Datasets:

willtheorangeguy
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2017-Spotlight-Transcripts

+**Jerod Santo:** \[00:31\] Welcome to our first Spotlight series recorded at OSCON London 2016. I'm Jerod Santo, managing editor of Changelog. Sid Sijbrandij, the CEO of GitLab, was on the Changelog recently, discussing GitLab's Master Plan and a new style of development they call "conversational development."
+I saw down with Sid at OSCON to see how they're doing executing that plan, and we also discussed the recent controversy around GitLab and the removal and subsequent reposting of security research data. I think you'll enjoy hearing how Sid turns everything into an opportunity as much as I did. Take a listen.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** You have a nice setup here. This is great.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's pretty cool, right? We had a good turnout... The hardest part about doing these things is getting people to actually sit down. Because certain people are intimidated or they have no idea what the Changelog is...
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** I love the Changelog. I got so many positive reactions due to the last podcast, it's just insane. It's the most responses to a media thing ever.
+**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** There's people that applied to the company because of that podcast.
+**Jerod Santo:** That's really cool. I think you did very well on it, and you guys have a lot to say at GitLab, so I think that resonated very well with our listeners. We're always excited when -- you know, listen counts are one thing, but when people actually do things based on the shows that we put on, that's pretty cool. We had Cory Doctorow on kind of leading up to this, and he had a pretty strong call-to-action at the end, and there was like half a dozen people that signed up for the EFF specifically because of him on the show. It's a cool feeling.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah. The EFF, that was my first donation ever.
+**Jerod Santo:** Was it?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** I printed it out.
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Yeah, be proud about it. So when we had you on the show, we were talking about your Master Plan and conversational development, which is a very interesting thing and I feel like it's kind of catching on... It's kind of like slapping a name on something we were already doing, which is smart. Don't you think so?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yes, trying to brand whatever we see happening already.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, which is a smart business move I think for GitLab, and also helpful, because we were kind of already doing this, and now we can call it something, which is always nice.
+Since then, you guys have had a release. Tell me about the big release.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** We had a big release, but the most important thing is that we started executing on what we showed. We revealed the Master Plan and we showed this montage of how things should work, and it really energized us. We said, "Okay, what we're gonna do every day for half an hour - we're gonna get gather this group of people and we're gonna do nothing else, and try to make this thing real."
+Lots of people have been working really hard to make it a reality. Now we're basically a month later, and we had two weeks of just making little improvements every day, and 80% of what we envisioned is there. It's not yet all shipped, but it's in the product.
+Yesterday I gave a demo here. We were sitting opposite the booth of Red Hat, the OpenShift booth, we installed GitLab on OpenShift and then we demo-ed ChatOps to create an issue training issue open up a coding environment - so you press a button, you get a terminal in your container...
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice...
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[04:01\] ...doing the CI, it auto scales on the container scheduler, doing CD and seeing it in cycle analytics... And I can demo that with a plain vanilla OpenShift installation within 20 minutes.
+**Jerod Santo:** That's pretty cool. That had to feel pretty good.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** It felt really good, and we kind of surprised ourselves how fast we're making progress.
+**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** The only thing we're still thinking about is the online IDE, and what's giving us pause is that people seem really attached to their editors, so where first we thought it's gonna be something in the browser, now I'm thinking like, "I don't wanna be the one that tells people to give up TextMate or Sublime..." People are very enthusiastic about VS Code and Atom, so maybe we should just sync the file system from the container to the local client. That's the path we're on right now.
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a decent value. Remember Heroku started off as an online editor... Do you remember that? And they were way early on it, and they had like this whole integrated environment in the web; that was probably ten years ago now. They moved away from it... I think the web wasn't quite ready for that kind of technology. I think the web is there as far as doing what you wanna do in the browser, but also people wanted to develop local. Like you said, they like their editors, they like their own terminals... I feel like an online editor is a nice-to-have for like - you may already have this - "I'm just gonna update this readme", or whatever... A decent file editor inside of GitLab is good, but I think you're onto something with syncing the file system or integrating into editors and having tight integration into all the different popular ones.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yes, so GitLab has an editor; it's not a development environment, it's just editing the file it's just editing the file. There are so many awesome solutions for online editors... like coding has a great product and we're working to integrate with them even closer. There's Codenvy, there's Cloud9 (awesome Dutch people, just got bought by Amazon). There's all these solutions out there, but when I hear developers, they never say "I wanna use a browser editor." They are complaining like, "I have too little memory on my machine. My CPU gets hot and my battery drains when I'm running my tests."
+It's kind of annoying to have to boot up an entire Elasticsearch cluster to properly test my dev environment. It used to be that you just had parity between your pre-production environment and your production environment, but I think with container schedulers we should go all the way. We should go "Your dev environment is similar to the production environment", and that means it runs just that hot, it will need as many resources, and we're not gonna do that on your laptop, it doesn't make sense. It should be in the cloud.
+So you want that in the cloud, but I'm not sure you want the editor there. It's super hard to do, and if you get really down to it, that online editor should do stuff like autocomplete -- it's super hard to do. Codenvy has done a great job with Eclipse Che. It's like an API to do those look-ahead things, because then you query the file system for like, "What else is there?"
+We think that's hard to do, and we're into the boring solutions business, so we think "Why not dump it down?" It's a file editor. We just get the files out to your editor and do that, but have all the stuff running back on that container scheduler.
+**Jerod Santo:** \[07:53\] Switching topics a little bit, you were recently in the news - I'm using air quotes, because it's like Hacker News, basically - not for a feature release, but for a bit of a controversy around some scientific research that was published on GitHub and GitLab, and you guys took it down, and then you reversed your decision, and you spoke very plainly about it. Can you tell that story from your perspective?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, of course. So Saturday morning I woke up and I saw a lot of chat going on in our internal chat channels... Like, "Oh, people don't seem to be very happy about our decision", and I looked at what it was, and it was a guy called Willem de Groot that published a research, and he disclosed over a thousand vulnerable servers, and then he complained that we removed it.
+My initial reaction was, "Of course we removed that. You shouldn't disclose that to the internet first. You should disclose it to the people that have the affected server and give them time to patch." But two strange things... I know this guy, he runs an internet hosting provider in the Netherlands called Byte - really good Magento hosting... And what he did - there was more nuance to it, because he wasn't just trying to warn the owners of the server, he was trying to warn users of those servers, because these were effective web shops. I think they were Magento shops, I'm not totally sure.
+But if you'd go there and you leave your credit card details, those details will get skimmed because these servers were rooted and had malware on them. So it was more complicated.
+We looked into it and we said, "Okay, what way to have here? The interest of those owners, that they get time to figure out what's going on and not have reputational damage? There will be root codes so it will be easy for another person to add additional malware... Or the interest of the users, that should be protected?" We figured the interest of the user weighed heavier.
+It's not so likely that everyone will add this list of servers to their etc hosts file or something... but by publishing it, they're putting more pressure on these people to fix their servers, and that's what started happening. 650 servers were fixed since publishing the files with names, so there was an acceleration in people fixing their stuff.
+So we reversed the decision... The first thing, I give Willem a call, apologize that we took his list down. He was kind enough to walk over somewhere where he had internet access and tweeted about it, and we did a small blog post, and that was well received. It turned into number one on Hacker News, and someone in the comments said, "I now have to apply to GitLab. They're doing such a great thing." \[laughter\]
+**Jerod Santo:** You were surprised by that level of praise from that action, or...? Maybe it was just refreshing to see...
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** I was very happy to see it... What you're afraid is that you're correct, but people will only notice your initial takedown and not the reversal, so I was happy that that also got visibility.
+**Jerod Santo:** The initial takedown - was it automated, or it was a decision one of your employees made?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** No, it was a decision that we talked about internally, and we made that decision. We just thought this is a responsible disclosure issue, and there are clear policies about that. We subscribe to responsible disclosure, so if people are not doing that, we're not going to facilitate it.
+**Jerod Santo:** Was this something that you foresaw when you started GitLab? You wanna be spending your days making sales or making the product better, forwarding the thing, but now you're dealing with controversies around something other people were doing; you didn't ask for this kind of... Did you know this was gonna be the case when you got going?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[12:02\] Yeah, if you're gonna run a dotcom for content hosting - and we have now even GitLab Pages, where you can use any static site generator and host your site - you're gonna have people hosting stuff that will be controversial, and there are no clear guidelines. Some things are very clearly not okay, some things are very clearly okay. There's this gray line, and we looked at all kinds of policies and formulas, but there's not clearcut thing. It's on a case-by-case basis sometimes.
+**Jerod Santo:** Did you track the -- this is somewhat related and you'll see why in a second... Did you track the story around the Dash developer in the App Store recently, how he was taken out of the App Store because he had a linked account that had some fraudulent reviews? Dash is a great is a great application, and the developer community said, "What's up with that, Apple?" There's more to the story than all that, but the point that I wanna thread through is that that got all the way up to Phil Schiller, who's VP of marketing. He's a C-level executive. He became involved... It was the kind of decision that made it all the way up to him, and it seems like there's a, I don't know it seems like there's a fault in their system. It's that kind of thing. I mean, they're huge, right? So if that kind of a decision, in the context of Apple, a small marketing App Store problem is being dealt with by Phil Schiller. Y'all are much smaller, but if this came up to you... It's not the best use of your time to be making this kind of decisions. Now, I figure your current size is totally legit, but do you have thoughts about that? Like, "What's the best use of my time today?"
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** I think these kinds of things - you can see them as a problem, you can also see them as an opportunity, and it sounds pretty corny, but...
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] It turned actually into an opportunity, didn't it?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah... Look, it's not like we're taking down stuff just so we can apologize for it later, but...
+**Jerod Santo:** Like, tell your buddy, "Hey, put up something controversial and then I'll... Let's stage a controversy."
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** We're not into that business, but every time there is a controversy, people will look and they'll see how long does it take you, and are you doing the right thing? We were talking about this yesterday, and there was this remark, like we should make sure that when we're out there commenting on stuff that we have a unified voice of GitLab. And then we talked about it more, but a unified voice means you have to coordinate internally before you take any action, and it's gonna drastically slow down your speed of iteration and our values are around transparency and openness.
+\[14:59\] So I said it's better to just go out there and have a real conversation right where it's happening, whether that's on Hacker News, whether that's on our public issue tracker. I hope that when people see GitLab team members openly disagree, being kind to one another but being direct, that will be a better thing than coming up with this pre-packaged statement two days down the road, of "We're not gonna do this" or "We're gonna do this."
+I'm sure it will bite us from time to time, but that's what we're going for. We'll just go out there and we'll say what we think... And it's not a unified voice. It's over 120 individuals - you can see us disagree also on our issue tracker...
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I haven't seen you guys do it so public.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, hopefully it's always kind and respectful, and we try to find the best solution together.
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's talk about OSCON for a minute. According to your guys' booth over there, this is like your first stop in the GitLab World Tour.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, exactly.
+**Jerod Santo:** So you guys are out in full force, you've got a huge booth, you've got lots of people here from the team... Tell us about OSCON and your support for conferences.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, so OSCON is our favorite conference. The big one of course is in the U.S., I think it's ten times bigger than this one, but it's great... All the open source projects are here, it's fun. We're growing pretty fast, so some of the team members have never seen other team members before, so this was the first time. So they're in the booth, and three people came up and said, "We love GitLab."
+**Jerod Santo:** That's cool, right?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** That didn't happen at their previous work, so there's a lot of love for open source companies here, and that's great to see.
+**Jerod Santo:** Sid, thanks so much for sitting down with me. This was fun.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, my pleasure!
