Full Stack Radio

Topics include:

• Why Gary decided to write Execute Program as a full-stack TypeScript application instead of using a Ruby or Python backend like he may have traditionally
• Do you actually have to write less tests if you have a good type system?
• What does a good type system give you that tests can't give you?
• Using io-ts to type check incoming data
• How to think about structuring your code to best take advantage of the benefits your type system gives you and minimize the need to write tests
• Pushing conditional logic to the core of your system to reduce the number of tests you need to write at the edges
• The correlation between type errors and behavioral bugs, and how a type system can help you catch mistakes you don't think to test for
• Do type errors signal that you're missing a test?
• Structural vs. nominal type systems, and the benefits of structural type systems like used by TypeScript and Go
• Best practices for type-checking within a function in a structural type system like TypeScript
• The power of supporting literal types like true or "active" in addition to traditional types

Links:

• Destroy All Software
• Execute Program
• TypeScript
• "Are tests necessary in TypeScript?"
• io-ts
• TypeScript course on Execute Program
• Gary's tweet about unions with literal types

Supporting the show:
I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my products:

• Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS.
• Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
• Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
• Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
• Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.

Topics include:

• What is Svelte and how is it different than other JS frameworks in the space?
• What special behavior does the Svelte compiler layer on top of vanilla JS syntax and why?
• Why the lack of render functions in Svelte isn't a real problem in practice
• What are you giving up when you choose to build your application with something like Rails instead of JavaScript?
• Why should we be trying to write our applications in a single language, and why should it be JS?
• What's wrong with striving to write an application entirely in a language like Ruby instead of entirely in JS?
• Why HEY doesn't really make a good argument against the modern web
• Thoughts on bundle sizes, code-splitting, and why aggressive code-splitting is still better than frequent round trips to a server-rendered app
• How Svelte and Sapper handle SSR
• Why page transitions are the killer argument for building SPAs if we want to be able to compete with native experiences
• Should we be thinking about JavaScript applications as native applications in terms of offline-support and eventual consistency, or should we keep thinking of them as webpages that depend on the network?

Links:

• Svelte
• Sapper
• "Second-guessing the modern web"
• "In defense of the modern web"

Supporting the show:

I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my products:

• Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS.
• Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
• Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
• Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
• Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.

Topics include:

• How do you decide what role to hire for?
• Why it's so important to figure out exactly what your biggest struggle is before hiring
• How to decide what the most important thing to focus on is when it feels like there's too much to do
• Why it's important to consider the impact of hiring for a specific role on your own happiness vs. just the company's bottom line
• Coming to terms with the fact that you can't do everything, and why it's important to focus on something instead of spreading yourself thin across everything
• Mistakes people make when they start managing a team for the first time

Links:

• Jason's blog, one of the greatest treasure troves of startup advice on the internet
• Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business, one of Jason's MicroConf talks

Supporting the show:

I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my products:

• Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS.
• Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
• Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
• Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
• Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.

Topics include:

• How did Basecamp evolve from being a team/client communication tool to focusing on keeping your whole company organized, and is it really even that different?
• How exactly should we set up Basecamp on day one to support a small 3-5 person remote software team? What tools should we use and which ones should we ignore for now?
• Finding the balance between being organized enough and splitting things up too much
• How big should projects be? Is "HEY v1" a project, or is a project something more like "HEY File Attachments"?
• What tools do you normally enable for regular projects, and how do you use them?
• How are you normally using chat at the individual project level?
• Why todo lists should be created by the individuals doing the work, and not the people assigning the work
• How should we use the company HQ project? What are some less obvious ideas we can apply there that can make a big difference?
• Using a "what we're working on" project to keep everyone on the team in the loop and feeling connected
• Using "heartbeats" to summarize the work a team has been doing over a period of time for the rest of the company
• Advice on bringing on new employees and how to assign them their first project
• When you're such a writing-driven company, how do you make sure decisions get written down when they are made in real-time instead of naturally occurring within Basecamp?

Screenshots:

• Example of a "what did I work on?" check-in
• Example of a heartbeat
• Example of the "What Works" project
• Example of an announcement in the HQ project
• Example of a conversation on a todo

Links:

• Basecamp
• Shape Up, Basecamp's recent book on how they work
• Going Remote: Basecamp Walkthrough, a livestream where Jason and DHH go over their real Basecamp account

Supporting the show:

I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my products:

• Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS
• Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
• Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
• Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
• Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.

Links:

• Hotwire
• HEY

Supporting the show:
I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my products:

• Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS.
• Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
• Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
• Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
• Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.