over 4 years ago Syntax Podcast
Code Explorers
- 05:41 Wes thinks commenting +1 is not helpful
- 07:20 RFC stands for Request for Comments
- 08:45 RFCs are places for people to discuss issues and ideas
- 12:18 RFCs show future direction of projects
- 12:44 Active changes happen in issues and pull requests
- 14:31 Managing RFC conversations is a skill
- 17:05 Twitter is a good place to learn about new features
Transcript
Wes Bos
Allow you to create, people use it in so many different ways. And you have to remember that
Scott Tolinski
the more, My name is Scott.
Scott Tolinski
Yeah. This episode is sponsored by 2 amazing companies, LogRocket
Scott Tolinski
Retool.
Wes Bos
it looks like they're focusing on internal tools Because
Scott Tolinski
Sick. Alright. Awesome. Cool.
Wes Bos
that people in marketing will come to you and be like, hey. We need an internal tool to do this. And internal tools are a beast of their own. It. And this is really cool. They get integrations with tons of different data sources. They've got all kinds of different templates. They've got template for doing Stripe refunds and arrest API,
Wes Bos
You could try it for free. Thank you, retool, for sponsoring.
Announcer
the craziest,
Wes Bos
and they will
Scott Tolinski
performance tracking tools, Wes. I don't know if you've seen that, but a lot of cool new stuff like customer engagement and retaining customer features as well. So, it. LogRocket adding a ton of new stuff, and we'll have to dive in deeper to some of those new features in other ad reads. So if you wanna check out LogRocket, head on over to logrocket.
Wes Bos
your product. And, like, for me, I have an entire application that is
Scott Tolinski
you know, you have a limited time for things. So even more so than contributing, I'm really interested in really Keeping up to date with what's going on with projects that I'm interested in because that way nothing's going to surprise me. If it's a breaking change, If it's a new API, it's a new feature. I'm feeling nice and ready prepared for this. Now sometimes it's just for Now welcome to syntax. In this Monday, hasty treat. We're gonna be us. The repos. That's right. We're gonna be diving. We're gonna be crawling. We're gonna be finding tight spaces, and we're gonna be seeing the future of code, In other times, it's a little bit more. I have a specific issue that I'm trying to solve, and I wanna stay up to date on,
Scott Tolinski
And if the user clicked on the thing and the thing didn't work and it popped up with the error message and they say, hey. Maybe I I clicked on this thing and this error message came up. You could say, okay. Well, let me actually dive in there, and you can look in LogRocket. And I not only see the the actual
Wes Bos
filtering by by day,
Scott Tolinski
Oh, And Bind group does not work with nested components. Those are 2 issues that are very firmly going to be worked on because they're attached to that milestone.
Scott Tolinski
Just for fun. Right? It's just for laughs. You know? Just, oh, just to go and check and see what's going on in here. I think this is pretty neat stuff.
Scott Tolinski
You know, it's like, for one thing, it's like, yeah, you can kinda see a bunch of noise, but, an amazing it's amazing resource.
Announcer
the tastiest web development treats coming again hot. Here is Wes, Barracuda,
Wes Bos
it. Stats, how many I've sold,
Scott Tolinski
good. You were just pulling up less.
Wes Bos
hookups. They've got charts, GitHub PR, Slack Notifier, s 3 File Explorer.
Scott Tolinski
And find places where you can see what's going on in your photos.
Scott Tolinski
in
Announcer
Open wide dev fans, get ready to stuff your face with JavaScript, CSS, node modules, barbecue tips, get workflows, breakdancing, soft skill, web development, the hastiest,
Wes Bos
It's almost unbelievable that this is a thing. And so Retool is like like, I'm not just saying that because they're sponsoring it. Like, this looks awesome. Like, this looks Like, I maybe should be using this. So what retails is, I know,
Scott Tolinski
Wes Bos. Hey, everybody.
Wes Bos
being able to get analytics on what's going on, doing refunds, partial refunds, hooking up to the Stripe API, the PayPal API.
Wes Bos
for your, it's it's at that point where you can actually it's it's kind of interesting. Like, you can literally have and you can sort of click together all these different internal tools, which is amazing because we always know, like, Both of them
Scott Tolinski
Maybe there was an error in the console you could investigate. All of those things are available to you, all of that and more. I know LogRocket has recently added, like, performance, And and there's a whole lot of discussion about how they're wanting to do that. There's, like, Forty some comments. There's a ton of PRs mentioning this thing, and you just know that maybe, What is going on in the repos and projects that you're using? So, yeah, that's it. Now that I have that out of the way. Beautiful. Alright. I think that's good for today. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we will catch you on And that's really, really good. You know what? One thing that you can do to maybe identify,
Wes Bos
You name it. Check it out at
Announcer
Boss, and Scott
Scott Tolinski
not only the more curious I get about these types of things, but the more I'm capable of understanding.