+Thanks again to our friends at O'Reilly for the awesome working partnership at OSCON London 2016. We'll see you again, OSCON, in 2017 in Austin, Texas. If you want to save some money on that ticket, if you're going, use the code "changelog20" to save 20% off your registration to OSCON 2017 in Austin, Texas.

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+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:25\] What role do you play in the NodeJS Foundation?
+**Tracy Hinds:** I am the education community manager, but my hats are many.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Like any organization, right?
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, we run lean. I also have been taking responsibility recently for the Inclusivity Working Group, which is not under the foundation from the executive side, but we just needed the work to be sort of investigated, examined, and that's something that we're capable of doing. I took that on because it's also something that I care about and have struggled with myself.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I understand from my conversation with Mikeal that you have some experience on that front, too.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, I run conferences as a hobby...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, nice hobby...
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, volunteering... It's not paid.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Are they hard or are they easy? Both?
+**Tracy Hinds:** They're both, yeah. The challenges are always the people, the human component.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Humans are hard.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Because the logistics or the money side - those are struggles, but with proper planning you can mitigate for those problems. The human challenge is always tough, because it's something new every year, and I tend to learn from experience... I can't learn as much from serving other people, so when it comes to trying to make conferences that are community-driven and making people feel welcome and also safe, experimenting with that can be tough, because if you make mistakes, it's big mistakes.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, you tend to be... Dare I say it, not much grace, even if you mess up, right?
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's like, "How dare you? You should have thought about this beforehand." A lot of onus is put on conference organizers to really do well and do it right the first time.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, that's something I've tried to -- over the years I've noticed that 1) people don't wanna know how the sausage is made, but when it comes to community conferences especially, when people aren't getting paid to do it and they are sacrificing a lot of their spare time... But it's just like open source - we can always be kinder...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A thankless job...
+**Tracy Hinds:** Right, absolutely. The volunteer work is taken for granted, and people really don't get to see this sacrifice that's made in order to make those things happen, and it's such a temporary thing... Because it's only a couple of days in a year. Before I was helping with open source, it helped me empathize.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So when was that for you, before you were helping with open source?
+**Tracy Hinds:** \[03:56\] My event organizing has always been attached to something like Node or JavaScript, but I haven't been -- I mean, outside of contributing to the event open source or tooling for that, it wasn't probably until last year... I was making open source tooling for conferences, but that's what my drive was outside of work, so that's what got me interested into contributing back into the community in a way that I wouldn't have to walk everyone through it personally.
+Otherwise, I wasn't working on things like Node until this year as an open source contributor, which is really whacky.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What kind of open source tooling goes around at a conference?
+**Tracy Hinds:** Everything from making the websites better, and making them apps instead of just sites, so that we can have a call for talks, or a review system...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You'd think that problem would be solved much better by now... Like, how many years later have we--
+**Tracy Hinds:** Well, it's been addressed three times over, but it's in different languages, or it gets worked on and then isn't maintained, or it doesn't fit the kind of conference that we're running, and it's enough of a not-fit that forking doesn't work. Or things like we were bananas enough early on to do something like use a Google form for submissions, which is great, but then if you wanna do a reviews system... Or we pulled it into GitHub from there. So we wanted to pull that in and then we realized that we didn't want people, we wanted that to be open or anonymous for people who were submitting.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...so you could make a judgment call based on the person's name or gender, or color race...
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, so then you're pulling it back in, so you're creating tools that's like -- you know, trying to deal with the GitHub API, and also the Google API. I know at least in the JavaScript community with conference organizers, a lot of people were doing that sort of thing, because one group does it and then you're like, "Okay, great... Using Google forms is great, but how did you solve this problem?" and you tell them and they're like, "No, I don't wanna do that at all... That's way too much work."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So are any of these tools available, open, in the process? What's the state of these things?
+**Tracy Hinds:** That one is under I believe the EmpireJS.org. I help run EmpireJS as well as advise for Empire Node, which I helped found. Those are two conferences in New York. I think we also created a document with my co-organizer for Cascadia... We have a How To Conf; we actually have documentation on how to run a JavaScript event like we run it. I think we also give some justifications on why we do the things we do; why do you go to JavaScript conferences that are max of 300 people? That sort of thing.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So the How To Conf repo is everything you know about how to put on CascadiaJS or a conference like it?
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting. I'm looking through the contents... Organizing a team, picking a date, sponsorship, CFPs, website...
+**Tracy Hinds:** And it does really need to be updated, because I don't think I've even worked on that this year.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is this readme, is it documentation, or is it actual working code that you can launch your own site from, and stuff like that?
+**Tracy Hinds:** That's a readme. We have many of the years of the websites that we ran for the conference, because they tend to be one-offs. Cascadia's is documented in a way that you should just be able to clone it and run it. The How To Conf repo is not a whole package, so that's definitely the readme documentation of how to run it, but it also has spreadsheets for budgeting and keeping track of volunteers... We live in the world of spreadsheets.
+\[07:59\] It was sort of like, "Well, we can spend that time to create apps that would help us organize this in a better way, but there's either pay tools that do that, so we don't wanna spend too much time because people are already using it", or we're just fine with using spreadsheets.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you feel about the site for this conference here? I know I talked to Mikeal earlier, maybe this is a touchy subject, but...
+**Tracy Hinds:** It's not a touchy subject... It doesn't engage people; it's really hard to dig in and find things, and I think the ability to be able to -- I mean, Mikeal and I are both developers and it's tough when we want to just be able to step in and fix something really quick, because we're used to doing that, and we don't have the agency to do it. I know that something that I wanna see front and center, during a conference - not before - is Code of Conduct, Emergency Contact and the agenda, and also Wi-Fi. Because sometimes people don't notice that it's on the badge.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. How many times today have you been asked what's the Wi-Fi password?
+**Tracy Hinds:** None, I was surprised. I think people are starting to get used to this, and I think this is the best thing ever.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I love the lanyard, by the way... It's great, because I hate when they flip.
+**Tracy Hinds:** I know.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And you're like, "What's your name?" and it's like, it's the back of the lanyard, it's not the front. Great job, I like that blend of lanyard best with a tube, so it doesn't spin.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, that's all our events team. Lara and Cassandra, they think of everything. That's all on them. I always forget to do these, and I end up doing the center ones, because they're everywhere.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or if you don't have that, the way they attach well, they can make a lot of noise, so all you hear in the background of the conference room is the clinking sound of the metal clinking together. Because if it moves - which it does, because people are gonna move and shuffle, and you can't make everybody stay still, so next thing you know you've got this lanyard that flips over, or it makes a bunch of noise.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Ours are terrible and beautiful... For Cascadia, the last three years we've done wooden engraved badges, which is great, except they're terribly loud and very heavy. And then you're also not gonna do double-sided, because it's really expensive; we're paying an artist to carve that stuff out, so...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. A lot of attention, though. I mean, it's about an experience.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Well, my dream is that -- New Relic has a conference that they've been doing for a number of years, and... I'm so embarrassed I can't remember it right now; one year they did a really incredible -- I mean, the only time I've heard of anything like this is when DefCon did it... And they did, they absolutely did hardware badges. We've been trying for years...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Mikeal and I talked about this... It was FutureStack.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, FutureStack, which I've heard is a great conference, which is always something interesting too when you're talking about a company or a suite of products... Running a conference is always -- it's peculiar to me, because the way I run conferences, I see it as very neutral and objective. That's not to say that they aren't, because Twilio is another company that does a really great job with SIGNAL, and they get a lot of different companies coming in. I guess they just have a good enough rapport with everyone to make sure that they trust that...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They've always been developer-first, Twilio... They've got a good rapport relationship with the community. I think once you begin to toe the line of exploitation, to a degree, or making it about yourself and not about the community, you get in the danger zone.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah. Well, I'd imagine when you're managing sponsor expectations, you have to be very careful when you're walking that line, ensuring that they can trust you, that they get equal footing alongside you.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. What's the challenge there with sponsors? Are you involved in that with this conference much, or other conferences?
+**Tracy Hinds:** \[11:44\] This conference I wasn't, no. Todd Benzies and \[unintelligible 00:11:50.00\] lead the charge on that for us, and thank goodness, because we've all got a lot of ownership in these conferences, but for me for this it's content, recruiting speakers, making sure that we've got a good variety of lineup, as well as diversity of speakers, making sure that we're also including people who are newer speakers, as well as speakers from all over the world, because in the U.S. it tends to be U.S.-centric, so we wanna make sure that...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, or even English-centric, or language barrier...
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I talked to Shiya from Autodesk, and we talked a lot about just the language barrier there in China. They work in Chinese, obviously, versus Japan, where they primarily work in English; they speak Japanese at work, but the can work in English. And you never really realize until you flip the coin how different it is on the other side. You just don't think about it, I guess. You can call it arrogance or whatever, but it's just like a bubble we live in sometimes... Tunnel vision.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Oh, sure. When I was talking with my friend Juan Pablo - he is from Columbia, and he has done incredible work with Columbia dev, which is a group that is really strengthening the tech community in Columbia and around it because of what they're doing... So there's other countries that are sort of networking and building it up together, and I was talking with him one day and he was telling me, "Go look and see how many learn to JavaScript books are in Spanish right now." Spanish, a language that I would have just assumed that...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Tracy Hinds:** At the time I think it was zero... And this wasn't ten years ago. This was two years ago.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+**Tracy Hinds:** And I was just like, "What?" I speak Spanish, I'm terrible at it, but I can read it. I was like, "If I can do that, why is no one translating...?" No one's doing it. And that's even with an alphabet similar to our own. Then I hear when people are learning in other countries, like Japan and China... Their letters and numbers don't look anything like ours - how do you deal with that with programming? So when I started learning about -- people are just having to program in English for the most part, regardless of the language that they speak or write... It's just like, I can't even imagine what the challenge would have been for me when I was teaching myself programming if I had had to also be doing it in another human language.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. We have a similar problem on our podcast, the Changelog... We were talking to the fellas behind Crystal, which is like a faster version of Ruby, basically; it's the easiest way to say it.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Oh, okay.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And we got to the end of the show, and Jerod and I, we're both from the central time zone. I'm from Houston, Texas and he's from Omaha, Nebraska - we got into the whole show, great conversation, but they were mentally tired. And we were like, "Why?" and they were like, "Well, English is not our first language." So the whole time, they're trying their best to talk fluently about a fast-moving topic anyways, in a second language. They just talked about what mental hurdles it was to do that on the fly, to try to maintain the listenership of the other persons speaking... There was two people on their side, representing Crystal, and me and Jerod, so it's four people total on this recording. It opened our eyes to think how difficult it might be to then ask like, "Okay, if English isn't your native language, how can we best appreciate you being here? Should we speak slower?"
+It just might make us more aware of what words not to use; just use more simple English, or just speak slower... Anybody who gets excited like I do -- I probably just talk fast. It's just a thing you never really think about, until somebody brings it to your mind.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Mikeal and I went to Beijing for a Node live where we met Shiya, they had translators. They had no problem providing translators either, but I just couldn't imagine... We have a number of folks who came over that we met when we were in Beijing who were speaking this weekend, and fortunately, I think they have - they may not think so, but I think that they have an excellent grasp of the English language, and that's a huge hurdle.
+\[16:15\] These folks are so smart, and the topics that they're talking about are so complex... And they're able to do it in English. That's what I just can't -- we're very lucky, we have it very easy.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We have it very easy. Let's talk about an uneasy subject sometimes - it depends upon which side of the fence you're on in terms of getting it right or getting it wrong; it's going back to our other conversation... A big effort for you in particular has been working on inclusivity at this conference, and making people feel safe and comfortable... A great post on Medium, which we'll link up in the show notes of this conversation, but a lot of great stuff happened at this conference in particular just to make people feel more welcome. Everything from childcare, to college stickers, to identify the comfortability of being photographed or talked to... What effort goes into making a conference like this feel safe, feel inclusive, and not just feel it actually be?
