React Podcast with Chantastic

Michael Chan

Perfect, perfect. I'm here for it. I'm here for it.

Brian

Yeah, appreciate that. So, you should probably introduce yourself like a real podcast before the listener's like, "What is happening here?"

Michael Chan

Well, my name is Michael Chan. I go by Chantastic a lot of places on the internet. And then, any place that I can't get Chantastic, I just refuse to participate because that's the way that I am. Yeah, and, I don't know, I've done some things. I don't know if many of them are particularly noteworthy but if you're a React developer, I, for about two and a half years, did a podcast called React Podcast. I still hope to get back to it but I'm taking a gap year while I figure out some other stuff in my life. And yeah, then recently, I've just been having the time of my life hanging out with people in a Discord that I started around React Podcast and just learning so much stuff from awesome people. So, I think we just got the ... What is it? The Discord URL so I'm pretty sure it's, what is it? Discord.gg, I think that's what it is, slash lunchdev. I'm going to test it out right now.

Brian

You would know more than I would know.

Michael Chan

It's the type of thing that I should have known coming into this conversation and I just admitted it. Yes, that's it, discord.gg/lunchdev. And really, really smart people there. We do little local streams and just learn together. I think, with all the Next announcements that happened recently, I'll say recently not knowing exactly when this is going out, we're going to be doing a bunch of stuff just discovering how they integrated server components and all the cool new stuff. So, that's what we do, what I'm excited about right now. Just working in that community.

Brian

Okay. So, I feel like you've probably answered a lot of questions about, we'll call it a hiatus for React Pod... Is it coming back? Do you feel like I don't really know? I like that, by the way, you hit 123 episodes, 1, 2, 3 and then called it quits. I think that was a great number. Ooh. that's perfect.

Michael Chan

Oh, is it? I didn't put that together until, literally, right now.

Brian

Wow, we do our homework here. We do.

Michael Chan

I like that, I like that, yeah. No, that was very intentional on my part. I wanted to get to a nice, clean number and then just pause without saying goodbye. Yeah. As you know, podcasting is a lot of work-

Brian

Yeah.

Michael Chan

... and it's a really big challenge. And I think that the podcasts that really make it are those that have figured out the sponsorship thing. And I was working with this really amazing network called Spec.fm, they had design details on there, it does not compute like a bunch of tools day, a lot of really cool podcasts. And they just gave me full control but then, managed the sponsorship part of it and it was awesome, I loved it. But sadly, they decided to shutter and things were changing. Coronavirus really changed the way that people consume podcasts which introduced a lot more work than we were doing and it was just a mess. And it was like, "You know what? It's probably time for us to move on to other projects that we wanted to do," and I felt the same. And I think one of the things that's really challenging about podcasting is you do this thing and you're talking with all these awesome people, with the exception of today, today you're stuck with me.

Brian

Yeah.

Michael Chan

But you're talking to all these ...

Brian

I thought you were saying that about me and I was like, "Wow, that's aggressive. We just met, but all right."

Michael Chan

No, no, no, no. I'm talking about all the other awesome people that you have on the show when I'm not here, but we're filling the spot, I guess. And so, I had this thing that happened where, every week, I was learning from people and I had no extra time between producing a show and my job to actually do fun stuff. I had all these learning resources that I wanted to make. I love teaching people or talks, product ideas randomly and I couldn't do it. And so, I just decided, "You know what? I really want to get more involved with community. I missed that hallway tracking conferences where I'm just hanging out with people, learning what they know." And so, that's the spot that Discord filled for me and, after a while, it became this thing that ... I don't know. It's really nice to just be around a lot of people, especially over the last 18 months when we've been, physically, around nobody. And so, I don't know. I just gave myself the freedom to be like, "You know what? I don't know what's going to happen but I'm doing this other thing now."

Brian

Yeah. No, look, I get it. We just just this and I forget how many episodes we've done. I think we must be at 70 or, maybe, 75. But-

Michael Chan

Nice.

Brian

Thank you. But there's a whole team and Kate, the producer, she hosts plenty of episodes, too. She does all the actual work. All the stuff you're describing, she's the one booking guests and I make the same joke over and over again. I'm just talk. She even put together notes that I ignore and then get yelled at later for like, " I did all this stuff and you just started talking." I go, "I know." But there are other hosts who will follow the script. But anyway, yeah, it is, for sure, a full-time job.

