Welcome back everyone. This is the change log where I'm ever supported blog, podcast and weekly email that covers fresh and this new in open source. You can check out the blog at the change log.com our pass shows at 5 by 5 TV slash change log and subscribe to the change log weekly. It's our weekly email coming everything.
It's our open source radar. You can subscribe at the change log.com slash weekly and we ship that every study morning so you can enjoy your Saturday in bliss learning about the new and fun stuff and open source. But this show is for myself, Adam Stikoviak and Andrew Thorpe. Andrew say hello.
How are we going? It's a good week man. I'm excited to have this show man. I wanted to talk about this for a while but good times.
Yeah I kind of dropped the ball on it actually. I asked Kaitlyn if we could do this a few months ago and he said yes or send me any notes and information to us about it. Oh man. We'll have to point out the truth.
We're getting a true apology to Kaitlyn here in a bit we talked to him but this is episode 111 and today's show is sponsored by Digital Ocean and also TopTow. We'll tell you a bit more about TopTow here in just a bit but a quick mention for them the Connect Startups businesses and organizations to a growing network of elite engineers around the world and they're hoping that you're that elite engineer so stay tuned for a mention here in a bit later on the show for them but Digital Ocean a fan favorite and certainly a fan of open source as well as a huge supporter for the changelog so we're always excited to tell you what they're up to but if this is the first time we're here at about them Digital Ocean is a simple cloud hosting provider built for developers so if that's you your developer they build it just for you like literally just for you pricing plans for the only five bucks a month for a half a gig over a 20 gigs of SSD drive space one CPU and one terabyte of transfer and Digital Ocean has data centers not only here in the United States in New York and San Francisco but also across the pond where not far from where Kaitlyn's at in the internet. Digital Ocean has a lot of features that really help developers get their apps launched as quickly as possible they have a service with full root access so the moment you spin it up full root access you can deploy that in 55 seconds and for a faster launch you can spin them up with a Ruby on Rails install Docker or even Ghost which we had on the show back in 105 already pre-installed so applications ready for from a one click. Additionally they offer feature that have a vast collection I'm sorry they also offer a vast collection of tutorials that cover configuring and optimizing your service so if you're like me you spin up that server you're like I don't want to go they've got pretty much a tutorial for every configuration whether it's a lamp stack or it's in GINX or whatever it is they've literally got to talk of your back and get you up and get you up and run but we have a brand new promo code for for this month of November and I think maybe for a couple more months but this one is changelog sent me or repeat that one more time changelog sent me you can try Digital Ocean today for free using that promo code which will get you ten dollars of hosting credit or basically two months free and to DigitalOcean.com to get started and thank you to Digital Ocean for your support today we're joined by Kaitlyn Mann he is from hoodie he's rocking it out and as Andrew mentioned he's going to look at the little apology to say so maybe just right there Andrew.
Well I don't know I think I already apologize to Kaitlyn personally but yeah he was excited to come on the show I think the first time too and I told him maybe it was a good thing because some some pretty big news for hoodie absolutely so maybe he's going to get him on now but yeah once you go ahead Kaitlyn and just kind of introduce yourself and in hoodie and what you're doing. Sure so hello from sunny England I'm Kaitlyn McMahon and you may know me from kind of Node JS land if you do any Node work I've kind of done work with the async module Node unit various other things in Node and now I'm doing work with the hoodie team and working on hoodie which is what we like to call kind of a no back end project and what we mean by that is that it lets you build complete applications complete data driven applications without worrying about the back end so entirely using front end JavaScript. So no back end that is something that is at no back end that work is that something that you guys have participated in or just like a kind of a mindset you're buying into. Well that's what's set up by Greger who's also kind of one of the founders of hoodie and it's kind of it's an idea that we're trying to put out there too I suppose discuss some of the things that we thought about in the hoodie project more widely and how they apply in various other spaces and so we're not the only provider of what we would call a no back end solution but we want to kind of really explore what that means for web development.