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, I think... One, it takes a community that wants those things to happen, and I think that we were fortunate enough to have that. Our entire team - not just the events team - they get it. It's really comforting when you have a team that you're working with that you don't have to get on board; when you have folks who are supporting what you think is right and you have leadership at every level, where people are saying, "This is important, it matters and we're gonna prioritize it", it makes a difference. People take that for granted.
+I have people who approach me for even just saying, "How did you get a diverse lineup of speakers at this conference or that conference?" and I say, "That's a really complicated question because it's not just a mandate." You can't just say, "We're gonna have half of our speakers be from under-represented groups." Cool, does that exist in the community that you're talking about? It might not, so then what should you be doing? You should be supporting those efforts throughout the year.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, not just the few months it takes to organize...
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, because otherwise you end up with things like speaker fatigue, where you have five really talented speakers from under-represented groups who absolutely deserve to be on stage, but they're not the only ones that should be speaking, and that's not fair to them. They're there because they are excited and talented, and they also don't want to be considered tokens; you have to show them that they're there for their good work, and for that reason alone.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Not because of being under-represented.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Right, not because they check a box.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's tough, because while you want to have an equation that matches what the community wants, which is more inclusivity, more invitational, but then not choose people based on their attributes.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Right, because you're doing them a disservice.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It must be really hard.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah. You're doing them a disservice because they don't -- you make them think twice about them being there, when they deserve to be there and they're talented. You don't want that, right?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And we all have impostor syndrome, every single one of us.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, so you don't need to erode that. And then you also don't want the folks who are still struggling with understanding the inclusivity and diversity challenge... Maybe they applied for a conference and they didn't get in, and then they hear that there was an effort to make a more diverse lineup, then maybe they're just gonna say, "They're not actually a good speaker, they just got there because they're a woman, or because they're black", and that's not okay.
+\[19:54\] It's not fair to the talented speakers for anyone to think that of them, because that's not why they're there. So it's definitely those sorts of efforts, and that's one of the reasons why I like to be so involved in the communities that I live in, because I wanna make sure that people are being -- you're bringing that back down from the conference level to the meetups, and making sure that people are feeling that at every level. I got really lucky with New York, that we have that. A lot of the organizers there do that. It was a lot harder work in Portland.
+Portland is historically a less diverse city, so it was much more of a struggle to have a good mix of backgrounds for people who are attending a meetup, and who were practicing in giving talks, and then going to conferences. The work there is very different, I think.
+The team doing things already had all of these things in place for months, which was really spectacular... Having the emergency phone numbers on our website, along with the code of conduct, and saying "These are real people that you can contact if you feel unsafe"... Having someone like Brian, who reached out as part of our community to also run that extra effort and then we were able to blast that out as well - that's another blessing of having community members who care that much to do that.
+Having on-site childcare, having the stickers that communicate whether you wanna be talked to - I loved that too, those special touches.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We understand those are the details that people just miss... For good reason; conferences are tough anyways. Then you naturally want to care, because you do care, it's just... It's already so many things happening, that if you don't have the right kind of team, the right kind of support and the right kind of attention to detail to those things that really matter, you will just miss them. And it may not be on purpose, like we said earlier. No grace given whenever you mess up.
+We all want to do well... Or maybe we don't all want to; generally, we all desire to do well, but we all mess up to some degree, at some point in our lives.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah... I appreciate when folks don't -- like, it's your job, right? People say, "You know, it's just a job" vs. caring, but people also like to do their job well. We're lucky that there are more folks who are running conferences now - including this one - that see that as doing a good job... That it's part of running a conference.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What kind of feedback do you get that makes you feel that way? Do you get people that come up to say things to you? Do you have a comment box? Is it anonymous? How do you provide a feedback loop from attendees as a response to the things you've done, the details that you paid attention to? Is it pictures on Twitter, is it tweets?
+**Tracy Hinds:** Well, it's tweets, we run a post-event survey, we also have... Anytime that we kind of get these wins, where we have someone come up to us personally and say "This thing was really important to me... I wasn't able to attend without this diversity scholarship and because of that... Now I'm gonna go to the Code And Learn", that's incredible, because that means that we may have someone new contributing to Node, which is a huge challenge, and they're welcome, and that's something they didn't have before - those sorts of things we'll share with each other on the team, because it's wins. It helps you on the days when things are a little tough, because it reminds you that we're doing a good job and we need to continue to do those things.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you talk about the childcare portion of this? What impact does that have? When I talked to Mikeal Rogers, he mentioned the experience in the history of the Linux Foundation having had already a system in place. Can you talk a bit about that system if you're familiar with it, or what it took to put childcare in place well?
+**Tracy Hinds:** \[24:06\] I'm not familiar with the system that the Linux Foundation established specifically; I know that having childcare on site is a hurdle. You have parents who don't wanna trust someone that they've never met before, even if they're a certified caregiver.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I can feel that, I have a son and a daughter.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, I can imagine. I think it's very gracious that they will trust us, and making sure that your venue will allow for that, it has the space to entertain those kids...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, there's a lot of moving parts...
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, and liability...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Security even.
+**Tracy Hinds:** And security, yeah. Absolutely.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, you don't think about security, but you think about the folks taking care of the kids, and then also making sure no one comes in and does anything to anybody, or does something that they shouldn't be doing. It's outside of just those people taking care of the kids. Even this gear here, we're sitting around all of our podcasting gear and audio gear - we had a guard on duty sitting right there, and that made me, as someone who comes here to participate, feel very welcomed, because I was like, "They care about me enough, not just to have me there to produce these podcasts in partnership with you all, but also to take care of my stuff whenever I'm not around." I felt like even that detail - maybe that's not something that was even intended, but I felt really awesome about that. That's cool.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, absolutely. Linux Foundation... With the history of open source communities, I did not expect -- I'd only been the Node Foundation and the Linux Foundation since March; I did not expect, I was not aware of the history of the Linux Foundation trying to prioritize these things, so it's been a pleasant surprise. Honestly, I didn't have any negative thought or assumption otherwise, but I just didn't know.
+It's exciting to see what the Linux Foundation is setting as example. It's easier for us, because then we also have precedents to point to when we decide to do something. We can say, "Well, they're setting this example." This is easy for us, because we know we're not the only ones doing it, and we 're gonna make this so commonplace that people don't question it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So the things you've learned from this conference and many others is the How To Conf? Is that your bible, or the things you've done for this conference, is there something new you'd contribute back? Where do you share things like that?
+**Tracy Hinds:** This is a very different conference. How To Conf is a single-track conference, and it is purposefully kept to 300-ish people; that's in order for people to have repeated connections over a couple of days. SingleTrack allows for sort of like the intensity of having to watch all of those speakers, you don't get a choice... But that's also a very different type of conference. This conference is trying to bring everyone together, and as part of that there's a lot happening - there's a lot of companies...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Salon one, salon two... Various places people can go to.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, and I think we owe it to folks to be able to give them the opportunity to get to say all of those things; if we're doing one conference in a year or two conferences in a year and we're trying to run this flagship conference for Node, then we sort of need to have high-quality, but a fair volume of choices. That definitely makes for different things to choose for running a conference, because multi-track is a different beast...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a whole different game.
+**Tracy Hinds:** \[27:47\] It is, and it also means for far more people. If you want all the experts in the room, there's a lot of people, if you're trying to get everybody in. So single-track can be a little difficult for that.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Just for size, what's the rough attendee range here?
+**Tracy Hinds:** I think we're at 700-750 in attendance.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So double How To Conf, basically.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And how many tracks was it? Two tracks?
+**Tracy Hinds:** This conference I think was three tracks. Or, well, seven tracks, but three or four rooms.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A lot of choice.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah. Some of the tracks are sort of like fledgling in Node; we know that they're popular in the ecosystem, but we maybe didn't see as many talks, or just trying to balance all of that out with time.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Back to How To Conf, the reason why I asked you that was more or less to see if you have - since you shared that portion of your experience, and I'm sure other contributors as well - some sort of playbook that says, "This is how we did this conference right", and you care enough about the community to share what you've already done with How To Conf; maybe there's a version of that playbook for Node Interactive. I mean, it's not an exact way of "You do this", but some of the things you've learned - everything from childcare to the colored stickers, to just various things you've done that are details that people just don't think about."
+**Tracy Hinds:** Right. Yeah, that's an excellent point.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Any plans for that?
+**Tracy Hinds:** Well, there weren't plans for it yet. \[laughs\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe it could be How To Interact for Interactive.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, that would be cool.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Lame name, don't listen to me. I'm bad at naming.
+**Tracy Hinds:** \[laughs\] I'm terrible at naming things, so I always take suggestions.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, what else can we talk about in terms of -- what good takeaways can we share with the audience listening to this? This is a series we're producing with the NodeJS Foundation, the Linux Foundation, sponsored by IBM, to give a picture into this conference and the future of Node... So what can you share about some of those things as it relates to this conference or the future of Node as you see it? Maybe some of the roles you're playing, not just in this conference, but other things around NodeJS Foundation.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, yeah... This time next year I think it's going to be a very different conversation I'm hoping to have, because a lot of our inclusivity strategy that I've been working on has been receiving input by a bunch of different parties. It's a careful conversation that we have to have around what we want the future of Node to look like, because that's essentially what we're talking about when we're talking about inclusivity and we're saying that it's important enough that we need to invest real energy and resources in, and part of that is how our conferences operate, and who's speaking, and what our panels look like, and the topics that are being considered.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How about the project itself, in terms of onboard of contributors...? Mikeal and I talked about how over the years, since the io.js fork with the merge with Node, the Foundation being formed - each year you've one hundred percent doubled the Node community, so I gotta imagine that trying to be as best you can inclusive to that kind of community and outreach, there's gotta be a lot of things around documentation, learning... Do you play a role in that?
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, so there's been a lot of discussion around rebooting documentation in general, because we've seen a lot of slowdown on that; that could be not just documentation for the API, it could also be on "What are the values of the Node community?" Because it's grown so much, you've got folks who've been here for five years, and they certainly have an opinion on what the values are of someone who's in the Node community, and it's nice to be able to onboard other people to that and make sure that they understand that this is a friendly place, this is a place that people are excited to nerd out with you on things, and you can find your niche and run with it. But sometimes people don't get that experience when they start, and that's unfortunate, so that's why it would be helpful for us to have guidelines... Or, it's not guidelines, it's like a guide for people to understand where they can go when they get started in the community and when they get started in the language, for help or for encouragement, or for just learning.
+\[32:15\] There's definitely a lot of room for us to do that, and we need way more people working on it. Core is so important, but it's a very small footprint of what Node is. For instance, right now I've drafted up a charter for a new org in the Node Foundation, alongside the TSC, which would be the community org.
+So much of our success over the years has been stuff like Node school and Node bots, and the meetups that happen around the world, and the other conferences that happen. They don't need to be under the Node Foundation in terms of paperwork and governance, but they absolutely need representation, because we're doing things at a high level that they need to be giving input on, and it would be nice to have formal mechanisms for that. That's actually part of the inclusivity proposal that I had laid out.
+It doesn't sound at first like it would make sense to be a strategy in inclusivity, but all of those people around the world who have been organizing these things have been on the ground and have learned and scaled, so they have a lot of lessons learned and the cross-collaboration that we could support by having that organization would be awesome.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. It shouldn't also be only on your shoulders either, as the Foundation, to do all the work. You wanna disperse that amongst the community and empower the people to do that.