Michael Chan

Yeah. Kate, you're a hero, by the way.

Brian

She is.

Michael Chan

I'm just calling that out.

Brian

No, I agree wholeheartedly. She's on the video now, like "yes, I am." So, okay. Again, I get it. I think there's also that pressure to produce which, either you're not feeling it or for whatever reason, sometimes there is a break. When we had Wes and Scott on from Syntax, it was one of the first things I asked them. I was like, "How do you keep cranking these out?"

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

Their answer was ... I don't know. I'm paraphrasing but it was it like, "Well, we just talk"-

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

... "and, frankly, we don't take it all that seriously." At least the business part. They take the quality of the episode seriously, but not so much the sponsorships and all that stuff, which I admire.

Michael Chan

That is one thing. Oftentimes, when I was producing React Podcast, I did often wish that I had a show in that format where it's just me and my best friend talking about whatever. I'm not saying that that's any easier from a structure perspective, there's still a lot of planning that goes in. But I think that the parts that are difficult or there are different parts and, for me, I was always stressing out about finding somebody, making sure that all of the schedule's lined up and that we would have episodes to fill all the spots. Whereas, if it's just you and someone else that you're in business with, it's like, "Okay, we have a standing meeting at this time and we're going to talk about the next thing on our list." It's a very different type of show to produce and, I don't know, I envy that at times.

Brian

Yeah, agree. That's one of the things. Anytime you have a podcast that's mostly guest-based, you have to book those guests and hope that they show up when they say they will and all that stuff. And we've been really lucky, most of the time that happens but, sure, there's a whole ... Also, I don't know. If there were no guests and we were just talking, it was just me talking into a microphone, that would be weird. I don't know. I, for sure, couldn't do that.

Michael Chan

That's true. I think that that type of show, the different challenge is keeping your audience engaged for a longer period of time. Because, I think, one of the things that's really interesting about a guest-based show is that you're constantly pulling people in with topical interests. And so, you're always doing some level of outreach just by virtue of having someone who knows something talking with you for whatever amount of time versus having to always be coming up with that. And so, you have to really develop a really big core community in order to propagate a show that's just two or three or four people talking with the same people every week.

Brian

Sure, sure. Which is a great segue. That's what you've done with Lunch, right? There is a community there and I assume there's more than four people. Tell me more about that. What's the purpose? How did it start?

Michael Chan

So, yeah. So, it happened in a funny way. There were a handful of episodes that I had done with Chris Biscardi who runs Party Corgi Discord and we've had a couple conversations about community and, over and over again, this was coming up. There was this Chase Jarvis video clip from one of their podcasts and just talked about how no anything that was meaningful was ever done without first starting, focusing on community. And this was just rattling in my head about community, community, community because I've always been like I'm just going to sit in my room and I'm going to do a thing and then I'll share it. And, honestly, it scares me. The idea of putting something out into the world and then demanding that other people show up for it. It's a lot easier to just be like, "I put this thing out, I don't really care, it's very safe to whatever. I like it. Whatever".

And so, that idea of I'm going to create a space and it's going to feel empty for a really long time until people start fleshing it out was very scary to me. And I probably would have never done it if it weren't for Joe Warren who hit me up after an episode one time and was just like, "Hey, what's up? Where's the React Podcast community?" And I was like, "You're in it. It's just DMs with me." And he's like, "Well, here's the deal. If you start something on Discord or whatever, I'll show up." Then he did and he brought a lot of really great people from the React Dallas Meetup which is a really great meetup. It's online, so check it out online. React Dallas, really great meetup, really kind folks and I can vouch for them because so many of them flooded the React Podcast Discord and we started with a really good core group of people who are kind and curious and fun and it just really got the ball rolling in the right direction.

And I think, even today, it's been really awesome to see those characteristics of people continue on and we just have really ... I guess like a litmus test. Recently, we were able to talk about Web 3. And nobody was yelling at each other telling anyone else that they were stupid and it just felt like, "Hey, you know what? We can have constructive conversations about even things that just feel like there's no way you could have a constructive conversation about right now." And yeah, I'm just in love with it right now.