You know it turns out there's quite a few interesting things that happen when you consider your application as being separate from the back end so I mean for one it's quite empowering so we often we have this idea in the hoodie project of jQuery developer and what we mean by that is someone who can you know design great sites does you know great interactions on the front end but doesn't necessarily know everything about all the back end technology is the full stack because you know what happens if you're a front end developer and you want to do a web app you could you could design it you can make some really nice interface but as soon as you have to hook up you know persistence emails payments all that kind of stuff all of a sudden you have to learn about MySQL you have to learn about PHP you have to be able to administer Linux or find a service that will do that and it's you know it may as well be rocket science at that point I mean you know it's just way too much to learn it's not you know it's not interested it's not your job and so by making it accessible to developers that just aren't interested in all that stuff we're hoping that one we can empower people to participate in making the web that wouldn't otherwise be able to and that's an important thing I think sometimes we forget most of us are full stack developers or you kind of do a bit of front end of the back end you know programming is a really empowering thing to be able to do and the more people that can participate in making the web the better it's going to be for all of us so so that's that's kind of one one nice thing about approaching web apps in a slightly different way right and the no back end a little bit of a misnomerite it's not that there is no back end it's that there is it's a generic you're not creating the back end there's no back end it's a generic back end and some assumptions are made right I think that their value assumptions and it hits the you know most use cases which are there's user accounts there's like some sort of data source emails you know then there's some more specific higher level stuff which is like sharing data between people payments all that stuff but you're making assumptions right and so somebody had to come up with these ideas and say all right the generic back end has to support this this this and this is right yeah exactly I mean ultimately this is a discussion about platforms really it's a it's not no back end it's a pre-packaged back end we're providing and you're right we have to kind of second guess what people want but you know 90% of the time it's it's really easy to guess what people want from the web app that you know they want to count same on storage all that kind of stuff yeah but I think where the no back end part comes in is really how you design your application so what we want to do is kind of disentangle the app from all the implementation details of sending emails and all that kind of stuff right if you could think in terms of the intent of your application rather than you know all the messy details of actually doing it then you get much cleaner code and you get much kind of smaller code for a start which is great for maintaining software but but also I think it's more portable because instead of saying okay I need to download some dependencies maybe node mailer I need to set up some kind of email service or find one to pay for online I need to point node mailer at the SMTP service I can send an email instead of getting kind of bogged down in all the actual deployment details you can just say hoodie.email.send from the front end and that's that's just the way you're out kind of specifies its intent right so I think at the it's called no back end and we'll get into hoodie specifically but just kind of lean of foundation it's called no back end so it's kind of obviously like a I don't know a play on the no SQL stuff and the data store part of no back end which I would argue is probably the the most important other than user accounts it kind of relies on no SQL to an extent right because you just have to be able to store kind of arbitrary data instead of modeling the data specifically in like a relational database yeah absolutely I mean if you look at the team we all kind of have a couch DB background so there's there's some there's definitely some nicely well couch DB influence in the design we've used for hoodie and it turns out that's a really good design for for this kind of API right because especially if you've been doing couch apps which you know the original design for hoodie kind of came out of the couch app idea you had to do some quite crazy things in order to make permissions work and sign up and making it all secure from the front end and so we've actually had quite a lot of practice doing things that seem kind of crazy to most people at the time right think you know things like being able to write to a database from the front end you know most people would have throw their hand up in the air and scream and run away at that point a year ago that was like people looked at that it's just a pipe dream that would never happen right exactly but most of our team a year ago we were all doing it right we were deploying apps doing that and that's the difference so okay this is a we've had this kind of a system is right where architecture but we have the spec being no back end and then kind of the implementation being hoodie so can you talk about like where what comes first the chicken or the egg so with hoodie and no back end kind of what was the order of operations for that so chronologically hoodie came first I think yeah but I think in terms of goals no back end is the bigger goal for us you know if someone comes along and builds another hoodie that's way better then that's great yeah you know mission accomplished we don't have to do any more work yeah it's a spec driven by implementation right so you kind of proven the concept with hoodie and then you can kind of generalize it into the no back end spec to kind of promote this sort of development that I mean that really kind of we talked about this with the open karma stuff like it kind of bridges the gap between front end well kind of between designer front end and back end right like it makes it a lot easier for people to do the whole stack or to not have to worry about the whole stack so that's good and so hoodie is the implementation that's driving no back end for you guys right now um before we talk about hoodie is there any other do you guys know of anyone else that's kind of that's running with the no back end stuff and working in kind of like competition hoodie um there are certainly competing ideas out there when it comes to actually implementing the specs and the ideas that we've come up with in no back end no not really not that I'm aware of but in terms of competing ideas back end as a service has been around for a while now and that's things like as always fire base if you're familiar with that that's kind of a real time back end that's quite popular the various other ones mostly targeted