+**Tracy Hinds:** You want them to own it, right. Exactly. That's the key. If people don't feel like they get to own things... No one's gonna raise their hand to say, "I've got this." They're gonna think somebody's handling it, and there's a lot that's happening in Node right now where that's the case, and that shouldn't be. We need to make people feel like -- I think we're getting the word out; William Kapke's been great about getting the word out that "There's a lot of work to be done, it needs to be done, you should be annoyed about these things that aren't happening, but you can also help with it. So capture that energy and run with it." That's absolutely what we are trying to work on doing, sort of evangelizing that, making sure people know that help is needed and that the help can come from them.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What kind of support then are you thinking about for not so much Node School in particular, but things like Node School or meetups across the world...? What kind of support can they look forward to? If they're listening to this now and they're not simply just a new user of Node or a potential contributor to Node that needs to be onboarded in terms of a user or a consumer of it, but more so guiding the localized communities... What can they look forward to? What are you thinking there?
+**Tracy Hinds:** I would say coordination of efforts and resources. A good example is you don't wanna give them water, you wanna lead them...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...to the well.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah. A lot of events - and it's not just events that would like help, but a lot of them see the challenges around sponsorships or getting money, and they want money. But that doesn't actually sustain their project or their organization. So having folks who would like to offer advice, or having a repo where we talk about these things... Because it's not just about money, it's also about the challenges, about not having internet and trying to npm install everything.
+\[35:54\] I saw that with Node School early on, how much the organizers helped one another with that. I mean, I was one of them, and that helped us all rise in our local groups, and really build communities there. But we're seeing new rounds of support needed, such as... Maybe one of those orgs wants to establish governance, and they know that we're slightly more experienced at it than them.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So they come to you for advice on how to set up things...?
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, they come for advice because they didn't know how to do that before. Or just even helping them organize a little bit... Having meetings on a regular cadence, or having some sort of accountability to a larger group where they're reporting in may also drive them a little bit to help out more just in their org, so they have something to report back to.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Have you ever considered things like localized community managers where you almost have - I don't wanna use military terms, but like lieutenants out there in the field so to speak, that are doing the day-to-day, they're in the trenches, they're in the fight, they care about the local community, they care about Node, they care about being inclusive and inviting in and welcoming, and they're taking the main mission of the community to the local communities... But rather than being this unknown person, there's somebody that you have a rapport with; maybe that's the meetup organizers.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, that's a really great idea. I would say that some meetup organizers or Node School organizers, they tend to take on that role informally. It's someone that just kicks butt locally, and they maybe have their hands in a couple different pots, so they're able to kind of see a slightly larger picture, and they're well connected. That's what I was for a while myself.
+Having folks that are on the ground like that gives you a less myopic perspective, I think; it allows you to know what's going on in an area and not just a user group. Sometimes those user groups are big enough, and that will be a pretty representative sentiment if something's really good or not good, but that's a really interesting... I think we were talking about that idea of Node advocacy in different parts of the world. We did Node Live this year in Bangalore, in Beijing, in Paris, in Chicago, in L.A., and...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's Node Live?
+**Tracy Hinds:** Node Live was initially tagged as a mini-conference; it was a one-day event... It could be on a weekend, all day, or it could be in an evening for a pretty long evening. It's essentially a fancy meetup that's bringing in people from potentially other areas, and also uplifting maybe a speaker who is there locally that doesn't speak at the meetups...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or too hard to travel to the U.S., if it's from abroad...
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was talking to Thomas Watson, he said he got in...
+**Tracy Hinds:** Oh my gosh, he had the hardest time.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, he had some troubles with his travels and he had to flip his time clock, basically. So I sympathize with that, having to be jet-lagged.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah. So those sorts of visits were really awesome, because it also opened us. Mikeal Rogers and I, we try and meet new people all the time, we have tons of emails and DMs and conversations on GitHub, and it's so not enough; those networks are still walled, in some ways.
+Beijing was an especially powerful visit for finding out how was behind the Great Firewall. We knew we were gonna run into some surprises, we just didn't know how rich that community would be, and we have no connection to it. So that's... They're running their own npm.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[40:01\] It's the language barrier and it's also the actual firewall barrier, so you get two huge hurdles to tackle when it comes to opening the doors to be more inclusive to China.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Right. So that's something that we could really work on. I was thinking the idea would be sort of like this research effort - because it takes a lot of work to build those networks. Being in person is a much more natural way to do so, even if there's a language barrier. But it's pretty cost-prohibitive and it can be physically taxing to travel that much, so we have to be strategic about it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you can't Google Hangouts with them either.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, exactly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm not sure if Citrix is blessed or not, but Google is not.
+**Tracy Hinds:** I think they use Skype... I think I used Skype when I was having a meeting.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it's a Microsoft thing, so it's probably okay.
+**Tracy Hinds:** I was also calling Microsoft people, so that might have been part of it. \[laughs\] I was a part of their campus in Beijing. But yeah, we need the power of saying, "I'm part of the Node Foundation/Node Project."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Some clout.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, it resonates with people and they wanna talk to you, they wanna see what's going on. Sometimes they want you to help their business, and you can't do that, but you can certainly make relationships and see how you can connect people when it would be really fitting, right?
+I'm a terrible salesperson; I can't lie, I can't sell anything unless I really love it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're not supposed to lie when you sell.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Oh, you're not? I don't know.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No! Selling is helping.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Well, see? That's how I see it... If I'm not helping you, it's not worth it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Then you're great at it... That's my feeling. I can't stand those kinds of salespeople. If you lie, you're not a salesperson, you're a sleazebag. It's a whole different term.
+**Tracy Hinds:** It's a different skill set, I guess.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a different podcast too, but back on topic, sorry... I derailed you.
+**Tracy Hinds:** No, you're fine. So I think that that was really powerful. I don't what 2017 holds for us with Node Live, because we want to make sure that we're focusing on the community and lifting them up, and not taking away fuel by running our own events. We wanna make sure that everything that we do is empowering them, instead of -- because it's also more energy that we're spending having to run 12 events in a year.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, you said earlier "speaker fatigue" and I think I may have heard that once before, but it still surprised me when you said it. Then, as we're talking about these localized organizers, meetup organizers, I'm thinking that I know for sure, I've met some organizers who have organizer fatigue. They run their local meetups, they care about the local community, but at the end of the day, if they're the most looked-at person, or localized fame or whatever, then they're always getting called to open up the doors, to just be there from beginning to end... They're like, "Where's the pizza?" or whatever it is; "Where's the resources?" Everything from the projector to the seats... And you've gotta find ways to not let them burn out either.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, I agree.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But also give them the ability to do what they to do, versus do every event, like he had said.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah... Taking advantage of what each of us are good at. You want the local community to feel empowered by running this awesome event that has maybe Node Foundation backing, and we're helping encourage TSC or CTC members to come and speak about a topic that no one in the local community is really working on. That's really exciting, because it just engages people in a way that watching a conference talk online doesn't do.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[44:00\] Right, face-to-face is better, but we do Skype, you know... Having a podcast, I don't meet most of the people I talk to. If I had to, we would never get to do it, so we have to be thankful for what we do get. But face-to-face trumps it most times.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, absolutely. Well, or just being able to have the conversation. I love that NodeSource started their online meetup, which is great, because there are a lot of really awesome programmers who aren't in major metropolitan areas...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's another thing, too.
+**Tracy Hinds:** And to be able to watch these talks or have these conversations... It's nice that people are trying to experiment with these different types of mediums in order for people to still have that. Because early on - Slack is a very neat thing, but I lived and breathed on IRC, and I had a really great community. There were people I didn't know, that I had never met in person for a long time before I got to meet them, and it was still like a genuine friend.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. When I saw Mikeal Rogers, I gave him a hug. I was like, "Hey, dude, how are you?", but I've never met him face-to-face. I just met him face-to-face yesterday, but I'd been talking to him for years off and on, either through the podcast or now working with us on Request For Commits and other fun stuff... So it's just like that - you're in this friendship that even when you meet them it's still a little fresh, too.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, so that's also a challenge that we've been talking about with education in Node moving forward, or even with Node Together, which I was helping with the group that Ashley Williams founded... That's very physical-location-based, and right now there's only one teacher. That's especially problematic when you're trying to do this throughout the world, and exhausting.
+One of our organizers, Tierney, he's lived in rural areas for a long time; I like that he has this position and he holds to it, which is "We need to have more of these distributed communities, because I want to be a part of them." That's the best way to hear it, because when someone says, "Oh, well we should do this thing", I wanna empathize, but I don't know anyone who actually needs that, and it's because I'm not there in that tiny town. I grew up in South Carolina and I moved for job opportunities, but not everyone has that luxury.
+I think that will help us reach a lot of folks throughout the world, so long as they have an internet connection, to maybe be able to build that up more.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So for those out there listening to this as part of this series, they wanna contribute, they wanna help your efforts - what's the best way to reach out to you? Is it you personally, is it your team? What's the best way to help make Node more inclusive, to support local organizers, to help in the ways we have talked about in this conversation?
+**Tracy Hinds:** There's a number of places that you can go to look... Nodejs.org I believe has a "Get Involved" tab, and it lists out the working groups and the projects that you should absolutely check out to see if it's something that interests you. There's also community organizations that are outside of that, such Node School and Node Bots. Check in to see if there is a local meetup around you - it's a really awesome way to get introduced to the community. We've also got repos for Inclusivity Working Group, which is looking like it's probably going to be getting rebooted very soon; it's not had a lot of activity there, because I think of all the stuff that I've had in limbo with my proposal.
+And education... Education is in full swing, and we're in this phase now, looking into the new year, where I have to see what the priorities should be, and I'm waiting for my survey to come back.
+\[48:04\] Greg Wallace and I - Greg is in marketing for us - helped build this really awesome survey to try and figure out who is writing and using Node, and that's gonna help us figure out what we should be focusing our resources on for next year, or our energies, because I wanna know...
+We are gonna have a certain audience; when people are filling out the survey, it's not gonna be people coming to Node, it's gonna be people who are already in it... But sort of seeing, if they've been in it for a little bit, how much of a struggle it was for getting started, or docs... And also asking if they're interested in helping change that.
+Once we have that data, we'll have more to inform us on what we should be doing for the next year. This year has been very heavily focused on building a certification exam, and that should be...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, Mikeal mentioned certifications when I talked to him. He didn't go into detail, though.
+**Tracy Hinds:** We're actually meeting this weekend to hash out the domains and the subtopics that the exam will cover. The aim is to be a low-cost certification exam for someone who's been writing Node professionally for a year, full-time. We're gonna be bikeshedding that and figuring out what that means. The test will be in browser and third-party proctored, and we're aiming for it to be in English as well as Chinese.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And not using Facebook Login, because of the Great Firewall.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, the challenge is around... What we're gonna do for hosting for the exam in China is still up in the air; that's still being researched.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I talked to Shiya about that, and I don't wanna derail the tail end here, but she mentioned that you actually had to have a business in China to have a server in China, and some of the red tape that goes into "we want to be inclusive." I won't go into it, but long story short, you have to have a server in China, and you have to have a business in China, so you have to kind of be legit in China basically, to serve them like we desire to. And it's just another hurdle.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yep. Hopefully that works out. The certification - the English version will happen regardless.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's exciting.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, and we're aiming for end of Q1, but the challenge is technically around hosting Node in browser in a way that feels real. It needs to be some sort of a contained operating system for people to be writing Node in and then test for it. We have to be able to run those tests against what they programmed, so that's not an easy challenge.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** More challenges... You'll rise to it.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Oh, yeah. It will be good, we'll get it through.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright Tracy, that's all I had today.
+**Tracy Hinds:** Thank you so much.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you.

