Whiskey Web and Whatnot

The best way to win over a developer is to make their job simpler. The release of Nuxt 3 promises an even better developer experience than its former versions. That’s music to every developer’s ears. Who doesn’t want faster rendering? Daniel Roe, framework architect at Nuxt Labs has been working to get Nuxt 3 production ready for a stable release. In addition to DX improvements, once N3 is out of...

Devs have a lot on their plate, but the key is to find time for what's important. Championing accessibility is only possible if devs prioritize it and a good place to start is by knowing your HTML elements. If dogs can learn 50 human words, then devs can learn 50 HTML elements. On another note, not all package managers are made equal. Robbie has been loyal to Yarn for years and is okay with waitin...

Building products is hard. And devs can often feel hamstrung by competing priorities. The battle between revenue and quality is ever-present and ongoing. But is it possible to achieve both?  In this episode, Chuck and Robbie discuss some of their frustrations with the tech companies and tech stacks in the modern era, supporting open source projects, and some great TV shows they have been enjoying....

Introducing a new framework can be challenging, especially when developers are loyal to old favorites. But Astro 1.0 is bridging the gap between old and new by staying compatible and familiar with other frameworks. Nate Moore, an engineer at Astro Technology Company and core maintainer on Astro has been working on Astro 1.0 for 16 months. His major focus was launching a new web framework that is s...

Like many developers, Mark Steadman began working in web development with just a couple of goals in mind: write something that runs and passes a test. No major thought for those using the interface he created.  Mark's perspective changed when he sat with a few folks who were blind or had low vision, and watched as they used assistive technology for the web and attempted to navigate a site he'd dev...

There are two types of engineers. The "normal" ones who strive to make their day-to-day lives as easy as possible and the Robbie's of the world who strive to do everything themselves until the last line of code is sealed in a changelog.  On that note, do you prefer conventional commits? Or the tools out there that make organization easier and, sometimes, automated? Chuck and Robbie don't see eye-t...

A few years into Preston Sego's coding career, a colleague working on increasing interactivity on the company's interface chose Ember for the endeavor. Years later, when Preston began developing his own project, he took his colleague's advice and began testing the waters with Ember as well.  In 2019, Preston noticed interesting work brewing within Ember. Realizing Ember was adaptable to modern too...

In recent years, accessibility has evolved from a way to avoid legal landmines, to a specialization developers are taking a serious approach to for the sake of their companies, apps, and users. Eric Bailey has been at the forefront of this maturation, working as both an advocate and educator in the accessibility and inclusive design space.  A user experience designer by trade, Eric developed a pas...

Years ago, Dan Gebhardt was mapping out data needs for an app he was building. In a struggle to make sense of every requirement and apply them to other packages like Ember Data, he hit a wall. At this point, there was no option for adapting Ember Data to the complex specificities of his app's needs.  Dan tried to rationalize a solution, deconstructing entire data universes and all aspects of a dat...

In high school, Matt Johnson followed in the footsteps of his older brother, pursuing similar hobbies like sports and music. After joining a band, Matt realized they needed a website. Mirroring his brother, Matt learned to code, built a website, and changed his college major. Following graduation, Matt dove into business ownership, buying out the company he interned for with a business partner. Th...

In 2022, the future of Ember is taking shape thanks to developers like Godfrey Chan. Alongside Yehuda Katz and other engineers, Godfrey's working on a new edition of Polaris. The project has three main goals: to align Ember with the modern npm packaging system, continue to invest and innovate in reactivity, and encourage universal design principles.  Like many developers, Godfrey came to Ember fro...

Robbie has spent years trying to improve his experience in the terminal. Fortunately, he's learned a few things about customization along the way. Meanwhile, Chuck and Robbie have thoughts about Apple's new products, the purpose of React, plus Fig, Hyper, Warp, and everything in between.  In this episode, Chuck and Robbie discuss everything you probably don't know about terminals, why Robbie's eye...

It's not often that a blog post sets the internet on fire. But a recent post by Cory Brown about async/await led to an uproar and even messages of pity from Hacker News. Who knew a simple post about pattern preferences would cause such controversy?  Today, Cory's here to explain his side of the story for those happily using async/await in various concurrency patterns. Luckily, Cory believes, to ea...