But yeah, to your original question, yeah. So, we started by just doing what I would call listen parties. Thursday, the day that React Podcast episodes went live, we would get together in lunchtime in Mountain Time because that's where most of the community was, the React Dallas community. And we would just, over lunch, listen to the React Podcast episode and have a little bit of a chat afterwards and it was really great. And that turned into people being like, "Hey, I have this thing that I'd like to share. I've never done a presentation or streaming or anything like that but I'd feel comfortable doing it here. Are you free Tuesday at lunch?" And so, it just became this thing where we're just repeatedly meeting and learning from each other and hearing these not fully polished but really interesting ideas. And yeah, it's something that really excited me.

The opportunity to see people in an environment that didn't have to be polished and perfect or where they were concerned about portraying themselves right because they had the safety of a community that was just going to be excited for them sharing no matter what. And, yeah, I'm just blabbering on about this but that stuff has just really made 2020 an exciting and bearable year for me or 2021. What are years anymore?

Brian

Yeah. If either one of them or both of them were bearable, then that's a huge accomplishment, I would think. A huge accomplishment.

Michael Chan

That's true. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we just have really great people in there. Who was it? Yeah, I am so bad with names that even the people that talk to every day, I can't remember their last name names. I always have to go by their handles or whatever but yeah. Yeah, Anthony, ajcwebdev on Twitter and Ben Myers, BenDMyers on Twitter, they've just really, Michael G., from day one just showed up and we're really driving stuff. So, really great, great folks.

Brian

So, it sounds, at least, like it started as a local community despite being in Discord. So, what I'm wondering is, what is it about this Discord that makes people feel comfortable you couldn't find in another platform? And I'm not asking you a sales question, I just mean is there something that you can think that is inherent or just made people feel comfortable other than, maybe, there weren't jerks there?

Michael Chan

Oh, man.

Brian

But yeah.

Michael Chan

That is a really tough question because I can only answer that for myself, I think. Which is, to be really honest, I tend to be fairly, I don't know what the word is, but asocial. I'm not anti-social but asocial. I got my computer, I got the web, I got my family, what else do I need? And so, the idea of community just felt like work to me. And so, for me, I had a really hard time diving into communities that already existed and I don't think that that's a good thing for a lot of reasons. Maintaining the base culture of a community is way more work than just engaging in a community that already exists. And so, in some ways, I'm kicking myself when I'm like, "Oh, do we have something for people this week," and that is difficult.

And so, yeah, I don't know. I feel like there are probably many communities out there. Party Corgi is awesome and there's really incredible people in there. Frontend Horse, also amazing Discord community. I'm trying to think of other ones. There's so many of them and I think that they're all slightly different and I know that a lot of people that are hanging out in ours, hang out in bunches of them. And, I don't know. I guess to answer your question, well, I think the people in this group are special. I think that there are equally special communities out there who are focusing on kindness, curiosity and just trying to be good to each other and foster positive environments instead of this tech Twitter flame war experience that we're regularly experiencing.

Brian

Yeah, Twitter's not a great place. At least tech Twitter. Well, no, I'll stick with that. Twitter is not a great place especially if you're looking for just overall positivity.

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

Although honestly, personally, I don't weigh it in. The only time I ever really get yelled at from the internet, which I'm not. If you're listening to this, I'm not inviting it so try not to do that. But I find that the programming subreddit is probably the harshest for just general. If our content makes it on /r/programming, I just know. I know I'm going to get it unless it's perfect, which I don't really feel terrible about. You know what I mean? But after giving it some thought, I think there are some parallels between the different or the number of communities out there or even, let's just say, communities that are in Discord that leaves out ... I actually don't know. Is there a Discord aspect for Dev 2?

Michael Chan

Oh, that's a good question.

Brian

I don't know-

Michael Chan

I don't know.

Brian

... Am I supposed to say Dev.2 or Dev 2? Could someone help me out with that? I don't know yet. I've heard it both ways.

Michael Chan

I also want to know because I always say Dev 2.

Brian

Yeah, that's what makes sense saying but I've heard both. If you represent Dev 2 or Dev.2, please tweet at one of us. Anyways, what I'm saying though is you've got all these communities and, also, you have all of these instructors and teachers.

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

And one of the first things that I asked Jessica Chan when she was on a while ago, she's been on twice, but a while ago was, "What do you think about all of these different ... Is there room for all of these instructors?" And she was like, "Well, not every instructor is for every person. So, there's enough."