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+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:05\] In this episode I talked to Shiya Lou about how China does Node; software development is done very differently in China, pretty much because of the slow translations of documentation and books from English to Chinese, but also because of this Great Firewall of China you've heard about. It's a censorship and surveillance project by the government, and it makes it very hard to interact with the rest of the web. Let's take a listen.
+\* \* \*
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's start with what your name is and where you're from.
+**Shiya Lou:** My name is Shiya, I am from China. I moved to the U.S. when I was 14 and I stayed there for about eight years, and then I moved back to China for a year. Now here we are, I've already been back for about a year or so, so that's why I'm here at the conference, to share a little bit about my experience, transitioning between the two worlds.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** For those out there in the developer world - and any world, really - we hear about news from other countries, right? I've definitely heard about, but haven't looked too deeply into, because I guess it didn't matter to me - not so much like in a negative way, but it didn't impact my day-to-day life so I didn't look much further into it. But I've heard about the Great Firewall of China and I'm aware of this; I'm aware that China is a communist country and you have different ways you live there than we do here in the United States. But for the web, we're sort of like a global economy, right? We're global people, where our national borders define us and separate us, but on the web we're a bit more like family.
+**Shiya Lou:** Right.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So kind of give me a peek into your experience then, having lived and grown up in China, then moved here, then moved back... What's been your experience with the way we do the internet, I guess?
+**Shiya Lou:** Okay. I'm gonna start off by saying that China isn't really a communist country.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's not...? Where does that come from?
+**Shiya Lou:** I guess because the central party is called the Communist Party, but it's not exactly what you would picture what a communist regime is like... Although I don't really wanna talk much about politics...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No, I'm just glad you corrected me there. I don't want to put any misinformation out there, it's not my intent.
+**Shiya Lou:** Okay. So I came to the U.S. in 2007, and at that time the Great Firewall wasn't built yet. Everything was open, Facebook was available, Wikipedia was as well, and I logged on to all these websites back home. In about 2008 and onwards, the Great Firewall started getting built, and it's been perfected over the years, and more and more websites -- at first it was just Facebook and Twitter, and then they added Gmail and Google, and a lot of other big websites that you would use in your day-to-day life in the U.S.
+\[03:59\] That causes us a lot of trouble in the developer world, because everyone's used to use Google CDN or put a Facebook login on your site - that is just never gonna work in China, because the mass majority actually don't have access to these websites. I guess when transitioning from the two worlds, the biggest thing is that you have to change your habits a lot, from googling to like using Bing or Baidu, and you basically kind of lose contact with your friends on Facebook, because it just slows you down a lot more.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So these networks that we're so used to using actually are bubbles.
+**Shiya Lou:** Right, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We don't think about it like that; we think that we create our own bubbles by choosing our friends, our networks or whatever, or the communities that we're involved in, I guess just by choosing one like Google. So Bing works in China?
+**Shiya Lou:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How did they get around it?
+**Shiya Lou:** Well, Microsoft has pretty good relations with the Chinese government.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But Google doesn't.
+**Shiya Lou:** Google doesn't. Google is more of an internet company, and Microsoft started off as a software company, and that is how the basis went.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So give me the basis of your talk, then. You're obviously sharing some of your experiences with living behind a firewall, living behind, basically -- what would you call that? Separation? How do you describe this firewall and what it does to the community behind it?
+**Shiya Lou:** Okay, so it's a very common practice for developers to log on to a VPN, that then goes across the borders every day, for work. That's the first thing that you do every day, to start working. For us, in the beginning it's actually okay, since as long as you are on VPN you can have access to everything... But VPN has always been on the hunt...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** On the what?
+**Shiya Lou:** We're on the hunt by either the security departments...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They're looking for you?
+**Shiya Lou:** Right, right. So I was using one when I just went back, and then three months later it closed, so I had to use another service. A lot of my friends set up their own foreign servers. I just ended up using some services, and it's constantly unstable, and you have to look for the newest, best ones.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So I guess the thing I'm trying to figure out is that outside of the personal experience you've had as a developer, as someone trying to build stuff, for sure here in the United States - or even in other countries outside of China, I guess, from this example - we're used to, if there's information for how to be a better software developer, we pretty much have access to it if it's open, right? But that's not the case for China.
+**Shiya Lou:** Right. I will say that the first lesson for software developers is how to connect to VPN on your own. Then I think the biggest barrier there still though is language, much less of developer experience in terms of whether you can get across, because for us developers, we can always get across.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. I was taking notice to something that's near and dear to us here at this conference (Node Interactive). Obviously, around a Node Conference, anybody who is in the Node community knows what npm is, so seeing Cnpm, which is China's npm -- so you had the language barrier, but then you also have this firewall barrier. Talk about the language barrier first. Clearly, from here to South America there's a language barrier; from here to China, there's a language barrier; from here to Germany as well... So there's a language barrier everywhere. What is your example of experiencing this language barrier?
+**Shiya Lou:** \[08:15\] Right. I think the language barrier is only an issue in countries that don't use English as the working language. In China, a framework or an open source project like Node is only gonna be popular if it has Chinese documentation and advocates in China. So very luckily for Node, there was a few very early adopters in China who wrote books on Node, and that's what people base their learning and studying from. I see a lot more people reading books than reading online documentations, surprisingly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Really? Wow... So they actually have an in-hand, physical books, versus online documentation.
+**Shiya Lou:** Yes, right.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Solve that problem, somebody.
+**Shiya Lou:** Yeah...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So how current are these books? How often does a popular or somewhat popular software development book get translated?
+**Shiya Lou:** I would say it depends on -- I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I think the more popular (O'Reilly books, for example) have a translation in the pipeline as soon as it's released.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. So they're released in English -- do they release all the languages, too? The reason why I ask that question is because you said earlier "working language." I think what you mean by that is if I'm a professional and I'm doing work or something work-related, or something like that, then when you go to work you speak English. That's not the case in China.
+**Shiya Lou:** No.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Are you familiar with other countries how often it's not the working language?
+**Shiya Lou:** For example Japan is one of the bigger countries with English as a working language.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. So in Japan they don't go to work and speak Japanese, they go to work and speak English, primarily?
+**Shiya Lou:** No, they would speak Japanese...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But they would read English...?
+**Shiya Lou:** It depends on the company. Is it an international company that's primarily US-based? Most of our co-workers, even in China and Japan will speak professional English and write pretty good English, but it is harder beyond that. It's hard to make pleasantries in English.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. So with your talk, what were you really trying to make people aware of? What was the core goal for you?
+**Shiya Lou:** Okay, so while I was in the U.S. I'd also never consider how certain websites are inaccessible in China. When I build my own site, I just use Google CDN, or Facebook logins and all these features, but when I'm back in China it's such a big problem, and also, there are so many internet users in China that it just can't get ignored.
+The practice of people getting around these problems are very counter-intuitive than what we believe that are good practices in web development. I guess this talk is really just for people to be aware that there are these caveats that you need to think about when you have visitors from other countries. There's so many people using internet in China right now, that you're just gonna get so much more volume if you have a website that's China-friendly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a good thing, I like that, China-friendly. I'm China-friendly. I mean, I wanna be friendly with everybody. We're obviously at a developer conference...
+**Shiya Lou:** Right.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[11:54\] I'm thinking to myself as you're saying that, "Who does that matter most to?" It's almost like when you say accessibility to the web, if I don't have an application that has a lot of users who maybe have accessibility problems - and language is definitely one of them - to me it's like, for developers it totally makes sense that we should have translations; it totally makes sense for O'Reilly to ship a book not only in English but in any other native language where there's a need for it.
+This message you're sharing about the language barrier, about being able to tap into the large China audience - who does that come up most to? Is it developers? Obviously when someone like Facebook builds what they built, their network, they're gonna think, "Well, we should probably make it as accessible to anybody in the world as we can", but who does that matter most to, this idea you're sharing?
+**Shiya Lou:** I think for us as a company - Autodesk has a lot of customers and partners in China. However, a lot of the engineering teams are in the U.S., so when they were developing, in the beginning they weren't thinking about these users in China. So if you're not thinking about the China market, it's fine...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's what I mean. If it's not a part of your business model... Not that it doesn't matter, by any means, but if it's not my focus...
+**Shiya Lou:** Right, yeah. If you already have customers in China, then you should be thinking about them.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But see, personally it is of interest to me, because I had never considered it; we run podcasts. I want everybody to listen to it. Now, naturally I speak English, that's my primary language, so I don't think it'd be worth it to me to have my podcast translated... However, we could transcript them - which we are doing - and those could easily be transcribed to different languages if we wanted to... But it is important to me to be inclusive to the whole world, including China, of course. I mean, you have so many people there... I would want anyone there who cares about the things that we care about, which is open source software development, open community, inclusivity, diversity - all those things that we really care about, I'd want them to be able to listen to my shows, too.
+For someone like me, who uses Fastly as our CDN, which is a US-based company, what would happen if someone goes to Changelog.com? Our servers are Linode servers, they're based in the United States, our CDN is an international CDN... How would someone from China be impacted by going to Changelog.com? Would they be able to listen to my shows or would they not be able to?
+**Shiya Lou:** They would be able to.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We don't force them to use Facebook, we don't use Google CDN... We have our own CDN.
+**Shiya Lou:** Okay, cool. Well, any server that's outside of the borders is gonna be a bit slower than servers that are within the borders. So you're looking at a page load time of a couple seconds instead of milliseconds.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, milliseconds, for sure. We focus on speed.
+**Shiya Lou:** Yeah. Then you definitely would need to have servers in China.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Plus, we built the website just for fun. We built it in Elixir, which is known to be pretty fast, because it sits on top of the Erlang VM, and we used Phoenix the web framework, and we purposefully used a smaller JavaScript footprint. We purposely didn't use frameworks that would have more than we needed just to have a couple features. We actually wrote our own JavaScript for our own web player; so we did some things to kind of keep it fast, for those reasons.
+So for people like us, or people that aspire to be like us, to have that kind of focus, with speed and our own CDN, what can they get right, I guess? Using our own CDN, that's obviously helpful, but you've mentioned the speed barrier... What's the speed roughly for outside of the borders? I'm just curious.
+**Shiya Lou:** \[16:02\] It really depends on the weather.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It depends on the weather, okay...
+**Shiya Lou:** I have no idea what the speed is in terms of the different servers, because it actually really changes depending on events, political events in the country, sometimes.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... So this is a human thing. Like, some human is doing this. You said the weather, but it's really... It's the winds, but it's the political winds, so to speak.
+**Shiya Lou:** Right.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So if I care about the China market, the internet, and I wanna be open to those users there, those developers there, when you think about speed - that's one thing.
+**Shiya Lou:** Right.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm sure the winds change, that happens, but aside from making a performant site, what else can I do to be mindful of the speed barrier?
+**Shiya Lou:** So the best thing to do is always have a server within China, but it is very difficult, actually. For example, AWS just got its license in China, and to deploy on AWS you need to be a registered company in China, and have all your paperwork ready.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A small business is hard enough.
+**Shiya Lou:** Yes, exactly, and it's very difficult to incorporate something in China.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you're not making it any easier.
+**Shiya Lou:** Yeah, I'm sorry... \[laughs\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wouldn't it be easier - devil's advocate of me saying this, but wouldn't it be just easier to get rid of the firewall?
+**Shiya Lou:** Yeah, well there's a lot of...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the purpose of it? Was it the people of China voting for this thing or desiring it, or was it something else? Maybe this is a whole different subject you don't wanna go into, but just share what you can share about what we could do about it. Will it ever go away, I guess, is probably the bigger question, rather than get you into an uncomfortable situation where you have to explain something that's just tough. I'm not trying to put you in a corner and ask you that, I'm just trying to figure out why is getting rid of it not an option.