In 2017, James C. Davis moved to Charlottesville, Virginia to work at a non-profit tech company that used Ember in their original Saas platform. While James had dabbled in Ember previously, an ask to reimplement the front-end in Ember, this time using TypeScript, proved challenging.  At the time, a few engineers were using TypeScript in Ember, but the open source framework James worked on became t...

They say if it's not broken, don't fix it. So why are we running tests on tests on tests that aren't business-critical? There's an art to testing beyond just striving to get 100% coverage. In fact, over-testing can actually hamper your progress more than help it. Meanwhile, Chuck's wondering why it's not possible to have a union of enums in GraphQL. In this episode, Chuck and Robbie discuss some t...

Great things come in unexpected places. For Tracy Lee, an ex-boyfriend's T-shirt sporting the Ember Tomster is what tipped her off to software development. Following curiosity and a three-week bootcamp, Tracy was hooked and ready to take on a career in coding. Today, Tracy is the CEO of This Dot Labs. She leads a team of 50 developers with a focus on reactive programming, web performance, and deve...

In early 2017, Chris Krycho was working at one of the few startups using Ember, searching for a way to bring types to the emerging language. His primary goal became solving semantic versioning for TS. As Chris kept iterating, striving to combine multiple programming worlds, other engineers joined him in the pursuit until eventually, the Ember TypeScript Core team was born.  Today, Chris is a lead...

Do you use monorepos? Do you love NFTs named after dogs? Chuck and Robbie have mixed feelings on both monorepus and Shiba Inu tokens and they're probably not the only ones conflicted. Developer tools and the metaverse are complex topics that don't always yield solidly positive or negative results.  The beauty of our ever-evolving digital space is the ability to continually iterate and learn from w...

It's been a while since Chuck and Robbie dove headfirst into trending tech topics without a guest to bounce their ideas off of. Today, they discuss the latest in TypeScript and Git, the evolution of JavaScript over the years, developer pet peeves, and what success means on a team, on the web, and on the field. Key Takeaways [01:09] - A whiskey review.  [10:14] - What Chuck and Robbie think about i...

When someone hands you an opportunity to specialize, to do something crazy with people you like, to learn from people building something before your eyes, it's difficult to pass up. An opportunity like that prompted Chris to leave LinkedIn for Bitski, a digital wallet for buying, selling, and storing NFTs.  Leaving what's safe and secure for what's largely unknown is definitely a risk, but Chris i...

The terminal is a constant in the dev world. Every developer will interact with the terminal in one way or another. So what if they worked better? Tools within the Google Suite inspired Warp Founder Zach Lloyd to bring that same ease of collaboration to the world of terminals. And so, Warp was born.  Because you can't avoid terminals, the implications of improving such a widely-used tool are what...

As developers, advancing in our careers can feel like the wild west. No guardrails, no handbook, and no standard path to success, everyone has a unique story when it comes to their coding career.  Far from a developer since childhood, Jen's no stranger to the unconventional path. Her Ember education grew within an accelerator while the bulk of her skillset expanded working in open source. While no...

When it seems like everyone around you has worked in the same field for a really long time, making a career pivot with confidence can be tricky. But not everyone's been coding since their early college days like Robbie and Chuck. Kara Luton started on track to become a professional ballerina. After college and a stint in music publicity, burnout prompted Kara to make a hard left and begin a career...

Just because something is widely used doesn't always mean it's your best solution. Frontside Founder Charles Lowell and CEO Taras Mankovski, stumbled into an alt GraphQL stack simply because the nature of a product didn't mesh with Apollo. After happening upon two up-and-coming technologies, GraphQL modules and Envelope, a solution was born, as was a newfound flexibility with GraphQL stacks. In th...

Charlie Gerard loves to experiment. Her love for experimentation and JS has propelled Charlie into the world of machine learning and in turn inspired her recent book, Practical Machine Learning in JavaScript.  Forever iterating on her projects and experimentations, Charlie extends that desire for growth into her professional life, even pursuing a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and dabbling...