at mobile so if you're a mobile app developer you don't really want to have to count up with the whole server just to a high score table or something right and so there are quite a few services that do user accounts and storage and a bunch of backend stuff for you as a service there are very few actually open source things that you can run yourself though and also they have a slight excuse me they have a slight uh slightly different approach in the way they target users I think we're trying to make it accessible to the front end developer they are targeting people who already do developments but perhaps just don't want to develop back end this time that's like me it's like I think me and that's not that's you know I I plugged this if you're a subscriber to the change a little weekly mention that in the intro but if you subscribe that we did cover this in issue nine about a month back and open source moves fast we try to keep up as best as we possibly can too but um Kaitlyn you you presented it you presented hoodie not long ago to it uh lxds and you kind of had a nice presentation there Jan is also on your team you mentioned team and you all were building this stuff a year ago and doing this uh you know run to the database from the front end a year ago who is the team behind and kind of what's the give a shot to the team I guess and kind of give some lay the land of what they've done or what you all have done over the past couple years to kind of get you to where you're at now sure so um well I've already introduced myself uh mostly a no-dess and cash to be background there's Jan who was kind of um one of the core people in couch DB these days he's lots of people will know Jan already he goes to lots of conferences and speaks and um is very kind of very good at hooking us up with the right people in the community um there's Alex who's also in Berlin where uh Jan is he's kind of like a designer kind of front end of the background which is very useful to us in the team to have someone with that perspective and he does a lot of work on the um the admin interface and kind of influencing the API there's Gregor who kind of you know way kind of came up with the original idea um in that it kind of grew out of a project called minutes.io which was a minute taking app that Gregor wrote and it was written the implemented as a couch app um so running on couch DB and he ran into some limitations and had to do some redesign and eventually coming up with the right way of doing that is what became HODI later on um there's also Lina who is our kind of uh she's does all the writing for HODI so the communications the blog post that kind of stuff uh keeps it on track and the communication stuff so it's great to have her on the team that really helps um and also we have Sven who was in London but now has also moved to Berlin uh who's just kind of turned up one day and contributed loads of code uh and now he's well he seems to be doing everything. He's actually Sven is also isn't he on the as well. That's right yeah and we'll have him bow around in a few weeks um maybe next week I can't remember exactly but yeah so this is pretty neat so you have a team of six that are working on HODI are you guys full time or um you have a a weekly sponsor for HODI which I think it's public knowledge it's a thousand euros a week is the rate is that right? Um yeah I think that's how we check yeah so that obviously isn't enough to pay six people so how does that work with you guys are you guys sure awful time or what's that like uh increasingly we're working on it um much much closer to full time uh we're all kind of uh lucky in the sense that we can we can mix up our work uh we'll do a bit of freelance and some other things to kind of keep things running smoothly um but increasingly we're doing just more and more HODI work and that has been sponsors um kind of paid for so far by sponsorship uh so our first sponsor was NLNet if you look it up on the blog we have a kind of big blog post about NLNet they gave us um a grant that that is billed to the plugin architecture uh which is kind of a really big thing we released recently but we'll talk about that a little bit later uh and then we have the yeah the commit sponsors which is you know really interesting idea I haven't seen any other projects do this uh so what you can do is you can um sponsor the team for a week and we will put a banner up on the home page saying this because sponsored by you know whoever uh we will also kind of tweet your message and say you know thanks for sponsoring us uh but interestingly we will also put your message in our commits and so we have a system in place with all the co-computers that we will update our commit message so the first you know usually on um a git commit the first line is kind of the key information and below that you can have additional stuff yeah so inside the extended info we will put your sponsor message and so this week we are sponsored by human JavaScript uh and so they have if you look at our commits for this week that you will see the um sponsor message in there and it will link to um the human JavaScript book uh so yeah it's it's a pretty idea I like the idea honestly it's uh I wonder how the rest of the community feels about that like if you got any feedback on like issues or whatever or line level commits or line level comments or whatever about oh what's this doing here at first but I think it's a unique I think we have to be creative in this work is we all know open source is hard we all know that open source doesn't exactly get you know in this case um you know sponsored by everybody in the world or you know we don't have the engine ours to facilitate you know rubinius or whatever forever that's gonna end at some point so we have to be creative in the way we you know kind of line up these kinds of technologies and sponsor the people making them so I think this is a huge thing that's I think it's pretty neat yeah you guys are kind of pioneering it and trying I'm sure you're trying a couple of different methods so you guys can kind of you know you're gonna prove concepts in all over the place of hoodie with the app itself with you know fundraising and stuff like that we like to think big that's what it is so I want to ask because I'm sure a lot of people are wondering this what is hoodie like where does that name come from what does it mean oh well um the name kind of predates me but I've heard the story um it's uh so um Jan and Gregor and possibly Alex I'm not sure about that time we're trying to come up with the name and it was um very difficult to kind of come up with anything I think at the time it was called couch apps the next generation or something like that yeah and I wanted something that was just a temporary name you want something more snappy uh and at some point Jan got up and uh said oh you know I'm just gonna get my hoodie because he's going to leave and he goes ah hoodie that's perfect um and he said okay if we can get hooded.ie as a domain name then we'll have it and and it was available.
