Special Guests: Gant Laborde

In this episode, the panel talks with Gant who has been programming for twenty years. In the past, he has been an adjunct professor and loves to teach. Finally, he talks at conferences and enjoys sharing his ideas. The panel talks about the React State Museum, among many other topics, such as: React Native, Flux, Redux, Agile, and XState.

1:24 – Chuck: What do you do?

2:02 – Chuck and Gant: We met at React Rally at 2016.

2:17 – Gant: I have my own sticker branding with a friend in Japan who is genius. She draws all these characters. They are my business card now.

2:41 – Chuck: React State Museum- talk about its brief history and what it is?

2:54 – Gant: React is this beautiful thing of passing these functional capsules around and managing them. Once you start creating another component, the question is how do you actually manage all of these components? We are all so happy to be on the cutting edge, but state management systems come up and die so fast. For like Facebook, there are 2 people who understand Flux. What happens is Redux is the one thing that shows up and...

6:34 – Chuck: I want to say...I think we need to change the topic. You said that JavaScript USED to be bad at classes, but it’s still bad at classes!

6:52 – Gant: Yep.

7:21 – Chuck: Typescript gets us close-ish.

7:31 – Chuck: Do you get feedback on the library?

8:12 – Gant: The requests that I’ve got - it’s from people who are better at (that0 than me. I wanted to test the lines of code. But that’s unfair because there are a lot of things to do.

It really was a plan but what happens is – components that are used in this example is that in this node module...

9:41 – Panel: This is an interesting topic. When you assess any technology...if you are not a technology expert than you really can’t say. That’s interesting that you are doing this an open-source way.

10:25 – Gant: I am a huge fan of this vs. that. I am okay with say “this” one wins and “that” one looses. I don’t declare a winner cause it’s more like a Rosetta Stone. I had to find pitfalls and I respect that for the different perspectives. At the end of the day I do have opinions. But there is no winner. They are all the same and they are all extremely different. Are you trying to teach someone in one day? I learned Redux in 2 different days.

12:00 – Panel: Is there a library that helps with X, Y, Z, etc.

12:16 – Gant: I love for teaching and giving people a great start. I just set state and live life. I had to show what X is like.

13:59 – Chuck: Like this conversation about frameworks and which framework to use. Everyone was using Redux, because it was more or less what we wanted it to do. But at the time it cleaned up a bunch of code. Now we have all these other options. We are figuring out...

How to write JavaScript if web assembly really took off? Do I write React with X or with Y. And how does this affect all of this? We had all of these conversations but we haven’t settled on the absolute best way to do this.

15:50 – Panel: This is great, and I think this is from the community as a whole.

17:20 – Chuck: I need to ask a question. Is this because the requirements on the frontend has changed? Or...

I think we are talking about these state management systems, and this is what Lucas is talking about.

17:45 – Gant: I think it’s both.

18:43 – Panel: Websites have gotten bigger. We have always been pushing CSS.

Panelist mentions Facebook Blue, among other things.

What does your state look like? What does your validation look like? We are on so many different devices, and so on.

20:00 – Gant: I agree to echo everything that you all have said. I think the expectations are tighter now; that we have less drift. People are being more cognoscente and asking what is our brand. And it’s about brand consistency. And we are expecting more out of our technology, too. We keep pushing the envelope. What about these features? We want to be feature rich, and pushing these envelopes – how can we build more faster with less complexity while building it. You have to put that complexity somewhere. It’s interesting to watch.

22:00 – Chuck: How do we use this React State Museum...where are we going next?

22:19 – Gant: It’s a loaded question. Being able to ID new and interesting concepts. If you had a terrible version and Redux comes along, Redux is great for some companies but not all. You won’t see bugs that are crazy, there is a middle-wear, and maybe for your team going into Redux will make things more manageable.

25:25 – Advertisement – Digital Ocean

26:05 – Panel: Understanding your problem is the first thing to do.

Talking about evolutionary architecture – to build your software to evolve. What does tha fit really well? So if you have to pick something new you are in a good position. What are my needs? Don’t look too much forward or

27:38 – Chuck: Advice on looking at your problem-sets?