Wes Bos
All of that for you. So you just hook it up to your data source
Scott Tolinski
This episode is also sponsored by and retool. Now LogRocket is the perfect place to see your errors and exceptions happening
Wes Bos
Actively working on it. Totally. And it's worth diving into these things as well because to do that. Right? Like, I am I think this is kind of an interesting topic that you came up with. And, yeah, I really like this idea because people always ask, like, How do you stay up to date? But, like, there's a flip side to that is, what if you're curious about what's coming down the pipe?
Wes Bos
I'm excited about this one.
Scott Tolinski
replay. Yeah. That's right. A literal video replay. This thing is so dang cool because you can see what the user did to actually cause the error And so people usually add the s on there. It's like request.
Announcer
CSD.
Announcer
Monday. Monday. Monday.
Wes Bos
retool.comforward/syntax.
RFCs are places for people to discuss issues and ideas
Scott Tolinski
You know? How do you figure that out? Yeah. And I I feel like the The better programming I get, thing is to look at the comments.
Wes Bos
Do you ever paw through our seas west? Yeah. I really like doing it. Specifically, I really like the
Wes Bos
API ergonomics or something like that makes makes it easy to use or, Hey. It's this is really awesome in Svelte land.
Scott Tolinski
Oh, hey. This is kind of neat or, no, this is not this is not the direction we want this to go in or Yeah. Or maybe, like, this is this is worth exploring or not worth Blurring, essentially.
Scott Tolinski
without having, like, it. You know, proper, Nowadays, more people are having, like, discussion boards too, but discussions they also I think it it's a great way to learn about stuff. For instance, I found out very early that, has a lot of comments, then, boy, you just found yourself something.
Wes Bos
input into how the things that all developers are using and building the applications
Scott Tolinski
Pretty pretty sweet. I'll I'll throw a little heart emoji on there in the reactions.
Wes Bos
are used. So It's really fun. I don't chime in as much
Wes Bos
because, A, sometimes I'm wrong because I could be thinking like, oh, that's not how I do it. And But, like, I don't know. Maybe I just need to have a bit of Best memoirs a function, but maybe I will chime in on, like, a lot of the, like, foundational ones, either at a language level or at a low level tool, Maybe we could have that in this other framework because I really like how they approach that type of thing. Yeah. Totally. I definitely get that too. And, you know, I almost always like my means of The ones in node land, in npm land,
Scott Tolinski
RFCs that might be a little bit more there are 2 things that are attached to the milestones of post launch version 3 features.
Scott Tolinski
What will happen is if somebody has an idea for the language, they'll open up an RFC a Scrubbable video like, really get a handle on something new that's coming to a library or even a project in general, The 1st place that I think you should go would be to simply head to Google and type in the project name and then the letters I always wonder why it's just why they don't make it our It stands for a request for comments.
Scott Tolinski
that is usually structured and organized pretty well to say, here's what I'm thinking. Here's what it would look like, and here's what kind of the practical implications of this. And then that gives everyone the the chance to look at it and say,
Scott Tolinski
good arguments to back up what you're saying, but also being way more respectful. Right? or RFC
Wes Bos
a a correction in terms of how I view something, And they say, oh, why did they do it this way or why is it done this way? And like, you had
Scott Tolinski
unnecessary comments like plus 1 or whatever.
Scott Tolinski
because of that, they're Actually working on it or that something is going to happen from that, so then you can dive in a little bit further and read into that.
Wes Bos
I might not be able to chime in on how you can memoize
Scott Tolinski
Like, maybe this isn't the direction we should go for these following reasons. But for the most part, I I really stay out of commenting. I just kinda like to snoop around,
Twitter is a good place to learn about new features
Scott Tolinski
Who knows? Like, right, you know, might be a little bit too over the top or over your head, but it's also a great place to practice reading code because you can see exactly Now Yeah. Oh, no. That's after it. In fact, I've linked 3 of them. 1 for Svelte, 1 for React, and one for Vue All in this, and I found all 3 of these. Not I mean, I have some of these start already, but By one of the core main train maintainers, if it was created by a core maintainer and, You know, what's not helpful is is commenting with things like plus 1 or something like that. That's why we have the heart Or or or thumbs up emojis. Right? Those emojis are there. Those reactions are there to avoid
Scott Tolinski
So I I find an interesting PR. It's this improved types for style interface. I'm gonna click files changed, which is one of the tabs there. You can see exactly what the person has been modifying for any particular PR.