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

And I think that's probably true for communities as well. Each community, you can find your own little niche. Am I making sense? Because-

Michael Chan

Yeah. No, I think that makes a lot of sense and I think that as a participant or more on that consumer side of community, having more of them is great because you can pick and choose as it makes sense for you. And I think that so much of content is going into variety education or variety content. So, you have a show and it's less about a topic. I experienced this with React Podcast. I produced about six episodes of React Podcast where we talked about React until I was like, "This is boring for me." And it turned into more of a holistic type of frontend thing. I feel that variety is really important if you can let go of the fact that someone's going to listen to every episode of your show. I think that more shows are going that direction of how can we learn from the experts in our field and we don't have to get it perfect. And I think that is the differentiator for communities that are going to move forward in the next five years and those that are going to fizzle out.

I think that there is a huge motion toward community styles of working and learning together and I think that's just going to carry on. So, many of the conversations that we have in the Lunch Dev Discord is people are doing their job on the fly and they're asking their trusted friends. They're like, "Oh, hey. I'm in a Discord with so and so who does Readex." Matt Zukowski is someone that I always just hit up, part of the Readex core team and just so many people are like, "Hey, Matt. I have a Readex question." And that part of thing, that community working together, I feel like it's just going to take off. So, I don't even know what I'm saying.

Collaborative work, I think in so many ways, that whole space is just going to totally change and I'm really excited to be part of that and seeing people be open about the things that they don't know. Because that's the thing-

Brian

Yeah.

Michael Chan

... that I want. I want people to be like, "Hey, I know that I should know this as a 15-year engineer, but I don't. Can someone explain it to me like I'm five?" And then, have other people who are just starting say like, "Oh, that is someone that I would expect to know everything and they're being humble and honest about not knowing this thing and that makes me feel like, 'Oh, I've only known it for six months but I know more than they do on this thing.'" And that sharing of knowledge from any place in your career is just really the most beautiful thing but everyone has to get over whether it's your imposter syndrome or the fact that you feel like you earned it and get to tell everyone what to do all the time. Whatever it is, putting that aside for a minute and just being open to learning from each other, I'm obsessed with it.

Brian

There is something very freeing about getting to the point, either personally or in your career, where ... And this is my own soapbox but it's so much more work to keep up appearances and pretend that you're an expert. You could still be an expert and not know everything, right? But create this image where it would be deeply disappointing or at least you believe it would be deeply disappointing to admit that you're not omnipotent. And it's very liberating to be like, "I don't know how to do this." And then, also, once you say that, other people are like, "Yeah, I don't really know how to do that either," or, "I do but I don't know how to do this."

And I think, yeah, that's one of the things that I've actually always really liked about creating content for web devs or just technical people in general. If we publish a blog post that's imperfect, like the author makes a mistake, more often than not, we get a comment that's just like, "Hey, there's a typo here or I think you did miss this." Nobody's in the comments, most of the time, being like, "Man, you're an idiot." Well, you're the one reading the tutorial and you don't know how to do it." So, yeah, there are some things like that.

Michael Chan

Oh, yeah. That reminds me of something Dan Abramov said and I think it was people talking about, I don't know. There was a conversation, I think, happening about accents in tech and it happens a lot. A lot of Western developers expect everything to be delivered in a perfect Western accent or American accent. And he said something interesting which is like, "When I speak in English, I'm doing it for you," and that's a really profound concept. He's already going above and beyond to try to make that content accessible for us and the fact that we just sit around and just nitpick about all of these minor, little things, that's not our best. We're not at our best when we're doing that. And yeah, I don't know.

I joke sometimes... I gave this talk about three years ago, called Hot Garbage: Clean Code is Dead and it's, I don't know. You have to watch the talk in order for it to all make sense but it was really about me coming to grips with the fact that after, I don't know, 13 or so years in this industry, I was now the person who was a jerk because I thought I knew stuff and I needed to get over that. And so, now, I just joke that my job is just to fall on my face in public and let people teach me stuff and I love doing that. I don't know, I feel like the better we all get at that and the more we can just be secure with knowing that it takes all of us to do good work, we're just all better off for it.

Brian

Yeah, I agree. I feel like now's the time to ... It just got really wholesome. Got really wholesome really quickly. Let's go the other way for a second and be-

Michael Chan

Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's just burn some stuff.

