The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Hackety Hack and _why (Interview)

Episode Date: January 5, 2011

Steve Klabnik joined the show to talk about learning to program with Hackety Hack and why the lucky stiff....

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the ChangeLog episode 0.4.3. I'm Adam Stachowiak. And I'm Winn Netherland. This is the ChangeLog. We cover what's fresh and new in the world of open source. If you found us on iTunes, we're also on the web at thechangelog.com. We're also up on GitHub. Head to github.com slash explore. You'll find some Trin repos, some feature repos from our blog, as well as the audio podcast. And if you're on Twitter, follow Change Log Show. And me, Adam Stack.
Starting point is 00:00:37 And I'm Penguin, P-E-N-G-W-I-N-N. Fun episode this week. Got a new contributor on board. Yeah, Steve. Welcome aboard. Welcome, Steve Klabnick. The, I guess, maintainer now of Hackity Hack from Huawei. We talked about Hackity Hack in this episode. A lot of fun stuff with this project, too.
Starting point is 00:00:53 I love seeing what it's going to do for, you know, programming in general, but specifically that bigger application, Shoes, and then, you know, Hackity Hack itself and being a Ruby app. Yeah, definitely a fun way to learn programming and Ruby to boot. So we also have some jobs remote, too. We've got some fun GitHub jobs. If you're looking for posting a job, head to thechangelaw.com slash jobs to use our affiliate link and post a job to GitHub,
Starting point is 00:01:16 and we appreciate it. But, Wynn, why don't you take the first one? First up this week is a Ruby engineer slash data wrangler post-rank. I guess a data wrangler means you have to be in Texas for this gig. Need to be fluent in Ruby Rails, Vent Machine, RabbitMQ, the usual suspects if you work on an Ilya project. We know that Ilya Grigorik works over at PostRank.
Starting point is 00:01:37 This should be a fun gig for anybody that wants to sling the Ruby. And if you want to change the world, Causes.com is looking for the most world-changing Ruby Rails developer in history. Seriously. Go to Causes.com to check out more details about that company. But they're approaching 25 million active users on a series of Rails applications backed by MySQL and Memcached, Redis, and a few other fun things. But plenty of things to do there, scaling, product challenges.
Starting point is 00:02:06 So if that's your world, check them out and check out the show notes for details. If your LinkedIn profile mentions Rockstar or Ninja, you need not apply at Centro. They're looking for talented developers of JavaScript, CoffeeScript, SproutCore, jQuery, Ruby, Sinatra, Rails, and MongoDB. That's quite the stack. Wow. I understand they use all those over there. That's pretty intense. Hackety-hack?
Starting point is 00:02:30 Don't talk back. Join today by Steve Klabnick, newest contributor to the Changelog. Steve, why don't you introduce yourself and what you do? Hi, everybody. I'm Steve. Thanks for having me on, you guys. It's been a lot of fun contributing to the Changelog so far, and it's good to get a show on the podcast. Basically, I like to refer to myself as a software craftsman. So I've been programming since I was about seven years old. And by now, I'm much more interested in how to make good software
Starting point is 00:03:08 and the things around it than the actual code itself. So I've been focusing a lot on best practices and refactoring and all sorts of things like that, which is one of the reasons why I really love Ruby and why I now call myself a Rubyist for the last couple of years is because the Ruby community's into all those kinds of things.
