than most other disciplines?” Certainly, nothing else that you can get – very few things you can get a four-year degree on average pay as well.
CHUCK:
Yup.
JOE:
So they need to recruit. They're constantly going up; of course, they're turning themselves into day spas with masseuses and all that sort of thing as well.
CHUCK:
Yeah, let’s not go into that.
JOE:
The reason why their costs are sky rocketing. They need that. It’s pure economics. They're an organization that needs to survive so they're going to pander to whatever they can do to survive.
Sorry, if you haven’t – we can’t tell. I have a furry little opinion in general University system.
CHUCK:
Yup. So I want to throw one more thing out there. I was talking to AJ O’Neal from JavaScript Jabber the other day and he mentioned that he thought everyone was going to revolt on ES 6 itself and force the industry back to ES 5, then make reasonable changes to ES 5 instead of overhauling it.
Now I disagree with him. I think things are going to move ahead in the direction they're heading, but I definitely see a contingent of people out there, wishing that they could stay on ES 5. I would love to hear your thoughts on it though.
WARD:
I want to take his money. Is he willing to put money up on that one? [Chuckles] Because that’s a sure loser. Of course, I was the one who went for the 1.5 billion and they [inaudible]. I could be wrong.
LUKAS:
The thing is, if you spend any time in an enterprise environment, whether it’s JavaScript or .net, ES 5 is really weird and quirky to those kind of developers. At the same time, it’s a very – it’s a large majority but they're not vocal. My experience is 100%, when I’m showing them ES 6 and more importantly TypeScript, they're eyes light up and they get it.
WARD:
Exactly.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
LUKAS:
So I think that you're going to see a lot of ES 5 jQuery types like, “Oh, this is hard. Ugh.” But once you start showing enterprise line of business, app developers – stuff that they are familiar with and that they build a lot of apps on already, in those constructs, they're just going to gravitate towards it and they're going to start taking JavaScript as a platform seriously. So I 110% disagree with that opinion.
WARD:
Yeah. This is a no brainer. He’s wrong.
CHUCK:
Okay. The other one that I want to just quickly get your opinion on and then we’ll wrap up is web assembly. Is that going to come out this next year and is it going to become a thing? Or is it just a nice idea that may someday get some attention implemented?
WARD:
I had a good [inaudible], particularly when there are so many better ways to get improved performance. Web workers and things like that, that’s the way in which people are going to improve performance for their applications.
JOE:
Alright. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s going to take off not because I have any idea that it will, just because it’s more interesting if one of us goes out on a limb on this.
LUKAS:
You’re dumb.
JOE:
Yup. [Chuckles] And that way if it does, then I can say [crosstalk].
WARD:
You’d look like a genius.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JOE:
And if it doesn’t, then I can say, “Well, I didn’t really think that it was going to happen but I just wanted to play the odds.”
LUKAS:
I was being sarcastic, bro.
JOE:
Just wanted to be wild. Yeah, sarcasm. Couldn’t you tell I was being sarcastic?
CHUCK:
I can edit that together and make it say whatever I want. Thank you, Joe. [Chuckles]
JOE:
Don’t edit this together to make it sound like I murdered my brother.
WARD:
You got the phrase right there, Charles. You got the confession. It was there. It’s done. Send in the cops.
CHUCK:
Alright, let’s go ahead and do some picks. Ward Bell, you want to start us off with picks?
WARD:
I saw a movie that is so much better than Star Wars.
JOE:
Star Wars? You’re talking about [crosstalk] Star Wars? Because Star Wars, nothing is better than Star Wars.
WARD:
It’s so much better.
JOHN:
He’s trying to say Star Wars 7 but [inaudible] Star Wars 6.
CHUCK:
That’s right.
WARD:
I’m saying I saw Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s hard to figure out how to merchandise that. I got to give [chuckles]. It’s not like you're going to have a whole lot of figurines with that stuff.
JOE:
Their cards are really cool but I don’t think I’d buy models of them for my 8-year old son.
WARD:
Yeah, exactly. I don’t think you're going to have a lot of pictures of skinhead kids with black eyes. But the movie was so much more exciting, so much more entertaining that – it made Star Wars look like a daytime soap. [Chuckles]
LUKAS:
That was frightening words.
WARD:
Which by the way, none other than George Lucas described Star Wars from beginning to end as a soap opera which I think pretty much says it all. But I digress. My pick is Fury Road for those who are action movie inclined.
CHUCK:
Alright. Lukas, what are your picks?
LUKAS:
My pick this week is a song that I’ve actually been really digging on. It’s just so hype and it’s called Key Engine by Luca Sestak. He’s just this young, German kid who plays boogie woogie piano and the song is off the hook. Check out the link in the show notes. It’s a great video of him doing it as a live performance.
CHUCK:
Alright. Joe, what are your picks?
JOE:
I saw this movie that was so amazing. I’ve got to tell you; it was action packed. It was so much better. [Laughter] It’s called Star Wars Episode 7.
WARD:
Never heard of it.
JOE:
From start to finish, it was non-stop, amazing fun action – the most fun I’ve had at the movie theater all year. It was an amazingly enough better than this other really awesome movie called Mad Max which I also saw which I loved, but it was even more fun. So I’m going to pick that as my first pick. [Chuckles]
JOHN:
I predict that for this year, we will all continue to make fun of Ward about Star Wars. [Laughter]
JOE:
And I predict that it will not bother him one bit and [crosstalk].
WARD:
It won’t.
JOE:
Every bit as good as it gets.
JOHN:
In fact, he would give it back even more. [Chuckles]
JOE:
Yeah.