+**Shiya Lou:** People in China can't really vote for it... We can't vote. It started in 2008 mainly because we were using Facebook and Twitter to incite protests, and they sometimes become pretty violent. That was in 2008. Afterwards, it just got expanded and any company - for example Google - who would not cooperate with the government on censoring certain word searches, they would get kicked out of the country, basically. They're not hesitant to even kick out Google.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you've got your own version of it, right? You said Baidu...?
+**Shiya Lou:** Baidu, yes.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. And then you've got Bing - good job, Microsoft! What other search options do you have?
+**Shiya Lou:** There's this company called 360 Search, this company called [Sogou](https://www.sogou.com/), and there's a bunch of companies making their own search solutions. My personal experience is that they never really compare to Google, no matter how good they are, maybe because once Google went out of China there wasn't enough competition for people to be forced to...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** To make it better. That's a good example of having a really good user experience (I'm air quoting); I think Google has a good user experience, but I think that there obviously are some biases where if you compare the results from other engines that you might like those better, but I've always, in a blind taste test so to speak, I've always preferred Google's results, without any styles; not even looking at the page, but just in general, the results I get back seem to be more relevant to me.
+\[20:12\] Let's flip it around then, let's talk about China to the outside. Your talk is on how China does Node, and I think what you're talking around is what we're been sharing here - the speed issues, the language barriers, educating developers on how to better think about using certain web services to communicate to China or be inclusive of China... What about the flipside? Do we have any issues reaching China's server, reaching China websites...? How does that work?
+**Shiya Lou:** I have noticed that the services and websites and apps that I use that have all the servers in China are a bit slower outside of China than within.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But accessible though.
+**Shiya Lou:** Yeah, accessible.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So there's no blocking out, it's just filtering what comes in.
+**Shiya Lou:** Yes.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So I guess, since we're talking here, we're at Node Interactive, this series we're doing here is called The Future Of Node JS, talking about the future of Node... For those out there listening, these are people who are either in the ecosystem already, developers in the Node ecosystem, and they want to learn more about the future. What can you share, more from your talk or more from your ideas on the future of Node and where we're going? One thing I mentioned earlier and we didn't get to dive much into, was the npm of China, basically. How does that play out?
+**Shiya Lou:** Cnpm I think actually stands for private, or company npm. It actually doesn't stand for China, it stands for Company npm.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I had that wrong... I just made an assumption.
+**Shiya Lou:** I didn't know until a few days ago either, actually. I've just been using it...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... Okay. So it's a mirror of npm, right?
+**Shiya Lou:** The registry, yes.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. And there's a little bit of latency, a couple hours...
+**Shiya Lou:** I think once a day, or so. So remember the ZPad thing?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, LeftPad.
+**Shiya Lou:** Yeah, LeftPad - it never affected China because when it happened we were like, "Oh, let's just stop mirroring that part. Let's just not sync that part."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. That's an easy way to avoid it. For those who aren't familiar, give us the deeper side of Cnpm. It's a mirror of the registry... What's the point of it? Is it because of the firewall?
+**Shiya Lou:** Yeah, it's because it's much slower to download...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** From elsewhere.
+**Shiya Lou:** From npm, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So who got the permission to synchronize this? Did they work with the government, did they work with somebody to bypass parts of the firewall to sync the registry?
+**Shiya Lou:** So the firewall doesn't work in a way that you need permission to do things; you just do it until someone stops you. So npm right now does not have anything political, basically, so there's no reason to censor it. And it's very important for the developers, so that's a very...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So basically until it may cross a line that should not be crossed, door are open.
+**Shiya Lou:** Right, yes.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How does that make you feel? Does that make you happy/sad? That's gotta make you sad, right?
+**Shiya Lou:** Yeah, I am completely against it. I think most people, or most of my developer friends are against it, too. I have met a couple of people who have been working on this project, which I don't call them friends... \[laughs\] I think most people - if you work on this project, you could probably find a better job elsewhere, that's better for humanity...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm just kind of curious, if someone from China -- because you still live there? You live in the U.S. now, right?
+**Shiya Lou:** \[24:05\] I'm still living in China for another month or so.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, gotcha. So would you get in any trouble if someone from China heard you talking like this, or just in general sharing information about how things work?
+**Shiya Lou:** I think the extent of what I've been talking about is pretty mild, so I shouldn't get in any trouble for this.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But it's possible.
+**Shiya Lou:** Yes.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What I'm trying to get at is that the listeners listening to this should be thankful that you're sacrificing potentially, to some degree.
+**Shiya Lou:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm not sure what level of sacrifice there is, but there's some concern for you.
+**Shiya Lou:** Well, yeah, but I think this is pretty common knowledge already, so that's fine for me to talk about. It's pretty open... Everyone kind of knows about this now.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So for those who are right now in China, listening to this podcast - maybe we've got a hundred people; it's a big country, a lot of people there, maybe it's 10,000 people, I don't know... What do they need to know about Cnpm? What do they need to know about this concern you have of the firewall, this concern of the language barrier? What do the developers inside of China need to know?
+**Shiya Lou:** Well, I think it's definitely more beneficial to learn English, because you're far ahead of people who have to wait and read Chinese documentation. I think that's actually the bottleneck for developers in China - not being able to be updated so quickly with English documentation.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You need to hear you say that; I wouldn't expect you to say that it'd be just easier to learn English, because it seems like it's part of your culture, your heritage, where you're from, to keep and maintain, rather than to give up.
+**Shiya Lou:** Can you repeat that?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It wasn't really a question, I was just empathizing with you that I find it a little sad that the bottleneck is the translation, that the bottleneck is being forced to some degree, learning or speaking English.
+**Shiya Lou:** Well, so computer programming is basically in English, so everyone is kind of forced to learn English.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess that's true, I'll take that back then. I'm not empathizing, I'm just kidding. \[laughter\] I'm a fan of Ruby - my roots are in Ruby, huge fan of Yukihiro Matsumoto, or Matz, as we know him, the creator of the Ruby language... Native Japanese speaker - he speaks Japanese as his primary language, but he came on our podcast and spoke English, but only we really asked him to, like "Hey, Matz, we'll speak slower, we'll take our time, we'll edit out the parts that don't work out right, we'll make it work..." We're open to having people like that on the show, obviously, that aren't only English speakers.
+I'm not really sure what my question was, I've caught myself rambling. That's really all I have. Did you have anything you wanted to share with the Node world that I may not have asked you?
+**Shiya Lou:** No, I think we have covered it, really.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, I'll stop rambling then. Thank you, I appreciate it.
+**Shiya Lou:** Okay.

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+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[00:31\] Welcome to our Spotlight series titled The Future of Node, recorded at Node Interactive 2016 in Austin, Texas. We produced this series in partnership with the Linux Foundation, the Node.js Foundation, and it's sponsored by IBM and StrongLoop.
+**Break:** \[00:45\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This episode features a small roundtable discussion with Sam Roberts who works on Node Runtimes at IBM, and also Thomas Watson, the Node.js Lead at Opbeat. We talked about keeping Node Core small, what to put in, what to take out, how to deprecate and everything in-between. Listen in!
+\* \* \*
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So let's talk about keeping Node small. You have some opinions, and we're sitting here with Sam...
+**Sam Roberts:** Sam Roberts, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sam Roberts from IBM, and Thomas Watson from Opbeat, two Node developers. Either of you have core contributions into Node Core?
+**Sam Roberts:** Yes.
+**Thomas Watson:** Nothing, really.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nothing really, but you've taught a lot of people about Node and you're an evangelist...
+**Thomas Watson:** I'm a heavy user of Node, I've been many years, and I'm part of the Diagnostics Working Group. I work with Node Core, but I haven't yet contributed.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So when we talk about keeping Node Core small, what comes in mind for you, Thomas?
+**Thomas Watson:** It's about what goes in Core and what doesn't go in Core, and feature upload. Or let me say it in another way, one word: peerDependencies. Or maybe that's two words. We have a real powerful thing in Node, which is the module system. The module system allows us to have dependencies that doesn't break. We can have a dependency to some third-party module, and if they make a breaking change it doesn't matter, we still depend on the old version.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Thomas Watson:** The problem with Node Core is that it's a forced dependency on us. We just run our code inside the Node Core that somebody provides for us; if we are a module developer, we can't choose which version our module runs on. So if something changes or is added, or an API is changed in Node Core, our module breaks if we depend on this change. The point is the less we can change and the less we can put into Core, the more stable Core will be.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you're all for more modules, less into Core.
+**Thomas Watson:** Yeah, definitely.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And Sam, for you - how does that clash with your opinion?
+**Sam Roberts:** That doesn't clash, I absolutely agree with that, and I'd extend it... I mean, one of the other things is that Node is a pre-packaged bundle of a set of modules, and you can't disassociate from them. If you want a particular version of child\_process because it's got the sync stuff, but you don't want the version of URL that came with that one, you have no choice because they came together with Node... Unlike npm modules, where you can mix and match, you can choose, and the modules you can depend on can even themselves depend on incompatible different versions of modules, but it's okay, because it's node and it's JavaScript, and multiple versions - even multiple incompatible versions of a particular dependency can exist in your dependency tree, and that works fine.
+\[04:03\] But Node has all of these modules compiled into the binary, and they all come together and it's very inflexible. It creates difficulties.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How does that create difficulties inside of IBM? So you're a developer inside of IBM - what part do you play there?
+**Thomas Watson:** Well, I should be clear, I don't necessarily speak for IBM, and I don't think anybody does. I started off at StrongLoop, so I've been working with Node only about four years.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You worked on LoopBack?
+**Thomas Watson:** No, I worked on core tooling, production tooling, production management, metrics, deployment, and also supporting Node and supporting Node Core; a lot of clustering, as well. A lot of my feedback actually comes from cluster. Cluster was added to Node to address a perceived deficiency in Node in that it could not utilize effectively multiple cores, and Java could. So it'd get stomped on benchmarks I assume, so Cluster was added... Along with a lot of things that were added in the early days of Node, because people were like, "Let's add it. It looks good", and it did useful things, but we can't change it.
+The problem is once you add it to Node Core, changing things becomes very difficult and it doesn't matter how good something is. It's not so much that you might add something and it's bad and you regret it; you might add something and it's great, but later it's not so good, and URL is a great example. The URL library predates the WHATWG URL definition, so we're now getting bug reports because the URL library doesn't do what browsers do, but it predates these browser APIs, so of course it doesn't. So it's not like we messed anything up; I mean, I wasn't there personally, but it wasn't like the people who did it messed anything up.
+It is what it is, it was a decent URL library... I mean, I look at that and I say, "Well, why do we have a URL library in Node that we expose to users? It's just JavaScript, it doesn't UV by an instance, it's not system-dependent, it doesn't have to be written in C++ - and it isn't... Why is it there? I mean, it's there because it's useful to Node users? Well, there are many things that are useful to Node users, and you do not require URL parsing to be in the Node API, but it is there now.
+I look at many of the current APIs as being in that category. They didn't have to be there. We added them because they were useful. I mean, thankfully, Promises were taken out. Can you imagine where we'd be now if the Node API was still promised, but obviously with a non-spec-compliant Promises from, you know...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What would happen? Speculate for me.
+**Thomas Watson:** I don't know... What would we do? We'd have to wrap it, right? \[unintelligible 00:07:02.24\]
+**Sam Roberts:** We would be really incompatible with modules that also have to run in the browser, because in the browser we have the native Promises now that we also have in Core, but if we had the old Promises in Core, those modules would not be able to run in both the browser and in Node. If you wanna embrace the fact that people run code across different platforms - Node, browser, etc. - it's the same problem with the URL that we now are getting; we would have the same problem with Promises if we had a different version of Promises in Node.
+But if I may play devil's advocate for a second with the URL example that you gave... If we remove URL from Node Core, we have suddenly another problem, which is a lot of Node Core depend on having that dependency available.