That's awesome yeah it's cool we haven't really got domain. It's like we had a company that I worked at before we struggled with uh or we talked about a lot we created our own brand similar to hoodie I mean nothing like hoodie but you know same kind of idea where the name of our company kind of meant nothing and we kind of bumped we ran into a lot of obstacles like you're trying to educate people on what your company does uh with a name that might not have anything to do with what you do so there was some um you know struggles there ultimately we ended up rebranding with a name that made more sense and we kind of found some growth there have you guys run into anything like that where people are like I don't know what hoodie is and kind of you know throw you out at first glance just because of the name or anything. Um well that's that's an interesting one uh so far the feedback app has been pretty positive but then I guess if they threw out the project at first glance we would never reverse one so yeah um interestingly in the UK hoodies are um there's kind of like a political headline associated with hoodies as petty criminals so it's uh interesting responses here but in most other countries know. Yeah that's a reminder of Canada they got uh if you're a goof in Canada Canadians out there you know what I'm gonna mention is a pretty derogatory thing but if you're a goof it's not good.
Yeah I don't want I think we should move along. I don't know what we're talking about here so let's talk about the news with hoodie which was the plug-in system and I think that's kind of what re-sparked I was like oh yeah I forgot about hoodie I need to reach out to him again so let's talk about the plug-in system and in your path to get that done with uh what was it NL what was it called? NL net. NL net and let's talk about what is the plug-in system and and how did that kind of come about?
Um yeah so the plug-in system is a way for you to extend hoodie functionality and that means extending the back end so you can kind of hook no JS workers into our data store and you get change events on tasks and you can kick off things like sending emails or whatever um also you can extend the front end API so that's that's not something that usually happens with plug-ins you know usually it's kind of back end code or something like that in the case of a framework but it was really important to us that the API is kind of like the first place that's that's where the beginnings of all our code is um so whenever we come up with the feature we we start with the API first we have this idea of um this concept called dream code and so we act like sit down and just write out what we want to do in terms of perfect code in our heads at least and then we think really hard about how we can make that possible and sometimes you know the implementation is really difficult but it starts with a really nice simple API um so it's important to us that plug-ins also extend the front end code so you could expose these beautiful APIs and thirdly you can extend the admin interface which is called pocket so you just drop some HTML and JavaScript and style sheets or whatever into a folder and it will get served up in our admin panel so you could also as well as being able to send emails you can also have a dashboard that says how many was sent or whatever yeah so the NL net kind of sponsored this this idea of plug-ins with you guys yeah well the thing with plugins was it's it's a big chunk of work to kind of rewrite a whole bunch of the back end architecture and lots of other things to make plugins happen um and the thing was we couldn't drag it out for too long because it would have been validated a lot of other community effort on the other side so you know before we were accepting full requests on one branch of code and we're doing plugins on another you know they're gonna get out of sync and it just creates for it so it's important to be able to do it as quickly as possible and actually dedicate enough time to get it right and communicate it properly and write documentation all that kind of stuff and so the money from an l-net meant that we could really focus on that for you know several weeks at a time and get out of the door can i do you have any kind of backlash with with getting out of sync or did you kind of challenge on and beat it i think it went fine yeah so no big problems to speak of awesome so i was looking for a tweet and this is one thing i think that you guys wrote the i think it was a blog post you wrote about offline first and it like sparked this just frenzy of i mean i saw it like hodie on tweet on twitter just like below up all of a sudden and i think one of the first ones i read was ethomark wrote gosh exactly about this whole offline first deal on like one of those blogs the kids are talking about obviously that's ethan talking like ethan but kind of the point is you sparked this huge frenzy when you guys did offline first and talk about that what was that like and is that kind of the biggest kind of news headline you guys have gotten so far um sure i don't know if it's the biggest yeah i just i hope it is i mean that's great um you know we like coming up with concepts i think we are used to doing things in quite strange ways in our team we have quite a special connection of people and um it's really fun being able to actually discuss it but the whole community at part so it's great when we get this kind of response offline first is i mean it's amazing it's not a thing already that's i keep thinking this with hodie hodie projects you know how can people aren't doing offline first already you know every time i go on the tube in London and i lose connection how can people don't do offline first that's crazy yeah um whereas you know now we have the tools available in the browser we have local storage we have index tv um in our case you know there's pouch so we can do catch-d-b-replication direct from the browser um i mean you could even include js get from tim caswell you could replicate um get repository whatever um so there's loads of tools available now to do really powerful offline experiences um and to think of your data the same way offline as online is a really interesting thing and that's something that we're all used to doing in the catch-d-b community because um we've had this idea of local apps running on couch for a long time where you replicate data between nodes and and so you know the idea of