Starting point is 00:03:23 So my main open source project is Hackity Hack, which I inherited from Y, which we'll talk more about in a little bit, I guess. And I do various startup related things. So that's sort of what I'm into, I guess. Startups, Ruby, software, all that kind of stuff. So let's jump into it. Hackity Hack. This is a project I guess you inherited from Why the Lucky Stiff? Yep. Basically, it was whenever Why disappeared and everybody realized that he was gone for good, people started stepping up for his projects because they were all really awesome and wanted to keep them going. And I had actually just missed Why. I never met him. He came to Pittsburgh a couple months in March before he disappeared in August and gave a talk at Art & Code about Hackety Hack. And I didn't realize he was going to be there. I wanted to go to Art & Code, but I heard about it and I was out of town that weekend. And I said,
Starting point is 00:04:15 okay, well, I'll just hit the next Art & Code up. And then when I came back, I realized why I was there and I was really upset that I had missed it. But basically, when Y disappeared, nobody stood up to take care of Hackity Hack. And I wasn't really sure that I could do it or not. But I didn't want to let the project die. So I sort of stepped up. And that led to now a year and a half later. For the folks outside the Ruby community that think we may be talking in terms of Albert and Costello skit here. Explain who Why is and why is important, no pun intended. So Why the Lucky Stiff was an artist whose medium was software.
Starting point is 00:05:01 Basically, he was a very well-known figure in the Ruby community who really did the whole – the reason that conference was called Art and Code and the reason why I was talking there was because that's what he was about. So he made very creative, interesting projects in software, but they were very much from that sort of angle rather than from the computer science kind of side of things. He went by the name Y as a pseudonym? Because he wanted his privacy. Actually, most of the time his name was written with an underscore in the front, which is sort of that convention about private variables. So he went by that name for all the different various things that he did. And so he was a great guy. So what was this Art and Code? What is that? Art and Code is something that there's been two or three of now.
Starting point is 00:05:44 But there's a guy named Golan at at carnegie mellon university here in pittsburgh and he's sort of interested in the same kind of space um where processing is and a bunch of other those kind of projects that are connecting those two things together and so um every so every couple months or so i guess there's been three of them now he has this event where he invites people to come and talk um usually has five or six of them and it takes a day or two. At the same one that Y was at, they had the guy who wrote Processing, whose name I'm totally drawing a blank on, and a couple other people. They did a mobile themed one later where it was all about building interesting mobile applications. It's just kind of a general little conference in Pittsburgh.
Starting point is 00:06:23 Is that the same thing as the open source gaming coding competition? No, that's actually run by my friends and me, actually. So OSGCC was something where my friends and I have traditionally in college, we all realize that we're giant nerds and we want to program 24 7 so every saturday we set aside saturday to uh sleep until noon go get a burrito and then go to the computer lab and and code away and so um because a lot of people were interested in games we decided to have an annual game coding competition and so uh you know we sort of invited people outside of our friends group to get together and do the same sort of thing so we have this like 24-hour sit down, start making a game. 24 hours later, it gets judged thing.
Starting point is 00:07:08 And this past year was a really, really super big year for us. We had more contributors than the rest of the previous three years combined, actually, I think. So it was really good. So Hackety Hack is not a singles from the Coasters in the late 50s. It's actually a program to help you learn programming using Shoes. What's Shoes? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:27 So Shoes actually was born out of Hackity Hack. It's another Y project. But basically, Y wanted Hackity to be available on all three platforms because everybody deserves to learn programming. So as he developed it, he decided that basically he should release all of that GUI platform toolkit stuff as a separate project. And so he pulled Shoes out of Hackity and released it on its own. And so other people can write apps using the same kind of interface. Shoes is the only GUI toolkit I've ever used that I actually enjoy using.
Starting point is 00:08:02 So it seems like every other toolkit is really complicated and takes forever to use. And they're all sort of based on when we started writing toolkits in C in like the, you know, the 80s or whenever GNOME and KDE date to, I guess, early 90s, late 80s, if I'm remembering my dates correct. But Shoes really embraces Ruby in particular and uses blocks. And it's just, it's super easy to actually code in and so hackity is the largest shoes application um so i'm sort of i'm on the core shoes team um as well we have five or six people that work on shoes um because i am the the largest user of shoes you know at the same time but there's tons of other other applications that are like little little tiny gaming things essentially so what shoes use under the hood to do the rendering?