+\[08:00\] So when you install Node, you don't pull down all the modules from npm; you expect Node to come packaged with everything Node itself needs. So the URL module, for example, is needed by the HTTP module. If it's not available, how would the HTTP module work? There are solutions for this, but it's a problem that I hear a lot when we talk about taking, for example, stuff like the URL module out of Node.
+**Thomas Watson:** Well, actually not only are there solutions, there are easy solutions right now. Up until just a year -- or very recently (post-1.0) \[unintelligible 00:08:38.12\] there was no way that Node could have a JavaScript library in it that was not also visible to users of Node. Node had no choice - every library that it needed internally also had to be shown to users. So you're right that URL is used internally, but it would be very easy right now to add a lib internal URL that was literally impossible to be accessed by a user. So we could add a WHATWG compliant URL parser to the internals of Node, and make it be the URL parser that's used by the publicly visible API such as http.get, so the behavior of http.get would be consistent with what our browser developer or anybody familiar with the spec would expect. But at the same time, if a user, they themselves wanted to do URL parsing, install your URL parser from npm. It's no problem, you can do it.
+**Sam Roberts:** And then when you compile Node, you would basically pull that in and have it internally, so it would actually be the same module that you could also install from npm if you wanted to.
+**Thomas Watson:** Yes, which is what's done with... I could be wrong here - I'm pretty sure there's a punycode, so we didn't need an internationalized DNS handling, so that module is actually... I guess nobody wanted to write it. This all predates my time, I just see it how it is now. But very sensibly, they're like "Well, this is a decent JavaScript module in npm, let's just bring it in." And as build mechanics, I don't think it was actually drawn down with an npm install; I think it was vendored in from Git as a dependency. But these are build mechanics; the principle is that a WHATWG compliant JavaScript library could be made on npm, could be vendored in; the people would be forced to install it.
+I have mixed feelings about whether we should actually delete the URL library that exists in Node from its public API.
+**Sam Roberts:** I think actually punycode was just deprecated in the recent version - it was in 7, I think... So in Core.
+**Thomas Watson:** Deprecated as in it's no longer used, or it's no longer exposed externally?
+**Sam Roberts:** Deprecated as you're not supposed to use it, I think. I can't remember... Or was it fully removed? I don't think so.
+**Thomas Watson:** I don't know, I haven't looked at it. I mean, it is still used internally, but that's an example, so probably what happened there is not many people used it from Node, it wasn't documented as an official API. But URL is -- I mean, I personally have a fair amount of code that uses it.
+**Sam Roberts:** But punycode was documented.
+**Thomas Watson:** Oh, it was?
+**Sam Roberts:** Yeah, yeah.
+**Thomas Watson:** Oh, okay. I take it back then. There you go, it's there.
+**Sam Roberts:** Deprecated. Version 7.
+**Thomas Watson:** Right. So we do have the ability to deprecate things. Punycode is really easy, it's just gonna sit there forever, probably. Maybe sometime in the future we'll run a search over npmjs.org and be like, "Okay, look, nobody is using punycode; not from Node anymore. They're all npm-installing it because there's a much more recent, better version on npmjs." So it's a first step to eventually being able to do a pain-free deletion, and it comes up with URL, because right now with URL we are facing a choice.
+\[12:01\] James has written this - and this is in no way a criticism of James; I mean, we needed a good parser, so he's written a WHATWG compliant parser, but the question is should we show it to users? Should they be allowed to use it merely by npm-installing Node 8? And what about those poor suckers on Node 6? Many of them are just moving to Node 6 - they don't get the WHATWG because it's not on npm, they have to upgrade to Node 8? No, I mean, it should be an npm module.
+So that's what I propose. First of all, I think we should be limiting things as much as possible, and if we can make our own Node APIs obsolete by making sure that there's a better one on npmjs.org that people can use, and during what's happening with punycode - and punycode is a low-hanging fruit; I do not think it was the most popular of Node APIs, right?
+**Sam Roberts:** Yeah, I think what they did was, as you said, they probably went over npmjs and looked at, "Okay, is anybody actually depending on this? How many is it?" I think if it's a low amount of people, it is actually feasible to reach out to these module owners and say, "Hey guys, we're gonna deprecate this in the new version. You should update your dependencies to actually point to the module that exists in userland."
+I think punycode probably falls into that category, nobody is really using it. But URL on the other hand, it's something that a lot of people are using... Though I agree with you that it shouldn't have went into Core in the first place and, as you say, you could have vendored it in on compile time, then I think if we take it out now, we're gonna break so much stuff in userland that is working just fine. And maybe modules that haven't been updated for two years - and that is not a problem, that a module hasn't been updated in two years; it just means that it's really stable, and that's a power that we have in Node. We have these really stable modules because they do only one thing and they do it really well, so there's no need for them to update.
+But suddenly if we pull out URL from Node Core, we're gonna get a lot of modules breaking that are working really well, and it's an unfortunate fact of Node being as popular as it is now, and I don't see any good solution to this, unfortunately. And I don't think pulling URL out is a good solution. I'm not saying that replacing it with a new WHATWG version is a solution either, but pulling it out is gonna create a lot of disruption.
+**Thomas Watson:** Right, so I believe the URL should be removed from Node; I don't believe it should be removed now. I definitely wouldn't propose that. I think that the punycode model is a much better one. What I'd like to see is that Node does not expose a WHATWG compatible URL library from Node, that we do make sure it exists on npmjs, we do use it internally, and we start directing what will be a continuing flood of bug reports, close them and say "Yes, this does not do what the WHATWG does, but we support this." We could even put it into the Node Foundation. It can be node.js/ whatwg URL and we can npm publish it, and we can semver it, and it can develop with time -- or not develop, since as a spec maybe it should never change. And then maybe we can have this conversation again in two years, by which point everybody who uses URL will have bugs reported against their library saying "Hey, your library doesn't work. It does this weird stuff with URL parsing", and they'll look at it and be like "Well, we just used Node's URL library", so they'll report a bug on us, and we'll shoot it back to them and say, "My friend, there is a module for that. Just like you run a module, there's a module for that. Your solution for you is don't use Node Core's URL, use that", and we can start moving that direction...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:07\] Incrementally.
+**Thomas Watson:** Yeah, it's an incremental...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Versus a big swathe, which will break things.
+**Thomas Watson:** Yeah, I don't wanna kill the world. I myself use the URL library quite extensively, and actually I like a number of its current real sloppy behaviors - they're excellent for some of my command line parsing. I happen to really enjoy its laissez-faire attitude towards URLs, but I also don't use them in web apps to actually parse real URLs. I'm using it more for configuration syntax.
+**Sam Roberts:** So your solution is that we could start with a, I don't know if they call it a 'soft deprecate' or what they call it, but basically you deprecate it in the documentation, saying "Actually, you shouldn't use this." Maybe even have kind of like blessed modules; you say, "Actually, go ahead and use this module instead, which is on npm", and try to make sure at least that new developers who come into Node and read the documentation, they don't start using something that we think they shouldn't use. But then you said at some point later, after it's been deprecated for a while, you wanna go ahead and remove it?
+**Thomas Watson:** I would hope to get to that stage. I think if Node lives long enough and is successful long enough, that eventually a significant part of the ecosystem will shift over to a good version of URL, the one that's on npm. I would hope to see that shift happen.
+It could be that it never happens, and if it never happens, that's still okay because we still won't change or accept bug reports on the URL library... Unless it's a segfault...
+**Sam Roberts:** Security thing, right?
+**Thomas Watson:** Yeah, a security thing. Unless it's like a real problem. But when it just doesn't do what people expect, it's kind of like "Well, there is a module for that."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So we've been talking about what to take out, and how best to take it out. How do you determine what to put in?
+**Sam Roberts:** You just say no. \[laughter\[
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Just say no? That's the easiest way? What kind of criteria do you define as like what should be a module and what should be Core?
+**Thomas Watson:** I would say the things that should be in Node Core -- there's definitely a grey area, but I think there's a couple principles. One is that things that should be in Node Core are things that cannot be done effectively outside of Node Core. That's one thing. Things that have C++ bindings into V8, for example, need to be in Node Core.
+But one thing that I would say is you have to ask yourself what needs to be in Node Core? For example, Node Core has an HTTP library that you could actually use pretty effectively, get lots of stuff done, it's good performance etc. But if you want HTTP redirect support, don't ask for it from Node Core, we're not gonna give it to you. You have mechanisms in Node Core; use those mechanisms to implement modules any way you want.
+Another interesting example -- actually, I was just looking at the code to see what happened with this... But my understanding is that websockets are a real pain to install on Windows systems because they had a compiled add-on. So there was pressure to put websockets into Node Core, but that conversation ended really nicely and the people realized that actually this compiled add-on was there to do a bitwise XOR, if I recall, of buffers, which could only be done effectively in C++.
+So we didn't have to pull in a whole websocket library to do that, we just needed to extend buffers, so it had this small API that could be used effectively to implement websockets. So websockets can stay out of Core and there can continue to be innovation in websocket APIs. Because all of the websocket APIs offer lots of high-level features of which there's debate - how should it work? What should you do? There's lots of innovation over there.
+\[19:55\] So I would say that for a number of features it would be nice if Node Core could add a very minimalistic set of APIs that will make it possible to implement higher level APIs, and people can use them directly and we'll keep them stable, but hopefully people would move out.
+Cluster is an example of that. Cluster could be built in the npm userland if there was two features present in Node Core that are currently missing. I would like to see those two features added... Obviously, somebody has to do it and I have not had the time to do it lately, but I'd like to see those two features added. Cluster moved out - because it's very opinionated - into npm, where it can innovate, or die, or whatever, and eventually, Cluster as well could be deprecated. It's too opinionated, it doesn't have to be something in Node Core; we don't have to maintain it, we don't have to bug fix it. If people don't like how it works, no problem. There's one, or two, or three versions of it on npmjs.org.
+I think that's a good pattern. Look for the smallest thing that reasonably should be implemented in Node Core that's maybe usable; but if it's not quite usable and it has to be used by people writing modules on top of it on npmjs, that's great. The more people use those types of modules that have individually semvered APIs, the better, I think.
+**Sam Roberts:** One of the things I think that's holding back some modules to be exported out of Node Core and into userland is that a lot of them for performance reasons are written partly in C++, and still today building modules that have native dependencies takes a little bit of time, and can break, and is hard to maintain, and requires certain things to be on the machine that you are building it on.
+**Thomas Watson:** It also requires network access the first time you do it to get the node-gyp headers.
+**Sam Roberts:** Yeah, so one thing that I really would look forward to would be - although that's not really Node, that's more npm or whatever package manager we're using - pre-built binaries. If we had pre-built binaries in the Node ecosystem, it would mean that we could have stuff like the HTTP/2 module that is currently being worked on that might be added to Node actually... Which is part built in C++ because of performance reasons. We would be able to have that easily installable from npm; that would be really hard today because of that.
+**Thomas Watson:** Yeah, I agree. That would be nice. It's a very difficult problem to solve. I've had many hours of unpleasant customer interactions dealing with problems with binary modules. In fact, our app metrics module, our node monitoring - we pre-build it for all supported platforms, all Node platforms, and we package it up with all of those binaries, so there is no compilation needed for it. But it wasn't easy; that's not rocket science... You need to build farm, you need to build it on all of those things, you need to collect all of the binaries together, you have to package them all together... But it's a fairly significant piece of work, and it's hard to push it into the npmjs, into the backend.