CHUCK:
Yup.
JOE:
Ward is not the kind of guy that backs down from a challenge. If you’ve ever seen him ask important question that a presenter [chuckles].
CHUCK:
[Crosstalk] Well on the show.
JOE:
So I’m just going to pick Star Wars again. Then while I’m at it, I’m going to pick littleBits which are little snap together magnetic circuitry that you can buy little kits of and then build things with, these little builders-type kit.
I have an 11-year old son. We’ve been – I’ve blown 280 bucks now on their kits. I bought the Arduino Kit which has a few pieces plus the Arduino piece. Then I bought their basic $200 kit which has a bunch of more pieces. And we built this remote control car that he absolutely loves way more than the really cool remote control cars that he might have access to because he built it himself. We only need one more power supply and then he can give it a horn.
That’s crazy because there’s these two levers. To make it go forward, you have to put one lever all the way down, the other lever all the way up. [Chuckles] For some reason, the polarity is reversed when – the way that it transfers wirelessly. But it has this wireless transmitter piece that came with it, so you put that in, you put the power in; hook them up to wheels. We took a little bit of – not glue, but the sticky glue pieces that – these little sticky pieces that they have, like poster sticky.
We put – take some of those Legos and give it to make the car part have other wheels. He’s just been having absolute blast and it’s been so cool playing around with that so I want to pick littleBits because it’s been amazing and a great thing to have. I’ve really had a lot of fun playing with my son. Those are my picks.
CHUCK:
Alright.
JOE:
Oh, by the way, the CFP for ng-conf is out so go submit to talk.
CHUCK:
Okay, I will.
JOHN:
I’m going to submit a talk at ng-conf, Joe. Just [inaudible], I’ll give you a heads up. It’s going to be about how awesome Star Wars is. [Chuckles]
JOE:
It already has my vote.
LUKAS:
You're in.
WARD:
That’s brutal. We will not be attending that session. [Crosstalk]
CHUCK:
I thought it was a single track.
JOHN:
It’s got to be the Keynote just so you’ll have to be there.
WARD:
Right.
CHUCK:
Is it multi-track this year?
JOE:
No, it’s single track. Although there’s a day in the middle. Instead of two days we’ve done on the previous one, we’ll have three days. There’s a day in the middle which will be not so much multitrack but just a lot of stuff going on that’s called [inaudible] and there’s tons of stuff going on, all of it going on simultaneously. Not all that, but lots of things going on simultaneously and you could choose what you want to go do.
CHUCK:
Awesome. John, I think we’re still waiting on picks.
JOHN:
I pick something non-technical. I have been enjoying spending a lot of time with my little girls and my boy lately. Sometimes I work too hard, I bet you guys do, too. It’s good to just step back once in a while and spend a little time with your family and the whole reason we do this.
CHUCK:
Yeah, I got a bad case of that.
WARD:
And then you wouldn’t take them to Star Wars and ruin the whole thing.
CHUCK:
I took them to Star Wars and then I took my wife to Star Wars, and then I took my father-in-law to Star Wars. I’m doing well. I’ve got a few picks here myself.
The first one that I’m going to pick is – I’ve been playing with this for a while. Clash of Clans; if you want to find me on Clash of Clans, I’m cmaxw. I’m playing on my phone and I just enjoy it. Nice thing to do, nice fun thing to have.
One other thing that I want to point out is that I do have other conferences this year. If you're interested, for example, freelancing, Ruby, iOS or React, those are coming up within the first half of this year so go check those out. I think I’ve also got a Git conference in there.
I’ve also been playing around with Swarm Simulator. That’s swarmsim.github.io which is fun so I’m going to pick that as well.
Finally, I went to CES last week and there was a lot of cool stuff there and I’m really curious to see what we’re going to be able to do with programming as far as the internet of things over the next year. They had smart shirts and smart pants, smart shoes and smart socks and smart – I have a zillion smart watches but that’s kind of old news. I don’t know that any of this is going to come out anytime soon, but it’s definitely interesting to look at. There are also all the smart home stuff and things like that. 3D printer; it was way cool. So if you're in the industry which. As programmers, they count us as part of the industry, you can get a ticket and go. You can get your ticket – you want to get your hotel room early because it fills up. Yeah, then let me know that you're going and we’ll hang out in Las Vegas for a while. Yeah, I’m going to pick that.
I’m also going to pick The Venetian Hotel just because it’s really cool. It reminded me a little bit of Venice. I do have one beef though; they have St. Mark’s Square and the reason they call it St. Mark’s Square is because they have the big cathedral, St. Mark’s cathedral and The Venetian left that off. But anyway, really fun. Really cool.
Anyway, kind of all over the place with my picks but that’s kind of where I’ve been at. I also want to plus one John’s pick because I’ve been going out of my way to spend more time with my kids and it really does come down to that that’s why we do this.
Anyway, I don’t think there’s anything else. Is there anything else you want to share with us about ng-conf, Joe, before we wrap up?
JOE:
No. the CFP’s definitely the big news right now. So hopefully, if you haven’t got a ticket, that’s probably your best shot for getting in is to get accepted as a speaker. If that doesn’t work, you can maybe find one of the couple of Easter egg tickets. They're hidden on the internet. Or your company to sponsor; information about that’s on the website as well. But it should be lots of fun. 1,400 of your best Angular friends all hanging out together for three days, as many as five days depending on if you go to workshops and stay after for some fun at the amusement park.
CHUCK:
Awesome. Alright, we’ll go ahead and wrap up the show. May the force be with you and we’ll catch you all next week.
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