Starting point is 00:08:46 And face value, it looks a lot like TickleTK. Yeah, so right now, it depends on what platform you're running. So if your Shoes 3 is the latest release, if you're using that, then you've got actually native OSX widgets for Mac OS X, I guess I should say. I have a bad habit of saying OSX instead of OS X. It uses GTK on Linux, and it uses the native Windows stuff. And I think it might even use a little bit of GTK stuff on Windows too.
Starting point is 00:09:17 I'm not 100% sure because I don't do the Windows stuff. I handle the Mac things mostly. So it's mostly native right now. But it does use Cairo and Pango, and so it has its own sort of widgets drawn as well. It doesn't always use the native ones. But we're looking at Shoes 4 to be all in Ruby, and so what it's looking like, it's shaping up to be,
Starting point is 00:09:38 we sort of all got together and tried a couple of different approaches, and it looks like Shoes 4 is going to be GTK with the native Ruby bindings on Windows and Linux. And either I'm going to get GTK to work properly on the Mac without needing X11, or I'm just going to do a MacRuby port for the Ruby side, and it'll be in MacRuby. So it'll be one of those two things,
Starting point is 00:10:01 but it'll be in all Ruby in the future. Well, you're feeling my segue. Ruby in the future. Um, so. Well, you're feeling my segue. That was going to be my next question. How's this fit in with Mac Ruby? Yeah. So the other nice thing about Mac Ruby is that shoes built a packager, uh, system that sort of kind of works most of the time. Um, it's sort of this ultimate black magic.
Starting point is 00:10:21 Um, one time why I said that he really, truly only learned about Ruby once he started working on Shoes and digging down into the C code. So basically, Shoes has the ability to package up your application to be able to run. You can package up an exe or a.app, or on Linux it uses this weird.run file sort of format. But MacRuby has that built in for the Mac already, so it'll be nice not to have to replicate that. We're not really 100% sure what we're going to do with the pure Ruby shoes to make that happen, but I'm working on it. There's been some interesting bundler developments, actually,
Starting point is 00:10:55 to sort of make gems be self-contained, and so I'm looking into possibly seeing if that can help with some other things. But it's pretty crazy C code at the moment. So HackneyHack uses shoes, but what else uses shoes? I don't think that there's any other big giant applications that you would necessarily be directly familiar with that use shoes. If you go to the shoebox, actually, which is the-shoebox.org,
Starting point is 00:11:22 that's a little website that is sort of almost like a mini GitHub for shoes. It's actually still up and running. The guy who wrote CoffeeScript actually is currently hosting this, but he and I have been talking, and we're trying to work it back into the main project in general. But it's got a ton of little tiny apps that people have written that are really cool. You see like a Go implementation there and somebody made an IM client
Starting point is 00:11:49 and all sorts of other things. I really liked Numba Crunches is this number munchers clone that I used to play on the Mac when I was in eighth grade or something. And so that was tons of fun. But there's all sorts of little stuff like that. There aren't any big, giant, well-known applications.
Starting point is 00:12:07 Hackity is definitely the largest. So with HackityHack becoming 1.0 officially, I guess, last week, and also getting posted to Lifehacker, the unofficial Apple weblog, and a bunch of other things, it's got to certainly raise the profile for shoes at this point, doesn't it? Yeah, definitely. That's my goal. Although I apparently have a lot of other things. It's got to certainly raise the profile for shoes at this point, doesn't it? Yeah, definitely. That's my goal. Although I apparently have a lot of work to do because apparently most
Starting point is 00:12:30 of the Windows development was done on XP and so there's some things with Windows Vista and Windows 7 that I'm fixing some bugs that people uncovered. It's the classic software. It works for me perfectly fine and then you hand it out to... I actually had 12,000 people download Hackity Hack
Starting point is 00:12:45 in the last four days. And so I got a lot of good feedback. Everybody seems to really like it. But there's been some crashes that I'm going to be taking care of now that I have a little bit, you know, a little bit of a broader installed base of people. So how did Heroku handle that traffic?
