Author: Loïc Houssier, Eira May, Ben Matthews

Webpack has been king for several years. Vercel wants folks to embrace Turbopack, but their claims about speed raised a lot of backlash after it was first announced. Lee explains why he thinks the Rust-based approach will ultimately be a big benefit to developers and how organizations who are deeply ingrained with existing tools can safely and incrementally migrate to what is, for now, a very Alpha and experimental release. 

We go over the routing and rendering updates in Next.JS 13, exploring where it might offer developers more flexibility and the ability to use React server components to ship less, maybe a lot less, JavaScript. As Lee says in the episode: 

“So to your point about wanting to ship less JavaScript, that was a kinda fundamental architectural decision of where we headed with the app directory. And the core of this is because it's built on React server components. 

The key thing with React server components is that as your application grows in size from one component to a hundred thousand components, the amount of client-side JavaScript you send can be exactly the same. It can be constant because you can render every single component on the server. 

And that's a lot different from the world of React applications today, where every new component you add for data fetching or just putting some HTML on the screen also adds additional client-side JavaScript.

So this is kind of inverting the default, back from the client to be server first. Now, of course, we still love client-side interactivity that React provides making really interactive and rich UI experiences, but the default for data fetching or just getting HTML to the browser happens from the server, and that's gonna help us reduce the amount of JavaScript.”

You can learn more about Lee on his website, LinkedIn, and Twitter. To diver deeper into his take on how Rust will impact the future of Javascript, check out a post he wrote here.

You can learn more about Andrew, from building out a telco in Canada to cyber security at Deloitte, on his LinkedIn.

Validation Cloud bills itself as the world’s fastest node infrastructure and cites networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance as clients it supports. Learn more at the company’s website here.

The company announced the launch of it's latest product, Javelin, earlier today.

Shout out to this week’s lifeboat badge winner, Derek, for helping answer the question: How do you open  the file chooser in an Android app using Kotlin?

Data show's Silicon Valley's share of new startup funding deals dropped below 20% for the first time.

What does it mean to experiment with big changes to an engineering org, in public and in real time?

SBF would like the chance to explain himself.

Today's lifeboat badge goes to CodeCaster for explaining: What is E in floating point?

Srivastava reflects on his upbringing in India, learning to write Assembly, and going to Stanford University to complete his Ph.D in computer science.

He shares his early career experiences at big tech names like Yahoo!, Google, Twitter, and Google.

The group reflects on some of the engineering challenges at Patreon including technical debt, migrations to open source services, and troubleshooting bugs.

Srivastava walks us all through upcoming product features that his engineering team is working to implement.

Andy wins a Lifeboat Badge for answering this question about a list of all tags on Stack Overflow.

Follow Ben, Matt, Cassidy, and Utkarsh.

Cami and Cassidy take us down memory lane, sharing how they got into computer science together, hosted a web series (and still podcast together sometimes), and overlapped at two jobs together.

We discuss the technologies being used to build in/for the Metaverse like  Horizon Workroom,  Presence Platform, Insights SDK, and of course, React. 

Cami shares how object and scene recognition work in VR.

Cami reveals a family secret — so listen up if you want to know how to beat Cassidy at board games.

Blackbishop wins the Illuminator Badge for answering and editing 500 different questions on Stack Overflow.

Follow Ben, Matt, Cassidy, and Cami.

We’re taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday so no podcast this Friday…have a good one, and see you next week.

SPONSORED BY PLURALSIGHT

Early in the days of high-traffic web pages and apps, any engineer operating the infrastructure would have a server room where one or more machines served that app to the world. They named their servers lovingly, took pictures, and watched them grow. The servers were pets. But since the rise of public cloud and infrastructure as code, servers have become cattle—you have as many as you need at any given time and don’t feel personally attached to any given one. And as more and more organizations find their way to the cloud, more and more engineers need to figure out how to herd cattle instead of feed pets. 

Show notes

Gartner forecasts that around $500 billion will be spent worldwide on end user cloud computing during 2022. Firment says that’s only 25% of IT budgets today, but he expects it to grow to 65% by 2025.

