Web development for startups vs. enterprises, StimulusReflex vs. React, and New Magic with Ruby on Rails :: with Joe Clarke and David Parrott

Dec 8, 2020

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In this episode of ventures, my guests Joe Clarke (TaskBill.io) and David Parrott (ProtaVentures.com) and I dive deep into the world of web development. We discuss its history over the past few decades, languages and frameworks, tools for entrepreneurs, tips for those learning to code, and thoughts about the upcoming “New Magic” from the Rails and Basecamp communities.

FYI: If you are learning to code, check out my new series: https://satchel.works/@wclittle/learn-to-code-as-an-entrepreneur

For this podcast episode, visit https://satchel.works/@wclittle/ventures-episode-22 for detailed notes and links to resources (videos, articles, etc…) mentioned.

You can watch this episode via video here.

In this episode we cover the following:

2:58 - Joe intro, journey as an entrepreneur, TaskBill.io and Hosting Playground

5:02 - David intro, journey from video games to over a decade at Amazon Web Services

8:22 - Code and the teenage years. What Joe and David did when they were that age, and their advice for teenagers today.

15:06 - Will’s journey from elementary school, middle school, and high school learning to code a little bit here and there.

17:19 - What were Joe and David doing and learning during the 2000s and 2010s? What programming languages were they working with and what kind of applications were they building?

24:29 - Big shifts in the late 2000s and 2010s, jQuery, Single-Page Applications, how were Joe and David thinking about modern web applications during this time?

29:24 - From a pure education standpoint, describing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and frameworks on top of JavaScript.

30:30 - What stack did/does Joe build his companies on? How did/does he think about JavaScript frameworks?

33:34 - Will’s experience with Angular 1 & 2, Ember, Backbone.js, React, Redux, and how he advised founders to think about their software stack for their startup.

33:05 - A brief journey through David’s experience with AWS. What did he learn during that season and how he thinks about progressive web apps, StimulusReflex, and Rails.

41:03 - Does Rails scale? How do Joe and David think about this question?

46:55 - What are Service-oriented architectures?

50:17 - What are “Serverless” architectures?

53:08 - What is Joe learning now in the Stimulus/StimulusReflex as he’s building Taskbill.io? What is TaskBill?

57:58 - What do Joe and David think about the upcoming “New Magic” that the basecamp team is releasing? What do they think it will be? What potential pitfalls might there be?

1:04:05 - For the developers considering using Stimulus/StimulusReflex and/or New Magic, what are considerations to keep in mind when choosing your software stack?

1:09:58 - Discussing how developers have a choice to determine where RAM and CPU computation take place (i.e. on client machines or on back-end servers).

1:11:54 - Final words from Joe and David. Advice for entrepreneurs choosing their stack, and advice for investors doing diligence on technical teams.

1:17:12 - People can find Joe @jclarke on Twitter, and at TaskBill.io, and get a hold of David at https://protaventures.com.