Starting point is 00:13:04 It was a champ. Basically, uh, I'm only ever on the free plan for it. Um, using Sinatra and Mongo mapper. And so, um, we got 50,000 uniques and a hundred thousand, uh, hits roughly. Uh, last time I checked the numbers a little bit earlier today. And, um, on Lifehacker, I added an extra dyno, but it didn't even need it. It totally was awesome. Part of this is because the homepage is mostly static, so the varnish caching that they have set up on Heroku was super awesome.
Starting point is 00:13:38 But yeah, I never expected to be able to sustain a Lifehacker front page and the unofficial Apple weblog too. So both of them basically at the same time, I paid like 15 cents or something because I turned on a dyno for a little while. That's awesome. We're big fans of Varnish. It's amazing what a little upfront HTTP caching can do for your application.
Starting point is 00:13:57 We need to get those guys on the show. Yeah, yeah. They're super great. The main guy who wrote it, I know, writes all these crazy papers about the system stuff that he does. Two of my better friends are operating system PhD candidates. And so we talk about that stuff all the time. And that guy's a really good systems guy. So the point of Hackity Hack is to learn programming. What makes Ruby such a great tool for that? Well, so I wrote up something about this actually on the blog a couple weeks ago. And basically what it boils down to is that Ruby is ultimately very forgiving. It's very
Starting point is 00:14:34 well supported by the community in general. So I guess I should back up slightly. So in the intro to programming class at my university, we used Java. And while Java has its strengths in certain areas, as far as the beginning programming goes, everybody knows the class, main class, public static, void, main, string, array, args, stuff that gets involved with writing your first program. And so if you're teaching somebody intro to programming with something that's a little more static, uh,
Starting point is 00:15:07 like Java is you have to sort of present it as all of these things are magic. Don't worry about the details. This is just hello world. And so you, you really have to like gloss over this large body of information before, and you sort of are presenting it in that way that like software is something magical and the computer does these crazy things and you, you're sort of playing with it, but you're not really. And it's encouraging that sort of mindset from the get-go.
Starting point is 00:15:31 So with Ruby or with Python or Perl or any of the other scripting languages, Hello World is just puts Hello World. And so you start off with it executes stuff in order and, you know, everything is very simple. And so while there is some stuff going on under the hood, you don't have to explain it right away. And I think that's really valuable for beginners because a lot of people get sort of hung up on that early syntax. And once you start getting in that mindset that you don't actually, you're not in control of the machine, the machine is controlling you and you're sort of playing around with it, you're on the wrong footing, you know, like software is all about us building things. So that's one of the reasons I feel really strongly about Ruby. The other reason is that the syntax is really
Starting point is 00:16:13 nice and expressive. So I just think that in general, dynamic languages are much better for learning than static languages are. Because even if they have some small runtime issues as opposed to compile time issues, I find that beginners are confused by C compilers error messages anyway. So it doesn't really help as much as you would think it was. Even though it says there's an error, they don't know what it means. I guess this is a Y project previous to being a Steve project. But Y wrote this book called Y? The Point and Guide to Ruby.
Starting point is 00:16:47 So I wonder if there's anything that actually stems from that book that has fallen into the learning patterns of Hackity Hack. Yeah, I mean, not necessarily directly. It's true. So one of the things that took me this long to come out with a 1.0 was because for the first couple of months, I was uber sensitive about the fact that I am not Y. It's really, really hard. It's sort of like, I don't know whoever it was, but whoever was the point guard of the Chicago Bulls right after Jordan retired, there's really big shoes to fill and people
Starting point is 00:17:20 have really big expectations of you. And so it's also difficult because I really loved Y's style and I thought that it was great. But it's also not my style. So I need to keep the project respecting sort of his original way of doing things but make it my own at the same time. So I really had lots of problems initially sort of grappling with those kinds of awkward identity issues where, you know, am I just going to totally screw up Y's greatest, you know, masterpiece? And, you know, so once I finally got over myself and just started actually writing code, everything worked out. But, you know, there's not anything necessarily directly from the poignant guide because I'm trying to sort of, I don't want Y to go away. I obviously wish that he was still here.