Scott Tolinski
like, what's happening and that's also a great place to learn a little bit about, like, it. The actual code base of a project. But if you click files changed, you can kind of get an idea of what's going on. Now that is a skill it. That really is something that needs to be tuned with your growth as a programmer in general. Sometimes this is going to look like,
Scott Tolinski
As always, thanks so much for listening. Peace.
Scott Tolinski
So
Scott Tolinski
another little tip there is that if you want to see exactly, And and and don't go in there and comment like, I think this is dumb of contributing to these things is is almost So PRs, issues, those are great places to check. Check the milestones, see what's attached here. Again, always be respectful.
Wes Bos
Well said. I I don't think I have anything else to to add to that, but definitely worth I I have one thing to add to it. What? When you're looking at PRs, you hook it up to your existing data provider, Whether that's a database, MongoDB, MySQL, they've got tons of them, or an existing API, The opinions of the entire world. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
Scott Tolinski
Node was getting fetched from Matteo
Scott Tolinski
Head on over to syntax.fm in addition to the pull request things. If you go to the files changed section of things so if you open up a PR, You can go directly to the files changed.
Scott Tolinski
Other people are looking. So, yeah, for a new version of something
Scott Tolinski
just required recommended elective limited use not recommended, but that's definitely how they used to do it. Basically, RFCs are just a a place where people can have issues and ideas, and they're frequently they're done as GitHub issues or pull requests.
Scott Tolinski
Peace.
Scott Tolinski
I'm hope I pronounce that right, Matteo. Matteo is one of the core contributors to Node. He's fantastic, That's not something that you could say, like, oh, this is what Svelte 4 is gonna look like. Let me break the news.
Scott Tolinski
Wednesday. Yeah. And let us know if you find any fun code things. There's a lot of cool code stuff coming, and, I know a bunch of people have found some recently some interesting features coming to SvelteKit. It's funny. I found them at one point, and I was just, like, waiting for other people to notice them. And then I saw the Twitter threads come in a couple weeks later. So I'm like, alright.
Wes thinks commenting +1 is not helpful
Wes Bos
cheaply instead of having to pay for a service. Yeah. Totally.
Wes Bos
people love to complain when something is released
Wes Bos
equal opportunity to actually dip into this. If you care very strongly about
Wes Bos
There is a proposal for something to a framework or a library or even the language, and I have a bit of a perspective from, like, a beginner point of view because I I work with so many beginners that it. My courses, I can sort of understand where people might get tripped up or,
Wes Bos
have done this a lot in the past where
Wes Bos
How something is doing. You should probably attach yourself to that issue and chime in where it's needed. I specifically Or b, I don't necessarily know what's the best way
Wes Bos
where they might need something or or something that's too hard because sometimes people building these things are extremely smart. And it doesn't look like a big deal to code out entire feature for a file upload. But it's like, it would be nice if that was included or It'd be nice if I could do this,
Managing RFC conversations is a skill
Scott Tolinski
actually, I wonder if this is is it an issues too? Yeah. It is.
Scott Tolinski
So, like, more aggressive inner HTML optimization.
Wes Bos
But Yeah. Yeah. And, like and shout out to people that are able to manage all of that. That's a whole another skill set of being able to take Everybody's concerns and opinions and also the way that people the apps I've built are not necessarily
Scott Tolinski
So
Scott Tolinski
there's a lot of really great ways to find things. Another one is to check the milestones tab. If you're in a poll request section, RFCs
Scott Tolinski
The last place to really get a handle on where some of the stuff is coming from and what new features are coming out or what's being worked on is Twitter.
Scott Tolinski
And and just being, I don't know, respectful and cool is is a good one. Now one neat thing about PR is, especially, like, everyone has a different way of doing this. So you kinda have to be, like, on the level of what the repo is you're looking at. But it. Sometimes, you know, for instance, like, the Svelte repo. Right? The repo for Svelte, not even Svelte kit. They have labels for their PRs. If it's a feature, if it's a fix, if it's a docs,
Scott Tolinski
If you're an issues or poll request, there's a little tab that says milestones next to the search box. If you click that,
Scott Tolinski
And they have a feature that's already going to be added to the project. It's determined that it will be. They'll assign it to a milestone. Like, right now in this felt Repo. I'm just I'm using this as an example because I have it open. But,
Scott Tolinski
And likewise, there's a version of 4, like version 4 of Svelte Milestone. Now There's a lot of great things you can find out on Twitter. In fact, I follow all of the core contributors for all of the projects that I'm interested in on Twitter, So let's get into this episode.
Scott Tolinski
oftentimes, when people are creating a release Cool. Okay. So Colina.