Don’t doubt the power of your people. Gartner estimates that 50% of all cloud IT migration projects are delayed up to two years simply because of the lack of skills.

Pluralsight just published its State of the Cloud report. 75% of of all leaders want to build new products and services in the cloud, but only 8% of the technologists have the experience to actually work with cloud related tools. 

Today we’re highlighting a Great Question badge winner—a question with a score of 100 or more—awarded to Logan Besecker for their question: How do you cache an image in JavaScript?

Want to start earning your cloud certificates? Head over to Pluralsight.

Connect with Ben  or Ryan on Twitter. Find Drew on LinkedIn.

Over the years Homebrew, an open source package manager, has emerged as the project with the greatest number of individual contributors. Despite all that, it’s creator Max Howell, couldn’t make a living off the occasional charity of the millions of people who used the software he built. This XKCD cartoon is probably the most frequently repeated joke on the podcast over the last three years.

While he is not a crypto bull, Max was inspired with a solution for the open source funding dilemma  by his efforts to buy and sell an NFT. A contract written in code and shared in public enforced a rule sending a portion of his proceeds to the digital objects original creator. What if the same funding mechanism could be applied to open source projects? 

In March of 2022, Max and his co-founder launched Tea, a sort of spirtual successor to Homebrew. It has a lot of new features Max wanted in a package manager, plus a blockchain based approach to ensuring that creators, maintainers, and contributors of open source software can all get paid for their efforts. 

You can read Max’s launch post on Tea here and yes, of course there is a white paper. Follow him on Twitter here.

Eric explains that great jobs are available for developers in Japan, but it can be tough to find these opportunities.

We talk about interesting startups that are gaining traction in the Japanese tech sector (like Visual Alpha, Treasure Data, and Exawizards, to name a few examples of companies on the Japan Dev platform).

Matt is impressed to learn Japan Dev generates an average of $60,000/month in revenue.

Eric reflects on starting Japan Dev as a side project while he was employed full-time as an engineer.

Eric elaborates on why he doesn’t think venture capital is a good fit for Japan Dev.

Night owls unite! Eric says that his most productive hours are between midnight to 4AM.

Follow Matt and Eric.

Episode notes:

The team questions whether a print out of 60-90 days worth of code is the right benchmark for whether to lay someone off. 

Ben gives our podcast  listeners a heads up to reports of repo jacking on GitHub (who got ahead of the issue quickly).

We reflect on whether or not we’re okay with generative AI—and question tradeoffs between copyright and the ability for more people to create stuff.

Ben discusses how his internet browser might be becoming his second brain.

Matt and Cassidy get props from Ben for their rising popularity on Stack Overflow’s YouTube channel.

Follow Ben, Matt, and Cassidy.

When most people talk about Web3 or cryptocurrencies and related technologies, they usually mean blockchains. But blockchain is only the first generation of distributed ledger technology (DLT). As with any new technology, once people see how it works, new generations come along rapidly to address the faults in the previous ones. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan chat with Matt Woodward, head of developer relations at Swirlds Labs. Swirlds Labs created the Hedera ecosystem, a DLT built on a hashgraph, not a blockchain. We chat about what the difference is between a blockchain and a hashgraph, Hedera’s focus on environmental sustainability, and why the Web3 version of “Hello, World!” takes a little more effort. 

Show notes

Hedera’s hashgraph is a third-generation DLT: it’s an open-source consensus algorithm and a data structure that uses a direct acyclic graph and two novel inventions, the gossip about gossip protocol and virtual voting. 

Where Bitcoin can only handle between three and seven transactions per second, a hashgraph can support upwards of 10,000. 

There’s been a lot of talk about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies. Woodward says that a single Bitcoin transaction uses 1000kW-hours—the equivalent of driving a Tesla Model S 5,500 km—while Hedera uses 160 MW-hours of energy per year, about 2.5 million times less.

Congrats to the winner of a Stellar Question badge, g.revolution, for their question What is an anti-pattern? 100 users saved it for later. 

Find out more about Hedera and hit the start button. 

Connect with Matt, Ben, or Ryan on Twitter.