Starting point is 00:18:06 But running around saying Y, Y, Y, Y, Y and crying about it is not going to let the community move forward. And so I'd like to, rather than try to use more and more of what Y's earlier works did, I would rather be inspired by them and make new stuff that's equally as awesome. So no chunky bacon? Yeah. I try to leave some of that stuff in there, you know, but I'm trying to gradually sort of, as the grieving process moves along, you know, it's been a while, so it gets easier and easier as time goes on to sort of take those
Starting point is 00:18:38 things out. I noticed the Chunk 5 font on the website. Is that a tribute to chunky bacon? Yeah, no, it's just that it just happened to be a tribute to Chunky Bacon? Yeah, I know. It just happened to be a nice one that I like the look of. If you're not sure what we're talking about, go check out Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. So up on GitHub, Hackity Hack is touting around 200 watchers now. So when you posted it last week to the changelog, what kind of effect did it have to the watch status and fork status of Hackity Hack? You know, it's funny.
Starting point is 00:19:06 Every time I post something that changes, I always tell myself, I want to look and see how many things that changes, but I never do. I'm a really big sucker for game mechanics, and those kind of numbers are something that I intensely am all into. But I think that I added about 70 or 80 watchers and probably 10 or 15 forks I definitely got some contributions from people that I'd never gotten
Starting point is 00:19:32 before after it was posted so thanks to everybody who's now watching and the people who are contributing to it although I still am doing the vast majority of the work on Hackity itself but we've gotten some good patches in from people, so it's been nice. I've sort of got to raise the bar for it a little bit.
Starting point is 00:19:52 You've got 27 issues there now that are mentioned there, but what kind of support are you getting from the community now in terms of actual pull requests, and what kind of changes have come from not just you but others so i'm still not um getting a lot of actual um software support so those 27 issues a lot of them are actually shoes bugs that hackety exposed so they're sort of merged in and one of the things i want to do with the shoes issue tracker was we were keeping track of feature requests and issues tracker but now it looks like there's a million there's like 45 issues now because we have, you know, 15 or 20 of them are feature requests that people ask for.
Starting point is 00:20:30 So I want to sort of move those around. So sometimes those issues get a little conflated a little bit where, you know, it's not really my fault so much as something that I'm doing that messes up shoes. But one of the things that I'm continually trying to do is lower the bar for contribution because I want Hackity to be the ideal open source project. If I'm going to be teaching people programming, I sort of have this subtle goal of getting them to contribute to open source as well.
Starting point is 00:20:56 So you'll see the website and the project in general will merge more and more towards trying to get people to share their code with each other and improve on each other's things. I definitely want to add the ability to fork people's projects on Hackaday Hack and those kinds of things. It's already happened one or two times on its own. And that made me really, really super happy where someone posted their program and then somebody else said, hey, check this out. I made your thing, but I added another screen to it or whatever. So it was really exciting. But one of the big things that we're trying to address with the next version of Shoes is that Shoes is incredibly difficult to compile. It actually, because Y was not necessarily known for commenting his code, and he was
Starting point is 00:21:37 also known for lots of metaprogramming, and the fact that Shoes is a C and C++ and Objective C and Ruby project. It's a bit intimidating sometimes if something goes wrong during the compilation step. So you don't actually need to compile Shoes to work on HackityHack. You can just download Shoes itself and open the RB files and make it work. But I think that I'm not doing a good job yet of letting people know that. And so I think that it's slightly intimidating to some people, um, because of that factor. So I'm continually trying to make it more and more easy to, to contribute. Um, because, you know, I would love to have people help me out. Um, but you know, that's,
Starting point is 00:22:15 that's kind of the thing is this, this dual nature of the project being two projects, but one project kind of is, you know, a little intimidating for people that don't know what's going on. It certainly has to expose some of those dependency issues that we see in Ruby apps and whatnot. Yeah, and because we also, I don't want to make people install extra things. So what Shoes actually does is it compiles all of its dependencies and then wraps them all up inside of itself. So it's completely self-contained. And so there's been some issues sometimes with those kinds of dependency issues too
Starting point is 00:22:44 where I've included the wrong versions of something or I've accidentally left one out and then it happens. So for those listening out there that are on different platforms other than what you develop on, what do you need most help on? What would be great is somebody who really knows about Windows 7 and Vista and the ways that they were different from Windows XP. So we pretty much have Team Shoes essentially as three people, Windows 7 and Vista and the ways that they were different from Windows XP. So we pretty much have Team Shoes essentially as three people,
Starting point is 00:23:13 one on each platform that sort of manages and does most of the development on that particular platform. So the guy who does Windows development, his name is Ash, Ash BB on Twitter, and he uses Windows XP primarily. And so a lot of the development was sort of done in that era too, I think, that Y was developing on XP. So, for instance, somebody let me know that I was installing certain things to a protected folder, and that was causing crashes on some people's systems and not others.