treating your data the same whether you're online or offline it is kind of amazing it's not just you know we don't we want it to just be some cached read-only copy of the data it's like oh i'm offline but at least i can see what i had we want you to continue to write new things record to do items or calendar appointments and for it to synchronize when you get a connection back um then you know we have the tools to do that now we should really be thinking in terms of offline first and so one of the guiding principles in hoodie is that all the api is that um we have in terms of in hoodie are based on a very simple mechanism that means you can continue to use them if you're offline so obviously if you're offline and you try to send emails not going to send but we will record in your local storage the fact that you intend to send an email and once you get a connection it will synchronize up to the hoodie server and hoodie will send it can somebody let's say i got a couple questions about this let's say somebody kind of wants to push into that queue when they're offline and then and they decide i guess it doesn't really make sense but they decide they no longer want to do that is there any way for them to like manage that queue yeah so um the queue is just your user database so i should probably explain something about the architecture of the other point um when you sign up every user gets their own own personal database and that's in couch to be recreated database and it's just assigned to you and no one else can read it but you can read and write to it and that's where we synchronize all your data too and so when you're working offline you are you can create um task documents in the case of sending an email and these are special documents that have like a prefixed ID that kind of indicate that it's a task and they get picked up by the plugins in the back end and so if you wanted to send an email then cancel it what would happen is you would create the task documents in your personal offline version of your data's database then you could potentially cancel it and delete it and it would send it up to the server but it would say by the way this was deleted so gotcha another thing you one of the blog posts there the big bowl decides as we can't keep building apps with a desktop mindset of permanent fast connectivity where a temporary disconnection or slow service is regarded as a problem and communicated as an error uh that's true obviously on a on a cell phone or something you you said you get on the tube which i'm a ignorant american i believe that's like the train or the metro and subway subway yeah and um you lose connection and all of a sudden like your app stop working so that's you you're kind of have two different directions that both are improving right so you want to go offline first but at the same time like our world is dedicated to making it so that you wouldn't lose your service when you get on the tube so offline first is is incredible and it's awesome but you kind of want both of those things right the goal is to never be offline if you don't want to be and but if you are offline to support that and not kind of not be an exceptional case true um you know the more connectivity we get the better but we are so far away from ubiquitous you know broadband i mean it's so far down the line as you know looking at how things are right now we've got an awful long way to go and it's not it's not good enough to just kick the can down the road and wait so um in terms of my own background i've been consulting on offline web apps for a couple of years and that's been in quite remote places so i've done things in the far north of Canada and worked with charities out in africa and obviously in those places they're quite a long way off getting reliable interactions um you know in the case of the north the north estergies where i did project they they have a satellite for their internet connection which is you know it's pretty expensive um but it's reasonable if it goes down they have to fly and engineer out it might take a couple of days you know there's for people like that there isn't really an alternative on the horizon any time soon and these people a lot and because of the offline first kind of not really existing until you know recently or you know you've recently seen the last few years um and these people when things go down they just sit idle for a few days right i mean they just kind of just for lack of a better word they're just kind of screwed yeah exactly i mean you know how bad it is if get help goes down for an hour or two uh you know it's it's it's crazy there's no need for it cool so yeah offline first the solution is use something like hoodie and be able to maintain state even if they're not connected and it's not exceptional case anymore exactly i think there's there's kind of also a bigger point here um in in kind of the idea of empowering users is also tied up with the idea of being able to go offline so i'd like to think of being you know we have view source to look at your markup your success your jobs i would love to do that with my data um and so separating your data from the kind of hosted back end is quite an empowering thing to think about i mean you're probably aware of uh unhosted in their remote storage that's that's taking very similar approach in thinking in terms of your data is a separate entity right yeah it's a uh i don't know i look at it i look at services and i look at like the tools that are available but i don't know that i well i guess you're saying you know they're they're they're would necessarily be a good front end for that for a user to kind of be able to look at that stuff when you talk about view source i mean isn't that more targeted at the developer anyway i mean most people don't even know that there's such thing as a source oh sure yeah i mean um i'm not necessarily saying everyone is going to be inspecting their JSON data right um that's not going to happen but um the more people that do the better right uh when i used to work at a large company and it used these lotus notes are you familiar with lotus notes oh unfortunately yeah yeah some uh with any other popular group where um piece of software it's it often just use re-mail which is a shame because it actually has this these great um kind of replicating databases that you can take offline and so i remember working at this company and you could um take essentially an app it