WebAssembly is a binary instruction format for applications to run in a memory-constrained, stack-based virtual machine. The WebAssembly ecosystem consists of tools and projects that allow programs in a variety of languages to compile into WebAssembly and run in a safe, fast, sandboxed runtime environment. WebAssembly is a transformative technology for the Internet. Most users will experience it as a set of gradual, incremental improvements to their online experiences. Pages will load faster and become more dynamic. Applications will become more secure. Infrastructure will become cheaper, and those cost savings will eventually reach the consumer. For developers, WebAssembly opens a world of possibility. In today’s operating systems, the user can feel a big difference between applications that need a large client-side runtime (such as video editing tools, or render-heavy games such as Half Life) and applications that are more lightweight and can run entirely on the web (such as Twitter). Tyler McMullen is the CTO at Fastly. He joins the show to talk about the compilation path, the runtime, and the opportunities of WebAssembly. RECENT UPDATES: FindCollabs is a company I started recently The FindCollabs Podcast is out! FindCollabs is hiring a React developer FindCollabs Hackathon #1 has ended! Congrats to ARhythm, Kitspace, and Rivaly for winning 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place ($4,000, $1000, and a set of SE Daily hoodies, respectively). The most valuable feedback award and the most helpful community member award both go to Vynce Montgomery, who will receive both the SE Daily Towel and the SE Daily Old School Bucket Hat We are booking sponsorships for Q3, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/ Podsheets is our open source set of tools for managing podcasts and podcast businesses New version of Software Daily, our app and ad-free subscription service The post Web Assembly Runtime with Tyler McMullen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Upcoming events: A Conversation with Haseeb Qureshi at Cloudflare on April 3, 2019 FindCollabs Hackathon at App Academy on April 6, 2019 Coding in the browser has been attempted several times in the last decade. Building a development environment in the browser has numerous technical challenges. How does the code execute safely? How do you fit all of the requirements of a development environment into a browser window? How do you get users to switch from their normal IDE (interactive development environment)? CodeSandbox is an online code editor created by Ives van Hoorne and Bas Buursma. CodeSandbox allows users to program and run applications in the browser. It is a full developer platform that allows users the ability to install npm modules, run their code, and share their applications with other users. The engineering problems within CodeSandbox are not easy–building a web-based IDE is complicated. But CodeSandbox is also an exciting project because it lowers the barrier to entry for many newer programmers. The development experience for a new programmer is still a difficult onramp. If you are an experienced developer, you have a workflow that you are comfortable with. It might involve vim, or emacs, or JetBrains IDEs, or Eclipse. But newer developers can find these environments confusing and hard to get started with. The development environments of today are integrated with build tools, Github repositories, and deployment platforms. This can be overwhelming for a newer developer. CodeSandbox is a very visual tool, which makes it especially useful for new developers who learn through seeing examples running live in the browser. CodeSandbox is also used by web developers who want a modern, shareable form of developing software. Ives and Bas join the show to talk about the motivation for CodeSandbox and the engineering challenges they have solved. The post CodeSandbox: Online Code Editor with Bas Buursma and Ives van Hoorne appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

WebAssembly is a runtime that lets languages beyond JavaScript to execute in frontend web applications. WebAssembly is novel because most modern frontend applications are written entirely in JavaScript. WebAssembly lets us use languages like Rust and C++ after they have been compiled down to a web assembly binary module. Language interoperability is only one part of why WebAssembly is exciting. The execution environment for WebAssembly modules has benefits for security and software distribution and consumption as well. In previous shows, we’ve given an overview of WebAssembly and explored its future applications as well as its relationship to the Rust programming language. In today’s episode, we explore the packaging and execution path of a WebAssembly module, and some other applications of the technology. Syrus Akbary is the CEO and founder of Wasmer, a company focused on creating universal binaries powered by WebAssembly. Wasmer provides a way to execute WebAssembly files universally. He joins the show to talk about the state of WebAssembly, and what his company is building. The post WebAssembly Execution with Syrus Akbary appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