Starting point is 00:23:36 So I would really love somebody who knows more about Windows development to give me a hand. That would be really great Because I come from the Linux and Mac world, and so all those tools are sort of foreign to me. And I got my VM set up last night, and I got everything to compile and working out, so I'm working on learning it. But it's always good to have people who know
Starting point is 00:23:55 what they're talking about. So that would be the largest need, for sure, as somebody who knows Windows stuff. I know most of our contributors are way younger than Adam or me, but if you started when you were seven, I'm guessing Ruby wasn't your first programming language? No, not at all. So how many languages do you speak? I've done serious projects in, I guess it's probably just easier,
Starting point is 00:24:16 rather than counting the numbers, to go back through and think about it. So I started off using GW Basic, and then I moved to C, and then C++, I moved to C and then C plus plus and then Pearl and Java. And then I did a little bit of Python, but I found Ruby and I liked it better. So I done more in Ruby, but I have done one or two projects in Python, including some robotics stuff. Uh,
Starting point is 00:24:37 I have a love affair with Haskell, which I'm always trying to find more excuses to use, but I haven't really gotten around to yet. I've played around with various LISPs and Scheme. I enjoy doing JavaScript stuff sometimes in the browser when it's not too tricky. Sometimes it gets frustrating, but that's a lot of fun. I have several friends who are heavily involved in the D language programming community, and so I've used D for a couple of things, although nothing super major.
Starting point is 00:25:04 But that operating system project that I was talking about earlier, my friends are doing PhD candidates are actually writing it in D, which is kind of cool. And, you know, a couple assembly languages every once in a while, and that's, I think that's it. I don't know, a lot of stuff. I love languages. So... Do you find it easier to pick up new languages after you get more under your belt?
Starting point is 00:25:23 Yeah, I think that what it really takes is once you get a dynamic language, like a scripting language, Ruby, Python, Perl, you know, any of the three of those or something similar. And once you get a functional language and you get a more normal, like static imperative language, once you have those three under your belt, it becomes really easy to pick up almost anything else because most languages are pretty closely tied to those three different ideas. There's not a lot of ones outside of those kind of categorizations. So, you know, but definitely learning Haskell and functional programming was one part where I really felt like I got much better as a programmer, and it continues to improve my Ruby code to this day,
Starting point is 00:26:02 whenever I do, you know, functional sort of things that Ruby supports. So before we get to the infamous radar question, I have kind of an off-the-wall question for you. Okay. In your bio and what we posted here to the changelog to kind of introduce you to the audience, there's one piece that stands out a little bit, and it says that you're an anarchist. And at the same time, you're also involved in open source and kind of creating this community. Does that kind of become an oxymoron for you? And why would you say that and be in open source?