was an app with some data associated with it you could replicate it offline um onto my laptop and i could just play with it i could change things around i could modify stuff and i didn't have to worry about messing with the data because it was my copy um and i thought that was really empowering and in that organization it really worked we had you know little apps running on a box under the desk in someone's cubicle that would organize the christmas party or for booking holidays it you know it was great and i would love to see increased hackability of the web i think one of the problems that we have at the minute is we think of the web in terms of full stacks and so we have the back end and the front end that's all really tightly integrated and the problem with that is you can't make changes at any point in that stack without recreating the full thing and that's why you know we have these um you have to download an entire VM to run a piece of software i don't know if you tried setting up things like gitlab it you know it takes a while it's a real pain um and you know the more independent we can think of the front end from the app but also the app from the back end and all the infrastructure the more opportunity there is to play around and have fun with it speaking of having fun with it let's uh let's pause for a minute i'm not sure let's get transition i like it yes can i like it uh let's pause for a minute give a shout out to our sponsor top tao not sure if uh if you've heard of top tao before but they'll be sponsoring the show for the next few months or sorry the next few next few weeks my bad is just uh Freudian slip there but for those of you who are freelancing which might be might be everybody i don't know i don't know who freelances not there but uh for those of you who are freelancing or like to test out freelancing or even try out a no risk kind of freelance like project while maintaining your full composition you guys got top tao uh you can work on special projects with companies like air bnb rz i do and many others you can work remotely or as angel angel likes to do work on a beach or pretty much anywhere in the world because it's the kind of opportunity offer at top tao you can get started uh today head to top dot com slash developer that's t-o-p-t-l dot com slash developer and click join the best and because they want to work with only the best senior engineers they've got a well thought out four stage screen process that begins with a personal call via Skype to get to know who you are and introduce you to top tao's mission to see if you're fit from end to end the entire screening process includes an english speaking test timed algorithm tests uh technical interviews with core top tao engineers as well as a test project but uh once you've made it through their rigorous screen process the sky is the limit if you think you have what it takes head to top dot com slash developer that's t-o-p-t-l dot com slash developer to get started tell them the change log sent you if you apply please email me adam at the chain log com i want to hear about your experience but uh top dot com slash developers so no back end no database offline so i wanted to the reason i got into the asking about the uh viewing your data kind of on the front end i'm looking at your website and one of the things that i see i like the way that you guys are doing the uh the features and the who is it for kind of it's complete it's your next it's planned i think it's a new idea so i think i don't think there's anything marked as your next or where on it it's hard for me to see that light yellow from the bright yellow but anyway uh planned who is it for is designers with basic front end skills so you guys are already kind of completed it for no developers and front end developers um it's planned for designers with with basic front end skills what would you say those basic front end skills are so we have the idea of a hypothetical uh jquery developer and so um perhaps you're a designer and you can you can code up an interaction um you can kind of make a few basic things happen on the front end but you're not implementing complex um algorithms and javascript on the front end that's all gotcha so you're so that this is increasingly what kind of the world is moving to for designers which is you have to be able to pretty much do you know mock-ups and prototypes and understand a little bit of jquery so essentially you're saying like i mean the goal in a year you know year for now three years from now then it could just be every designer is able to build a hoodie app well that's an ideal to strive towards right i mean every step we take in that direction is is a good thing in my opinion the more people that get to create apps the better apps will have so let me ask you i think a lot of my designer friends so i don't know let me rephrase a lot of my developer friends when you don't understand something your first inclination is you know rtfm right read the docs figure out what's going on solve the problem and i don't think there's anything wrong with my designer friends but a lot of times that's not their first thought to read the docs so how do you guys kind of accomplish that how do you get the designers to go through and read the tutorials read the docs figure out how to solve their problem that's an interesting question i'm not sure i read the docs to be honest um i think you know for people like that it's more about creating and they'll learn through creating something that they want to create that's that's why that's the reason they're programming isn't it's not for the love of programming necessarily um but it's because they have a dream of this perfect app and they want to just make that happen and so the the more closely we can align what we provide with just getting things done i think the more successful will be right and when you speak to is it is so easy to get up and running with hoodie that that barrier of getting started is almost um almost gone now when i say easy like i understand homebrew and i understand how to install modules with npm right i understand what's happening with that stuff so is there any um is there any desire to like i don't know maybe have like a standalone install or anything that kind of makes it easier for people to get started um yeah we certainly want to make it easier for people to get started i mean at the minute it's it's what you would call a developer preview and