Brian

I actually don't know how you feel about this because I don't know how I feel about it either. Do you think that there is a place for, we'll call them corporate communities.

Michael Chan

Interesting.

Brian

And I really haven't thought about this at all. But what if, say, LogRocket were to start a Discord and attempt a community.

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

Is that something that could happen or should happen? I don't really know where it would fit in the ecosystem at all.

Michael Chan

Yeah, it is interesting. I think that there are a lot of people doing that. We just saw you know Next has a discord. I work at Chromatic who maintains and leads Storybook and we have a Storybook Discord for that. Super Bass has a pretty thriving Discord. There's tons of Discords for products, specifically, and I think there's a lot of space for that, for sure. I think how you build the community, do you see that as just an outlet or do you see it as an ingress point for bringing people in and supporting that community? That's the part that's really questionable.

Brian

Oh, for sure. And I think that in some of those cases, if the product is open sourced, then you've got goodwill on your side to begin with.

Michael Chan

Right, yup.

Brian

But if you're a straight up for-profit enterprise, yeah, of course people are going to be suspicious. Like, "If they join this, is a salesperson going to call me at some point?" You know?

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

And I don't blame them for thinking that. I do think and I talk about this occasionally that I do think it's funny when, let's say, one of our posts gets to the front page of Hacker News and someone will be like, "LogRocket is blatantly engaging in content marketing", and that's like, "Uh-huh, yup. That's true. That's what we're doing." We're giving you free stuff, hopefully, you like it and that the quality is good but yeah, the idea here is for you to like us and, at the very least, at some point, when the time comes, you can look at the product and see if it works for you or not.

A community has to be ... Well, now I'm just drifting and I'm just straight up marketing talk. But it has to be way further up. There should be community managers who actively fight against that and say, "We could run hackathons or challenges," and that might be one way to build goodwill. But at no time should you be like, "Hey, we launched a new feature that you definitely don't care about right now because that's not on the top of your mind," you know what I mean?

Michael Chan

Yeah, yeah.

Brian

Yeah.

Michael Chan

Yeah, it's tricky because I feel like communities take on a life of their own and, if you start it, you have to be along for the ride. I don't know if I can say this but people call bullshit fast in communities. And so, they either leave or they call you out and everybody leaves as a group. And so, I don't know. You have to start that vision but you never know where it's going to go and I think that's probably the coolest part of it. Just seeing people come in and take ownership of it. And I have to call out Adrianne Malet who is one of the moderators in the Lunch Dev Discord and she's just always just going above and beyond to make sure that we understand the importance of doing things in an accessible way.

So, alt text for images and all that kind of stuff and that has been a huge learning opportunity for me to do that. And yes, do I see it as a real big pain in the butt to add all of that alt text, a big wall of alt text for an image, whatever? Yeah, every time. I'm like, "Oh, man." But then, I always think like, "What would Adrianne think if I didn't do this?" And that community pressure to do better and do the right thing is challenging and rewarding and I feel like if you're up for the journey of learning from your community, then there's nothing better. If you can, as a company be like, "We're going to learn," then I think that, yeah, do it.

But if you're like, "We're going to enforce the way that we think about the world on a community," it's never going to happen. People are just going to call it out right away and then you just have a glorified blog. You can just post stuff to a blog and it's a lot less work than having to maintain a community. Just post stuff somewhere else.

Brian

But the blogs are so dumb and one of the... No, I agree with you and I still don't have an answer on whether or not people would accept a community. You have to earn it, you have to earn some trust and that's true. And so, once you've done that, then you actually have to foster regular community stuff and at no time can you treat it like a source for leads which is-

Michael Chan

Yeah, that-

Brian

... sometimes the... You know what I mean? That would be a horrible idea and you'd never come back for it. Maybe nobody would ever trust you and, maybe, rightfully so. It's like, " I'm good."

Michael Chan

Yeah, you have to be really careful on that front. I've been really reticent too. I know a number of communities will subscribe you to a newsletter, I think with the best intentions, as you sign up for the Discord but it's tricky. It's a balance because you don't want to feel like a product, you want to feel like community and I don't know. I would never profess to say that I know much about it at all except for what I'm learning from people around me.

Brian

No. Like I said, I don't know the answer either. What I do know is, okay, so there are a bunch of open-source tools and they have Discords and those are communities and, eventually, in many cases, especially the ones that have taken funding, they're going to monetize at some point. So-

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

... then what happens?