27:52 – Panel: We have gone from planning too much to not planning at all. I don’t need to plan for too much or else it will “hurt” me.

28:42 – Chuck comments and mentions Agile.

29:29 – Panel and Guest chime in.

29:39 – Panel: I worked on a project (3 months) we needed to do a big change. I asked them why didn’t we take that into consideration. And their answer was...

30:30 – Gant: You might get away with...

30:55 – Chuck: What are some of the knobs on this? If I turn this know Redux is looking good, but if I do this...

31:12 – Gant: There are a lot of attractive knobs. Using app sync, not using app sync.

32:33 – Gant: Is your app really effective? That’s your first important question. How much state do I need on the frontend. And vice versa.

34:02 – Gant: How easy will this be to test? Can I teach someone how to do this? If I cannot teach it then it won’t do my team any good.

34:35 – Panel adds in comments.

35:08 – Gant: Looking at tests.

37:25 – Panel: If you have a great backend team then you can move the work across the team. You have a strong team to move that work along that line – normally you can’t cross that sort of thing.

38:03 – Chuck: There are so many options, too. I see Apollo getting reach here. I don’t see it as a statement tool instead I see it as...

38:31 – Panel: Apollo State – seems like they are pushing the envelope. It’s interesting to watch.

38:54 – Chuck.

39:12 – Gant: I am going to go ahead and use this tool – I am not going to worry about it.

But now you are being held accountable.

39:29 – Panel: Question for folks: React not having a blessed ecosystem can hold people back in some ways?

You have the freedom to use what you want. Here are the tools that you can use. Do you tink it be better if the Facebook team could do...

40:20 – Gant: I find that I don’t like (being told) this is what you will be using. I am a person with idea. We’d all be using Flux and all be very upset.

41:00 –Then there would be 3 people who don’t understand it.

41:17 – Gant: I loved Google Wave. Fool on my once and shame on me twice...

Google Video! Google comes out and says here is BLESSED and you don’t have any choice. But it’s any author for themselves. It’s a little bit silly 0 I would like a beacon from Facebook saying: Here is a guide. It seems that they can’t focus. They are running a large company; I would like to keep it open – friendly energy.

42:24 – Chuck: I am mixed feelings about this. It only plays as far as people play into it. IN a React community there are so many voices. They all have opinions on what you should/shouldn’t use. The one thing that I like about a blessed / recommended stack – brand new person – it’s a good place to art. After that if they realize that Flux is hard then they can go and try other options. There are other things out there; there is a good balance there.

43:36 – Panel: That is the Angular way right?

43:38 – Chuck: Yes but Angular is more opinionated. It’s a different feel.

44:38 - Panel + Guest continue this conversation.

45:00 – The book DRIVE is mentioned.

45:21 – Gant: ... we need more recommendations.

45:43 – Chuck: Let’s talk about Repot and how to use this? If you go and get Repot – Google React State Museum it’s really easy. How should people come to this and pick it up?

46:18 – Gant: The table that comes in there – it links to the main Repot. A lot of people showed up and contributed. First of all show up.

Gant mentions a sandbox link – and he talks about getting your hands dirty.

React Native is mentioned, too.

48:10 – Gant: There are many opportunities for contributors. I could use my links. Typos, documentations, etc. - anything friendly is accepted here.

49:20 – Gant continues this conversation.

50:33 – Chuck: Anything else to dive into?

50:41 – Panel: I think there could be other things you can bubble up

51:26 – Gant: I would love some help with that. I did have some contributors write some tests. I wrote a test – 4 hours later – and it tells me if it passed or not. It has to go into a new directory, and work in Android, etc. It’s insane testing library. Then there are some checks to see if there is a link in the README. Animation if there is anyone who wants to do some cool stuff – like modules. Maybe it’s apple to oranges comparisons there. I would like to identify that for people. We would like some outside feedback out there. The more the merrier to help with the data is out there. Sanity check complete – yes!

53:24 – How to do that?

53:31 – File a ticket to help contribute. So you can say: I will do this. If you do it in a reasonable amount of time, then heck yes. If you do some open source...Do 10 (I think) and you get a free t-shirt?

54:28 – Advertisement.

Charles

Justin

Lucas

Special Guest: Gant Laborde.