we're basically expecting you to be some kind of no-js developer or comfortable with the next or using homebrew or something like that i was gonna say because you started starts off with the brew you got you know you got homebrew and npm in place and i know even there's a lot of assumptions already yes i mean even for us one of our top hit um one of our top hit articles i think of the last couple months has been how to get node installed and it's like if that's like the number one search for getting hit for people wanting to know how and it's not exactly easy for uh what angers to how about this you know your your designer buddies absolutely um so in the longer term we definitely want to tackle that there are a few options available one it might be to look at uh offering a hosted platform or perhaps a variety of hosts offering hoodies that would be great too um so that you could just click and you're up and running um another option might be that we offer things like the m's or daco or something like that and in terms of the node developer because we're based on couch tv um we've actually been experimenting a little bit with the idea of running pouch tv on top of level dv so if you're a node developer you're probably familiar with level dv it's a key value store from google but it has great uh node js bindings and so what that would mean is we could potentially get to a stage where the installation process is npm install hoodie and that would be fantastic so um there are lots of things we could look into it's certainly not going to stay the way it is that well that's one thing about the way you're doing it now though however is that i think you know into your early on the show you touched on bower coming on the show soon and things like that and i think as we start to see more and more of these front end tools becoming more accessible or you know using npm for example to install packages and all this different stuff like it's becoming more and more accessible because of things like grunt and bower they're pushing front end developers or front end designers as you say um to start to get into more developer-esque things and having homebrew in place and having mpm in place is getting more and more common for the i think you're at least you're initial like you said a developer review that initial stint of people you want to have childhood and you know take on this flag and want it yeah for early adopters i think it's reasonable to say you you have npm or you can use gates or something like that um one other option that we discussed at one point was the idea of um so one of the workflows i really enjoyed was google analytics so a lot of front end developers are really comfortable the idea of copying and placing a snippet of code and just putting it into their site however they hosted it normally whether they ftp it some shared hosting or whatever and um i really like the idea of offering um a hoodie tag so you get a little snippet of hoodie code you place that into your site wherever that is wherever you're comfortable hosting it and all of a sudden you can talk to a hoodie back end i mean that would be really nice um design and with cause and various other tools that's that's potentially achievable yeah so we talked about uh you guys just kind of released plugins that was november third so just a couple days ago um but what are you guys doing now and what is the future we talked about kind of some pipe you know not pipe dream so kind of like bigger picture future plans what's like the immediate future look like for hoodie um well right now we're all kind of busy off doing talks and various other workshops and things um so i'll be at qcon next week in sisco uh so we'll grega so if you're around there come say hello um yang we'll be up in vancouver uh so in the immediate future we'll kind of be doing that the next to do item in terms of creating hoodie is probably going to be on the admin interface um so uh we we really like these kind of nice small panels that you get in admin interfaces with all the graphs and all that kind of stuff people like numbers and wizzy graphs and so um you know if you can just kind of click a button you get a backend uh you start creating users and you get stats and all that kind of stuff just by default that would be fantastic um so yeah i think i think admin interface is the next big thing do you guys have your sponsors lined up for the next few weeks um yeah i think so i don't know i don't handle the sponsorship myself but yeah so i just wanted to plug if you're interested in sponsoring hoodie development just go to hood.ie slash sponsoring.html get some information and help help this project grow yeah absolutely thanks very much so for those of you that are new we ask the same three questions at the end of every week we need to name these questions we need to come up with the common questions i don't know the common questions that is the uh that is the working the working name the common questions until we come up with something better but yeah we'll go ahead and ask them here um the first one calon is for kind of a call to arm so uh something you would like to see the community kind of get involved with and help out um sure so i think um the most useful thing you could do if you're interested in the project is to come along have a look at the api's discuss the whole concept of no back end and just try out the code if you're a no-jess developer and you want to really get your hands dirty then please have a think about doing some plugins uh so we're really nice on plugins right now we just have like the small core things users email um we're working on doing data sharing between users so there's loads of things that you could potentially implement all kinds of services that you might want to integrate with on the back end um so plugin developers is it's the big thing we need how do you get involved with plugin development um so you can if you go to hd on github there's a whole load of repositories there you'll find a few examples we tend to prefix everything with hoodie dash plugin if you want to ask us questions then we're on free node so if you join um hash hoodie on free node we're usually in there and someone will help you out uh we're really excited when people want to write plugins so we'll be very friendly to you so hoodie plugins so yeah there's something we didn't get into much this time but maybe we can have you guys on when it starts