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

I don't know and I'm not passing judgment, I don't think that I'm in a position where I can do that. I work at a company that looks to make money so that's-

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

You know what I mean?

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

But I do think that even for people who don't work at a company and moderate a community, well, you know what I'm saying, the company is not sponsoring the community.

Michael Chan

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brian

They still feel weird about sponsorships in the same way that YouTube creators are like, "I don't know if I definitely want to take ads."

Michael Chan

Yeah, yeah, because it's tricky. You really have to present what the value is to the community. You need to provide enough value to the community to justify the take that you're making and that's always a weird thing.

Brian

Yeah.

Michael Chan

The interesting thing to me, though, is that a lot of people are very eager to support that value. You see a lot of people like, "I've been blown away." I didn't really understand Twitch until this year, I still don't understand it but Twitch is really fascinating because money flies around that platform. It is bewildering to me. If you told me there's a place where people just get on and they talk about stuff and then people throw money at them, I'd be like, "Yeah, that place doesn't exist." Yeah, it absolutely does on Twitch and people are making tons of money and people are absolutely like, "Take my money," about it. And that blows me away, blows me away and I feel like they're doing something right.

That's the thing that's really fascinating to me. Content creators, right now, are figuring out ways to have people just be really excited about what's happening, a community, having someone listen to them from the other side of the world. It's something we're all hungry for and, I don't know, we're just at the beginning of it. With more and more jobs going remote and people being further displaced from people who understand them, share their interests, share their work experience. And yeah, we're creating all these new digital neighborhoods and it's really fun to see in real time.

Brian

Did you make that up? Digital neighborhoods?

Michael Chan

I don't know. I'd say it from time to time. I'm sure that someone else incepted that into my head.

Brian

Well, I like it. So, for our purposes, we'll say that you made it up.

Michael Chan

I made it up for this podcast episode, yeah.

Brian

Okay. So, my last question for you is something that I've asked other folks and something I've thought about a lot is the, okay, the complexity of the front-end landscape but then, also, the popular frameworks. And so, there used to be the Big Three and, now, it's the Big Four if we include Svelte-

Michael Chan

Yup.

Brian

... when does it end? Is it the Big Five, is it the Big Six? It has become the accounting firm? Big Four, right? Big Four, yeah.

Michael Chan

It's the Big Four, yeah. That is an exciting thing. I'm excited that we're going to be here for it in real time to see how that plays out. It's really tricky. I think that I have had really mixed feelings about this, specifically in the last year, as I've seen Svelte do a lot of things that I was happy that React didn't do. And so, I feel very fractured in my brain because it's like, "Oh, I love the fact that React is," as they famously say, like, "It's just JavaScript." I have learned more about JavaScript as a React developer than I have at any other point in my learning of JavaScript. That was a really awkward way to say that but I think that it makes sense.

And so, with something like Svelte, that goes away a little bit. It's very much less true in Svelte, that learning Svelte would make you a better JavaScript developer because it makes you a better Svelte developer. And yeah, there's going to be a lot of opportunities to write better JavaScript and better TypeScript inside of his Svelte app but it doesn't demand it in the same way that React does. And so, I don't know, there's something very interesting happening there and I'm super excited about it. I think that those of us that have been programming for the last, I don't know, what, 12, 15 years believe that adage of always bet on JavaScript, but maybe not. Maybe not anymore, maybe it's not true in the future. Everything is just compiled to JavaScript. I don't know.

Brian

How would you know? I don't expect you to have an actual answer for this but how do you know when it gets to the point where it's maybe not, maybe everything's compiled? Is it just when adoption goes through the roof and that just becomes the de facto standard?

Michael Chan

Yeah, I don't know. But there's some interesting things happening, though. Right?

Brian

Yeah.

Michael Chan

Why is there so much attention on Rust in the frontend space? So many things are getting rebuilt in Rust.

Brian

Yeah.

Michael Chan

And then, TypeScript is just dominating right now. It's just absolutely amazing the ascent of TypeScript. And then, also, there's so much interest in Svelte which is its own freaking thing. Yeah, it supports TypeScript but it's in everything entirely like you're writing Svelte.

Brian

Yeah.

Michael Chan

And so, what's happening?