Starting point is 00:26:35 I think it's actually the exact opposite. So I – first of all, I call myself an anarchist because I've been reading about anarchism for the last year or two. And so it took me a really long time to identify that way. But I'm pretty sure that I agree with most of that political theory now. So it feels the most correct to me. But basically, anarchism is fundamentally about empowering people to do the things they want to do. It's about not being controlled by others and doing, like empowering people that way. And they want to do. It's about not being controlled by others and doing, like empowering people that way. And it's about community. Like you can't have a group of people work together effectively unless they know each other and they become friends. So anarchism gets
Starting point is 00:27:18 a really bad rap because, you know, it's been sort of slandered by people over the years. But really, I think that open source and specifically the Internet actually is a great example of how anarchism could theoretically work as a way of governing people because they're exactly that. They're distributed. No one's necessarily directly in charge. And, you know, so that sort of relates into those things. But that's why I identify that way. Anarchism is not, there's a sort of saying like anarchism is not no rules, it's no rulers. It's about direct democracy. And so you can sort of think of it as libertarianism to a slightly
Starting point is 00:27:58 even more extreme to the point where they don't like capitalism, essentially. So for the folks who don't really know Steve yet, and when they read that, it could have been a negative thing, I guess, but you just definitely clarified there that you're not an evil co-conspirator of some sort of, I don't know, like conspiracy theories and stuff. Yeah, yeah. It's one of those things where I wish there was a better word because people have sort of taken it down a notch by associating it with all sorts of other things necessarily.
Starting point is 00:28:30 And this is a very complicated topic. I guess I'll just leave it at that. But it's not as simple as like, I'm a teenager and I hate my parents, so I don't want there to be any rules and the world would be awesome. That's really all I have to say. And if anybody has questions, you can email me about it and I'd be more than happy to talk about it in more depth. I'm sure you're a good guy. I was just
Starting point is 00:28:49 kind of curious about how that played into your role and then just in general, I just thought I'd ask the question. Totally. I guess it's about time that we ask the question of what's on your open source radar? There's lots of stuff out there in the open source world. It moves fast. We try our best to keep up, but what's on your open source radar. So there's lots of stuff out there in the open source world. It moves fast.
Starting point is 00:29:05 We try our best to keep up. But what's out there in open source that's on your radar that you just have to go out and play with right now? So the two largest things that I want to play with more are evented programming. So that's why I posted that Coolio project a couple days ago. I would love to do something with Node.js and or Event Machine or Coolio
Starting point is 00:29:26 but evented style web programming is something where I have very little experience but it seems like it has a really good use case in certain times and so that would be definitely something that I would like to expand some more knowledge about and it's getting kind of hot lately the other thing is that I've been using MongoDB a lot and I really really enjoy it and I would like to get familiar with some of the other NoSQL stores since they're not really similar to each other. It's sort of like learning different ones every time, you know? So I think that learning more about the details of Cassandra and like React, I've used Redis a teeny little bit. And CouchDB are the other ones that I really want to try to, you know,
Starting point is 00:30:09 learn how to use those tools effectively because it's all about using the right tool for the job, right? So the more things you learn, the more equipped you are to solve problems. So I guess those are the next big things that I'm sort of interested in learning about in the open source projects that are sort of popping up now that those things are getting popular. We've done a couple of shows now on React, and we've covered MongoDB on the show. I'd love to get Redis on the changelog.
Starting point is 00:30:34 We'll have to keep trying to nail down Antares to get him on the show. But Cassandra would be another great episode. Yeah, they're all cool projects. And it's interesting how similar and different they all are at the same time. We've also been asked to kind of rehash the whole NoSQL Smackdown, too. You know, I have to host another one of those. Well, thanks for taking the time. Thanks for contributing to the changelog, Steve, and looking forward to the posts that you have forthcoming and more about Hackity Hack.
Starting point is 00:31:04 Yeah, Thanks for having me. It's been a lot of fun so far. And, uh, you know, you guys, I'm glad to, to be a part of this cool stuff that you guys are doing. I think that it's, it's a great to be able to find out about new projects. I'm always on the lookout, so it's good. See you then. I found myself for the first time Safe in your arms As the dark passion

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.