React Native allows developers to build native applications for iOS and Android using components written in the React JavaScript framework. These ReactJS components render to native application code by going over a JavaScript bridge, a message bus that communicates between JavaScript code and native iOS or Android runtimes. For most mobile application use cases, React Native works well. But in some cases, the platform suffers from performance issues due to the functionality of the JavaScript bridge. For example, mobile games with high demands on graphics, networking, and fast real-time updates to the UI can stutter when using React Native. To address the performance issues of React Native, the core team working on React Native at Facebook is rearchitecting the React Native runtime within a project called Fabric. Fabric consists of changes to the threading model, the data handling system, and the JavaScript bridge. Chris Severns and Lee Johnson work at G2i, a group of React and React Native specialists. Chris and Lee join the show to discuss the rearchitecture, including the engineering history of React, the technical debt within the React project, and the vision that the React team has for the future. We also discuss Google’s Flutter project, a cross-platform native framework with a different architectural model than React Native. The post React Native Rearchitecture with G2i Team appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

React, Vue, and Angular are the most popular frontend JavaScript frameworks. Each of these frameworks lets frontend developers build components. A component is a high level visual abstraction that is used to compose a user interface. Frontend development has moved towards component-driven-development. At a typical technology company, a designer will put together a design file of different user interface elements, and the frontend engineer will take those UI elements and program code that can render those designs as components. As organizations have started to reuse their components and share them across the organization, the efficiency of design and frontend engineering is improving. User interface is gaining more of an emphasis with organizations and new tools are allowing frontend engineers and designers to work together more productively. One of these tools is Storybook, a system for sharing components and the code that renders those components. Zoltan Olah joins the show to talk about Storybook, and his company Chroma. Chroma is building tools to allow design-driven teams to work more effectively. We talked about how the relationship of designers and frontend engineers has some resemblance to the relationship between “dev” and “ops” before the DevOps movement. There are some frictions in the process of moving between design and engineering implementation, and in talking to Zoltan, I got an understanding for how much the UI layer could improve through better tooling. The post Storybook: UI Engineering with Zoltan Olah appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Ten years ago, there was a distinction between “backend” and “frontend” developers. A backend developer would be managing the business logic and database transactions using Ruby on Rails or Java. A frontend developer would be responsible for implementing designs and arranging buttons using raw HTML and JavaScript. Today, developers can build entire applications in JavaScript. Developers who spent their early career developing frontend JavaScript skills are finding themselves with a surprising amount of power. With NodeJS providing a backend framework and React, Vue, or Angular on the frontend, a single JavaScript developer can write all the code for a whole application—hence the rise of the “full stack developer”. At the same time, the cloud infrastructure is becoming easier to use. Backend-as-a-service simplifies the frustrations of deploying your application, and standing up a database. GraphQL improves the relationship between the frontend and the backend. And futuristic technologies like WebAssembly and web virtual reality are promising to make a JavaScript engineer’s life even more interesting. Adam Conrad is an engineer and a writer for Software Engineering Daily. In recent articles, he has documented the changing nature of the frontend, including JavaScript engines, virtual reality, and how mature corporations are using React and GraphQL. He joins the show to share his perspective on what is changing in the frontend—and how full stack JavaScript engineers can position themselves for future success in a quickly changing market. The post Modern Front End: React, GraphQL, VR, WebAssembly with Adam Conrad appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Wes Bos has created popular courses on React, GraphQL, and JavaScript. With hundreds of thousands of students, Wes has earned a cult following for his fun, practical lessons on web development. The courses produced by Wes teach developers how to build useful applications such as a complete e-commerce store. Wes has built a career around studying and evangelizing JavaScript. His approach to education centers around practice, repetition, and hacking on fun projects. He also co-hosts a podcast called SyntaxFM, and is a frequent Twitter user. Wes is a rare mix of developer, teacher, businessman, and designer. Throughout his work, there is an artist’s sense of attention to detail, and a modern entrepreneur’s sense of pricing and marketing. His sites, such as JavaScript30 and React For Beginners have the deliberate style of someone who has been building websites for a very, very long time.In today’s episode, Wes Bos joins the show to give his perspective on JavaScript, entrepreneurship, and podcasting. To learn more about Wes’s business and his background, check out the IndieHackers podcast with him. The post Full Stack JavaScript with Wes Bos appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Engineers can build applications faster by using tools that abstract away infrastructure. Major cloud providers offer this tooling in the form of functions-as-a-service, as well as managed services such as Google BigQuery or Azure Container Instances. The term “serverless” refers to these functions-as-a-service and the managed services–because when you use these tools, you are not making calls to specific servers–you are making calls to APIs that abstract away the servers from you, while guaranteeing uptime and reliability. In previous shows we have covered Heroku, Firebase, serverless functions, serverless event driven application development, and a few startups that are built almost entirely on serverless infrastructure. “Serverless” is a way of describing backend services that are represented by an API. But what about the rest of the application stack that you use to build on top of serverless? You still need to use JavaScript to define the custom code of your application. You still need to use HTML markup to describe the look and feel of your application. The “JAM Stack” is a way of building applications consisting of JavaScript, APIs, and markup. Phil Hawksworth is the head of developer relations at Netlify, and he joins the podcast to explain how these JAM Stack applications are developed and deployed, and how developers can use the JAM stack to rapidly build new systems.   We recently launched a new podcast: Fintech Daily! Fintech Daily is about payments, cryptocurrencies, trading, and the intersection between finance and technology. You can find it on fintechdaily.co or Apple and Google podcasts. We are looking for other hosts who want to participate. If you are interested in becoming a host, send us an email: host@fintechdaily.co The post JAM Stack with Phil Hawksworth appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Google Search is a highly interactive JavaScript application. As you enter a query, results are being automatically suggested to you before you even finish typing. When you press enter, some of your search results may be widgets that represent the weather, the price of a stock, a recipe for green bean soup, or a language translation for a phrase. These complex frontend components are loading dynamically–the Google Search application cannot prefetch every single possible widget that you might ask for–but the results do load very quickly. Google has many other examples of advanced JavaScript engineering. The company is mostly known for backend engineering inventions like MapReduce, TensorFlow, Dremel, and Spanner. To turn these backend tools into user facing products, Google develops its own JavaScript frameworks and infrastructure to deliver information from the backend to the frontend. “Backend” and “frontend” are not precise terms. At Google, there are so many layers of infrastructure between a user and the data center. If you are an engineer working on a service at Google, you probably have several “frontends” and “backends” on either side of you. Malte Ubl is a senior staff engineer at Google. He’s heavily involved in Google’s JavaScript infrastructure, and has written about managing large JavaScript applications in detail. He also works on AMP, an open-source project for delivering web pages in a fast, performant format. He joins the show to describe Google’s history with JavaScript frameworks, the process of building frontends and middleware to deliver JavaScript applications, and the engineering behind AMP. There are criticisms of AMP, but some of them misunderstand how the AMP technology actually works.  AMP allows pages to be cached, prefetched, and served to a user more quickly. AMP does not necessarily centralize pages around being served from Google Search. A good example of AMP speeding up pages outside of Google is reddit. We recently launched a new podcast: Fintech Daily! Fintech Daily is about payments, cryptocurrencies, trading, and the intersection between finance and technology. You can find it on fintechdaily.co or Apple and Google podcasts. We are looking for other hosts who want to participate. If you are interested in becoming a host, send us an email: host@fintechdaily.co The post Google JavaScript with Malte Ubl appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Kotlin is a statically typed programming language that started as a JVM language. It gained popularity because it reduces the amount of boilerplate code required for a typical Java project. Many of the early adopters of Kotlin were building Android apps or Java applications, but it has grown to a variety of use cases including at companies like Uber, Pinterest, and Atlassian. Andrey Breslav is the lead language designer of Kotlin at JetBrains. He joins the show to describe the original goals of Kotlin, the compilation path of the language, and how it has moved beyond its days of only running on the JVM.   Show Notes Episode 12: Interview with Andrey Breslav, Lead Language Designer of Kotlin – Mapping The Journey KotlinConf 2017 – Opening Keynote by Andrey Breslav – YouTube Kotlin Blog | Kotlin — Programming Language by JetBrains KotlinConf 2017 – Deep Dive into Kotlin/Native by Andrey Breslav – YouTube How to Kotlin – from the Lead Kotlin Language Designer (Google I/O ’18) – YouTube Community Basic Types: Numbers, Strings, Arrays – Kotlin Programming Language Calling Kotlin from Java – Kotlin Programming Language Kotlin Programming Language The post Kotlin Design with Andrey Breslav appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.