Brian

I don't know.

Michael Chan

For all of our talk about always bet on JavaScript, there's a lot of people not betting on JavaScript right now in the front-end space and that's fascinating to me.

Brian

So, we noticed that and we started creating Rust tutorials because I think that there was a dearth of resources outside of the official book on how I want to learn Rust, I don't really know where to go. And then, I would see our posts make it to the Rust subreddit and they did well, fortunately. And I've said this a billion times, but Rust community is very passionate and, if you make a little mistake, you're, for sure, going to hear about it and that's totally cool with me. But I did notice a bunch of times, a lot of comments like, "LogRocket is doing this, they have nothing to do with Rust. So, why are they doing that?"

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

And then there was, "Well, it's because there's this huge interest in it from the frontend and that's what they're doing." It's interesting to see them figure it out and be like, "Why are all of these frontend folks just turning up?"

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

And, yeah. They're smart people, they figured it out really quickly. So, yeah, it's very interesting.

Michael Chan

Something's happening and, yeah, I don't even I have no idea where to begin understanding where but yeah, where it's going. But it's something that I'm very excited about because I think that there are a lot of gains to be had there. I feel like some people see it, not everybody does, but it does feel like, in some ways, the future is not going to be writing JavaScript which is weird for me because I always prefer to bet on standards. I had a brief stint six years ago now where I was like, "Oh, yeah, CSS and JS is awesome." And then I was like, "Oh, no. Actually ..." As soon as I had to style parts of our applications that existed in two types of frameworks, I was like, "Oh, no. This absolutely does not work across those framework boundaries as standards." But I don't know, it is JavaScript. I just never thought that anything would come for it. But Rust and TypeScript are definitely on its heels.

Brian

If you have thoughts about what Michael just said, you should go to the Lunch Discord and tell him why he's wrong.

Michael Chan

But kindly and curiously.

Brian

Yes, kindly and curiously and why you believe and be open to feedback on why you yourself might be mistaken. Or, leave a comment when this is on YouTube and you'll hurt. Actually, we get really nice comments, so whatever.

Michael Chan

Good, good. I'm happy to hear that.

Brian

Yeah, I don't know. People are nice, for the most part.

Michael Chan

Yeah.

Brian

At least. No, I'm sticking with that. This has been a very positive episode, I'm sticking with people are nice for the most part.

Michael Chan

If you treat them with respect and give them attention, I feel like everyone has has kindness in them.

Brian

That's really good advice. That's a great place to stop, I think. This is usually the portion of the podcast where I ask, would you like to plug anything? People, you think, deserve more attention? Now is your time.

Michael Chan

Yeah. So, I mentioned a handful of people in the Discord. I think if you felt so inclined to join our Discord, you would see these people right away, they're constantly producing a lot of really good stuff. As I mentioned, Anthony's doing FSJam Podcast which has a lot of really great episodes. And then, Ben Myers is doing some Antics Dev Twitch stream and blogs at BenDMeyers, a lot of really killer accessibility stuff. Yeah, I think those are two people who are, I don't know, I just want to pitch them anytime I can and I'm sure that I'm forgetting people and, for that, I am sorry.

Oh, Lindsay Wardell is doing Views on Vue, really great stuff. So, yeah, if you want to meet all these people, yeah, again, it's discord.gg/lunchdev and, yeah, just come hang out with us, teach us what you know, learn from some really awesome people. That's really all I have to pitch, is just the great people that I'm surrounded by.

Brian

We'll put all their links in the description for this. If there's Twitter or we'll just put the Lunch link and just walk in and be like, "I'm interested in meeting everybody." Those can be your options, too.

Michael Chan

Great. Awesome.

Brian

I enjoyed this a lot. So, thanks for coming on.

Michael Chan

Thanks for having me. This has been an absolute pleasure and I'm a big fan of what you all are doing, so keep doing it. If you're so inclined, make that community, I think a lot of people would show up and you'll learn a ton.

Brian

Okay, but if I get yelled at for being a corporate community, I'd be like, "Listen, we were told by people with more credibility than us that it would be cool." So, all right. A pleasure, Michael. We'll talk later.

Michael Chan

Yeah, next time.

Brian

See you. Thanks for listening to PodRocket. Find us at PodRocketpod on Twitter or you could always email me even though that's not a popular option. It's brian@logrocket.