Wes Bos
use a piece of tech like you. We have this language JavaScript, And it looks like this does
Active changes happen in issues and pull requests
Scott Tolinski
Now again with the issues, just like with the is probably not where the active changes are taking place. The active changes are gonna be in the poll request and then the issues.
Scott Tolinski
Has not only more sway over the project, obviously, because he's the creator of it. But, I think what we're gonna try to do here is help you help you cut through some of the noise and really understand I found all 3 of these just by typing in Into Google, React RFCS.
Scott Tolinski
somebody like that for a full archive of all of our shows, and don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player it. Or drop a review if you like this show.
Scott Tolinski
is a big skill, but also, like, knowing who, That is in your system.
Scott Tolinski
then maybe that's something you'd want to look at a little bit more closely because,
Scott Tolinski
the RFCs in general, If you find things with a lot of comments associated with them because, like, some some path some projects have a ton of issues. That's just like the nature of it. But if you find some issues that have a lot of conversation or PRs associated to them because if you look at the table, there'll be a little, Like merge icon if there's a PR associated with it. So if you find 1, like, here has 8 value or 8 comments and a PR associated with it, That might be something that could actually be happening whether or not it's a bug fix or a feature. Right? But it It kinda gives you an idea about what things they're at least thinking about or working on. I got really used to this with the meteor because I always wanted to see what was coming up in the pipeline.
Scott Tolinski
creating issues can also be a big one too. Right? If it's Joe Schmo creating an issue saying my thing doesn't work, then it's not helpful. It's not interesting. Right? But if, Let's say Rich Harris has created an issue on this felt repo,
RFCs show future direction of projects
Scott Tolinski
future. Right? What what could be worked on? What what are things that We might be wanting to see in this or or might be happening, a scrubbable video of the user doing the thing, but you actually get access to the network request. So maybe that network request failed for some reason.
Scott Tolinski
So RFCs These are a great place to really get an idea of Always via supportive emoji. I'm not using the thumbs down on the somebody's, like, being rude or something like that. But if Mhmm. If, like, there is something that I I think is Forward slash syntax. Sign up, and you'll get 14 days for free.
Scott Tolinski
And this is where just diving into the repo comes into play. Now there are 2 different places to look really.
RFC stands for Request for Comments
Scott Tolinski
is reviewed by various technical groups and given a one of 5 classifications How many comments he has. This kind of a neat little hack because if something is something that people are actually considering or there's conversation around it. There's gonna be a lot of back and forth and a lot of comments between the creators. I mean, there's 1 here on the looking at these felt Explicitly typing props, slots, events, plus generics.
Scott Tolinski
Now RFCS I wanted to say that like this is something that I've been definitely doing more and And the more I do it, the more I I think I I I'm like very interested in following along with product projects more so than like as you work on your projects by showing you how you can stay up to date with what's going on in the projects and repos that you care about. My name is Scott Talinski. I'm a full stack developer from Denver, Colorado. And with me, as always, is And he's a great place for information. He's also the creator of Fastify. So just an awesome, awesome JavaScript creator. But Finding people like that on Twitter who are always posting what they're into or what they're working on is just but what about, like, things that are happening? What about Changes that are actively being worked on.
Scott Tolinski
standardized, So I mean, you can only contribute to so much. Right? And how look at look at some stuff and see what you can find. Who knows? It could be a lot of fun.
Scott Tolinski
as a as a technique, and maybe it's been around for longer than that even. It says once published it. An RFC you can see at a quick glance. And, again, if you see something that has a lot of comments or something that was created If you want to,
Scott Tolinski
it's not exactly, required, recommended, elective, limited use, Or not recommended.
Scott Tolinski
is capitalized, and then the s is not. So it's definitely just RFCs. I Probably have a little bit more insight into things that are actually going to be changing or actual issues or actual things to work on. So Knowing and understanding who the core contributors are in a repo,
Scott Tolinski
stands for request for comments, This is stay, seeing if they've opened an issue or seeing what issues they've opened in reading those is also a great way. Again, I like to just kind of snoop around and stay on the sidelines here than to, really get too involved unless it's with supportive emoji.
Scott Tolinski
Mhmm. They're literally asking for you to chime in. Yeah. Right. That that's really it. A a request for comments is basically a thing that's been around since, like, the I don't I don't know if it's been around before this, but it's been around since the start of the Internet In the start of computing, when people were trying to work on features. So it's been around forever the progress of something if I'm not the one who's you know, super common to see that I I think that I don't think the s is actually part of the acronym here. I could be wrong about that. I think it's just RFCs. CSDs. Yeah. Okay. When they're listed, it's RFC