to grow and kind of talk about the ecosystem a little bit more sure uh same question is for if you weren't doing this what would you be doing i would probably be working on one of the thousand other ideas i have in my head for uh open source projects uh the great thing about working with it this team is that they kind of keep me on track with one specific thought for a long period of time which is nice um but i'd love to give a really balanced answer you know like i'd be off sailing or traveling the world but i'm just gonna be programming i love programming well if you're maybe if you're being paid to do all of your open source ideas you could be sailing and doing them you know in the middle of the ocean on about somewhere sure you know especially as you would have offline access all the time so if anyone wants to sponsor me to sail around the world and program then uh get in touch yeah it's hood that i.e. slash sponsoring that and i was kidding uh cool so the last one is for a programmer hero so somebody that has been influential in your life that's not a tricky one i meet so many great programmers every day i think every program is better than me so i always have something to learn um but for a specific example i think i'm gonna go with uh jerry sussman so one of the guys behind scheme along with guys deal um but also he was involved in the sicp the structure and interpretation of computer programs i think programming is all about communication and if you're able to communicate really well um in terms of you know the clarity of designing a language type scheme but also if you've not seen the video lectures the mit um videos of sicp then you should definitely watch that anyone who has the gift of kind of communicating clearly in code i'm in awe of i think that's fantastic yeah the book structure and interpretation of computer programs we uh i remember when i went to my computer science program in college we read that book and we called it the sic book i think that we we didn't i wish i would be able to go through and read and and take all my courses again now with the appreciation and kind of education knowledge that i've gained over the years i think i would enjoy that much more this second time around well um perhaps i just enjoyed it because i didn't do computer science yeah yeah maybe it was a little bit more of a uh homework assignment than uh then uh you know reading the i mean if someone if someone sat me down and forced me to read i'd probably hate it that awesome yeah so hoodie is uh you guys are definitely growing and um i think we can talk about it for hours i say that with most of our guests because most of our guests are awesome just like hoodie but for the sake of keeping it you know under an hour so i think we're gonna have to let you go but yeah i definitely am excited to see kind of where this thing grows and to keep an eye on it if you guys want to follow hoodie they do have a hoodie weekly which is weekly.hood.ie and you can find them on twitter at hoodie hq well spoken man yeah thanks so much for having me so kalen uh yeah i mean i think the thing that's kind of neat i think just to kind of summarize this is like this idea of being able to build apps pretty quickly uh you know and this friend and friend kind of focused something about ender game manager from earlier mentioned in the hit chat same front ender but uh but being able to build an app and in just a few days pretty quickly not have to think about you know the back end and servers and all this stuff i mean what you guys are doing hoodie are super super cool and and if you mentioned earlier for anybody listening out there the ones that's once these guys you know you know definitely look into that this is a cool new technology kalen you're out there and yawn and the rest of the team out there giving talks at various um you know either conferences or local communities or whatever um you know user groups and whatnot i mean support these guys what they're doing at super neat kalen thank you for coming on the show to kind of share with us this idea of no back end this idea of offline first and for you listeners um definitely check it out we'll have a bunch of links in the show notes um we've mentioned yon a couple times he's been on the show twice before once way back in the day when we went in our over there in Austin uh for a south by south west long ago there was a no-sequel spacked down that was a little beta but i'm sure entertained nonetheless and yon has been on the show talking about gosh b before as well so i've got links out to that and a bunch of cool stuff but you know thanks for for joining us this show for sure and uh well also i just think our sponsors digital ocean and top tower if you're um if you haven't used it at ocean yet and you want to take advantage of them they have a ten-hour hosting credit with us i mentioned earlier in the show that the the code you want to use is changelog sent me that's changelog sent me whenever you go through the process of putting your accounts uh and putting in your credit information there's a little spot there to put that code in there go ahead and uh for the new they'll give you a ten-hour hosting credit and if for some reason it doesn't work out or doesn't actually apply don't worry they'll go on twitter and be upset just email their support they're supporters like super quick i was emailing their support last night because i was setting up a slice for myself which is awesome um and if you are a fan of what they're doing and you're gonna be at launch hackathon that's how it's gonna be there if you've read any of their tutorials i tell is likely one of the ones that's that's written them i know that everyone i've been reading up their tutorials has been written by itself so uh tell is uh is one of their main communications contacts at the de julician should be at launch hackathon it's uh i think it's next week uh wait what they say it's a set up it's like this weekend remember a through 10th um if you want stickers email berry at de julician.com i'll send to you just on your address but uh one thing also top tell uh join the top tells network of awesome engineers all around the world and uh go to top.com slash developer to apply that's to apply and yeah that's that's it for this show thanks so much for a really awesome show and kelen thank you so much for taking the time to join us later so let's say goodbye see you guys later yeah thanks honey