The Babel Podcast: Recent Episodes
Henry Zhu
You probably use Babel. Do you ever wonder who made or works on the software you use, especially in open source? Or maybe it's in your dependencies and you don't even know.
Henry Zhu chats with other members of the team, TC39, and the JS community about the future of JavaScript, open source, and how it's all maintained. Join us in babbling about Babel!
Nicolò Ribaudo talks about his life as a math student, learning jQuery before JavaScript, doing oss on the side, his experiences in oss, doing an internship, participating in TC39, and some thoughts after three years of being on the team. (recorded in October). Transcript at https://podcast.babeljs.io/nicolo
Nicolò: https://twitter.com/NicoloRibaudo
Henry: https://twitter.com/left_pad
Sections:
- Intro
- This is just applied math
- Starting in open source
- Why Babel?
- What matters now?
- Open source and Internships
- Maintenance Boredom
What is a breaking change about anyway?
Fred Schott (@FredKSchott) joins Henry to have a discussion around the topic of breaking changes in programming. We chat about Snowpack and Babel's major versions, different vision means a new name (Rome), semver, RFCs, BDFLs, breaking changes as bug fixes, forking, and more (recorded in April)! Transcript at https://podcast.babeljs.io/breaking
Headings:
- Intro: What is a Breaking Change?
- What is Snowpack: V1 to V2
- When is a Breaking Change Just a New Package?
- Re-Defining Semver?
- Famous Coder, Bruce Lee
- Commit: "fix stuff"
- On RFCs
- Project Vision: BDFLs and more
- On Removing Babel's TC39 Stage Presets
- Communicating Breaking Changes: React, Yarn, etc
- Are the Changes We Make Even Helpful?
- Different Vision, Different Name
- React 17, Babel 8?
- Rationalizing Breaking Changes as Bug Fixes
- Breaking Changes and Plugin Ecosystem
- Reverse Transforms for All Proposals
- Project Sustainability and Sponsorship
- Streaming Coding
- The Difficulty of Reaching Out
- Scaling Your Time, Managing Your Attention
- The Freedom of Contributors To Join and Leave
- The Value of Forking
- Platform Funding, Sponsorship
- "Babel Pika Fellowship"
Jason Miller and Henry Zhu do a follow up episode on the issues around running modern JavaScript for not just your own code, but rather your dependencies (what's in node_modules). Discussed are specific approaches by bundlers to change package.json fields like jsnext:main/module, general issues for library consumers and maintainers as well as browsers, and the hints of some ideas for the near and far future.
Transcript: https://podcast.babeljs.io/dependencies
Jason: https://twitter.com/_developit
Henry: https://twitter.com/left_pad
Podcast: http://podcast.babeljs.io
Jason Miller and Henry Zhu talk through a high level philosophy of transpilers (compilers), Babel's core mental model as the democratization of programming language design, and all nuances of the relationship between developers, TC39, browsers, tools. Let's look a the future of Babel.. through the future of preset-env with the newly released babel-preset-modules started by Jason!
Transcript: https://podcast.babeljs.io/preset-env
Jason: https://twitter.com/_developit
Henry: https://twitter.com/left_pad
Podcast: http://podcast.babeljs.io
Henry chats with Sebastian McKenzie, the creator of Babel, on it's beginnings, what he's learned both technically and personally, and what this Rome thing is all about. They surmise why it was popular, names/logos, vision/scope of projects, planning a launch, doing closed source development, burnout, motivations, setting priorities, delegating/letting go, and more! On Rome: why create something new, what's different than the current status quo, pros/cons of a mono-tool chain, on working privately, etc.
Sebastian: https://twitter.com/sebmck
Henry: https://twitter.com/left_pad
Transcript: https://podcast.babeljs.io/rome