+In theory, npmjs could organize a build farm and they could do it, but they'd also have to have all the libraries... You know, that's a separate problem; it's a big problem, and it's hard to solve. Bert had suggestions for that, actually. I don't know if you saw that Chrome has an intermediate compiled format; basically, the C++ gets compiled to an intermediate platform-independent performance format, and then (I'm pretty sure) LLVM at runtime can do the final compilation down to machine code, and Chrome's using it... It's significant levels of programming wizardry and effort required to get that kind of stuff into Node.
+**Sam Roberts:** \[24:06\] Do you think that HTTP/2 should be shipped with Node?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was gonna ask that.
+**Thomas Watson:** Yeah... So that's an interesting case. I have mixed feelings. There's a case to be made that HTTP should not be part of Node as well.
+**Sam Roberts:** Absolutely.
+**Thomas Watson:** But there are significant performance problems. TLS is famously poor performance in Node. Anybody who's not absolutely required to do end-to-end encryption is terminating their HTTPS at NGINX or something reasonable. You can get two or three times speedups by doing that. And part of the reason it's slow is because of the structure of Node internally. It could be erased by moving a lot of the code deeper down into libuv and C++ code. It's difficult to do it in a backwards-compatible way, but...
+Given that Node already has HTTP, I think HTTP/2 is going to become more and more popular and it's going to be stranger and stranger that we have HTTP/1 and not HTTP/2. The build requirements for HTTP/2 will be terrible. I'm pretty sure the implementation uses lots of calls into V8. It would probably be hard to wrap with Nan and also what people want is for the HTTP API in Node to do the right thing - be either 1 or 2 as is possible, and that's hard to arrange unless you just force them out of using the Node HTTP API and go off into userland, which is not terrible.
+**Sam Roberts:** But then you would have an API that you can't really change because now you're stuck with that; you have the same problem.
+**Thomas Watson:** Yeah. I think it's a heavy dependency on C++ that makes it something that might need to go into Node. I'm not really happy with it, but I can't think of a better way.
+An HTTP/2 is not just in C++ for performance, it's also because it's a complex protocol and it has a very good... I'm pretty sure the implementation is C, actually; well, at least the APIs are C. So it has a good implementation AND it's reasonably performant, and it's easy to build into Node... Or relatively easy; it was designed to go behind even-loop architecture, as opposed to some versions. So it's not so hard to do.
+There's been some work - there was for a while - to rewrite the DNS library away from C areas into pure JavaScript, because JavaScript compilation is getting better and better. But then Node is stuck with maintaining an entire protocol implementation in JavaScript all its own and nobody uses, which has its own maintenance costs.
+I'm kind of on the fence there, but I can see the wind is blowing in the HTTP/2...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We can clearly see there's a grey area, for sure.
+**Thomas Watson:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's no clear definition where you could say, "Well, this is what should go in and this is what should not go in" or "This is what should come out or not come out"...
+**Thomas Watson:** And there'll always be disagreement, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, of course.
+**Thomas Watson:** Well, what do you think about HTTP/2? Are you on the fence as well, or are you like "No"?
+**Sam Roberts:** The main problem I see there is the compile -- if the compile issue wasn't there, I'd say it should definitely not go in. I also think that HTTP itself technically didn't need to be in, because no other module in Node Core is depending on the HTTP module.
+**Thomas Watson:** But it depends on the compile binary. The HTTP parser itself is a C++ add-on, so it would have required compilers.
+**Sam Roberts:** Exactly, that's the main issue. That's why I was thinking about maybe if we could have pre-compiled things for each platform, that might help it. But again...
+**Thomas Watson:** \[28:06\] It would make the tradeoffs really different. If in some future nirvana we achieve a better way of dealing with compiled add-ons, that really makes things better. The balance of tradeoffs would really change... Which is a good reason to have as few things as possible, so we don't look as foolish, or we're not stuck with as much baggage when we reach this future, if we do. Or maybe the future will be different -- the future will definitely be different from what it is now.
+**Sam Roberts:** We just have to be really careful; every time we put something in we have to think to ourselves "Okay, it's now in for good. It's gonna be almost impossible to change this API from now on." We've seen that a lot of times in Node Core, and now we're stuck with that. Every time we add something, it has to be really well thought out.
+**Thomas Watson:** I think one of the interesting things about the HTTP API is that the protocol stack spec is pretty stable; HTTP/2 is kind of what it is, and the Node API, in the streams part of it, follows the spec fairly closely. It supports all kinds of great features - protocol renegotiation, and as good header parsing as you can even do, streaming... It's got all of this stuff in there because it follows a spec fairly closely - even at times making choices that make it a little bit more difficult to use, but it follows the spec and it's very flexible. And I think it's reasonably successful because of that... Whereas other APIs are more user-facing. Cluster does not particularly follow a spec, or... What are some other examples...? Streams - Streams is what it was, not because it was following a spec or had to be that way. There were three or four really popular Streams modules at one time that all did things differently.
+**Sam Roberts:** Streams is a clear example of something that should never have been in Node. It's a huge mess right now.
+**Thomas Watson:** I absolutely agree.
+**Sam Roberts:** I would recommend anybody who's working with Streams to not use the Streams that ships with Node, but to use a module called Readable Streams, which might be a little bit funny-sounding name because there's also other things in Readable Streams, but... Readable Streams is actually also maintained by a lot of the Core people in Node. The Streams 3 implementation si pulled out into a module where you can experiment with a lot of stuff that we can't afford to experiment with in Node Core; now we can make better APIs, and stuff like that. And this is the most important thing - in our program, we can do a dependency to this version of Readable Streams that we know works without module, and even if Streams 4 comes out at some point, then it doesn't matter, we can run on that version of Node as well because we have our own version of Readable Streams.
+That's a good example; that should never have gone into Node, and I think we can start doing that... Maybe also with the Cluster module - make a Cluster module in userland as well.
+**Thomas Watson:** Yeah, I absolutely agree. There was a real problem in Node that had to be solved, and that was of back pressure; there needed to be a way to deal with pressure and to write some sort of -- and I'm not gonna say I know exactly what the solution was, like what minimal type of mechanism was required that would enable an ecosystem of streams to develop around it, but there has to have been a better way to make back pressure possible while leaving Streams outside.
+\[31:46\] That said, there's actually a movement right now to move streams (not the Streams 1, 2, 3 - not that JavaScript Streams), to move streaming capabilities down into libuv. Doing that might allow TLS to move into libuv, and other things to move down into libuv, and allow a lot more performance. But even so, even if we do that, that doesn't necessarily have to surface into streams like API and Node. If it could surface into a much simpler API, which was used by Readable Streams and all of the wonderful Streams modules out in npmjs land, that would be nice. But we're left with it...
+It's terrible... Streams is a huge module, it's very difficult to understand, huge maintenance overhead, and has all kinds of user problems - it has Streams, Cluster, URL... These are big modules that don't have to be there.
+**Sam Roberts:** I think a very easy step that the Node Foundation should take in the documentation is simply just to have the concept of these blessed userland modules that we suggest to people to use instead, because we can't take out Streams of Node Core because everybody's depending on it right now... But at least the updated documentation says, "Hey, actually this is deprecated. You shouldn't use this, you should use this one instead, that is in userland. Just npm-install it, and it's way better."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So take the soft deprecation approach where you don't remove it, don't disable it, maybe even throw a warning or something like that, potentially...
+**Sam Roberts:** No, don't throw a warning.
+**Thomas Watson:** No, no, no. And don't print anything.
+**Sam Roberts:** No, I consider that breaking.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay...
+**Sam Roberts:** We actually saw that very recently with a change to the buffer API...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because you're getting back a result you're not expecting.
+**Sam Roberts:** Yeah, so if I run a module that uses the now deprecated buffer API, it prints out a warning saying "You're running insecure code." The reason in this case was that you could insecurely allocate a new buffer if you didn't know what you were doing. You could also use it correctly, and if you knew what you were doing there wasn't a problem. If you didn't know what you were doing, you could do it incorrectly, so they changed the API to make sure that users were forced to do it correct. But now, suddenly, a lot of modules that maybe were doing it correctly, they get these issues on GitHub saying, "Oh, I got this message you're breaking... You should, you know..." -- it's like, "No, my code is fine."
+People get really scared when they see they see those things when they use your module... So no, definitely not print out anything; in my opinion, that's a breaking change...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So simply vocalize, "Do not put it in code..."
+**Sam Roberts:** Just update the documentation...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And then write a blog post on Medium about it...?
+**Sam Roberts:** Oh, you can do a blog post, you can do anything like that, but it's more like an educational process; at least that's the first step. I don't think we'll ever be able to pull out Streams of Node Core. Maybe URL at some point down the line, if we see that less and less people depend on it, I think it's likely. You know, it might happen. But just update the documentation and have these blessed modules that we refer people to instead.
+**Thomas Watson:** \[35:11\] I really like that idea, and actually I might PR a change to the Streams doc right away. I mean, Streams needs to be documented in Node because Node APIs return Streams, you have to know what the APIs are. But there's a very good argument that you should never yourself type "require Stream" from Node. You should always require a readable stream, and it's not unreasonable to say that at the top of the Stream doc. "We have these in Node Core, but YOU, when YOU use Streams or build your own Stream, should be using Readable Streams."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's what it says for -- is it \[punny\] or \[pewny\]?
+**Thomas Watson:** \[pewny\] code.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[pewny\] code? I thought it was \[punny\] code...
+**Thomas Watson:** It's \[pewny\], because it comes from Unicode.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, gotcha. And it actually says, "Users currently depending upon the puny modules should switch using the userland provided at punycode.js module instead." So they're already taking these steps, like you're suggesting.
+**Sam Roberts:** That's cool, I haven't seen that. That's really awesome. That means that it's not really that big of a political issue apparently to do that.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So your suggestions are already being accepted, to a degree.
+**Thomas Watson:** Yeah, so with Readable Streams it's a little bit different, because you can't not use Node streams. I mean, when you do fs.createWriteStream you are getting back a Node stream, right? But we can't nudge people to not use it themselves, to use Readable Stream directly. Well, I mean, directly from npmjs.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Any final closing thoughts?
+**Sam Roberts:** I'll just say no.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright, thanks fellas.
+**Thomas Watson:** Thank you!
+\* \* \*
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thanks again to our friends at the Linux Foundation and the Node Foundation for working with us on this project, as well as our friends at IBM and StrongLoop for sponsoring this podcast series. It was a blast being there.
+We'll be there again next year, so look out for us in 2017 at Node Interactive. If you wanna hear more JavaScript-focused podcast from Changelog, check out JS Party, our new live weekly show with Mikeal Rogers, Alex Sexton and Rachel White. Head to Changelog.com/jsparty, click Subscribe, don't miss a show, and thanks for listening.

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+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[00:31\] Welcome to our Spotlight Series titled The Future of Node, recorded at Node Interactive 2016 in Austin, Texas. We produced this in partnership with the Linux Foundation, the NodeJS Foundation, and it's sponsored by IBM and StrongLoop.
+**Break:** \[00:44\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In this episode we talked to Gaurav Seth, lead program manager of Chakra and TypeScript, as well as Arunesh Chandra, program manager of ChakraCore. We talked about their polite fork of Node to introduce the community to Chakra, the high-performance JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge. We also talked about why Microsoft is so interested in the Node, the future of Chakra and ChakraCore, VM neutrality and more. Listen in.
+Let's start out with "Why Node inside of Microsoft?" Why is Node important to Microsoft?
+**Arunesh Chandra:** You know, Node as a platform has been having an amazing growth over the last few years, and it's right in the space of JavaScript and JavaScript developers. One of the big directional things for us or a guidepost for Microsoft is really any developer, any app, any platform... So kind of looking at that guidepost that we are after, where we wanna go support any app, any developer and any platform, Node is a very important aspect, and that's why it is very important to us to make sure, because it plays into our developer community that we wanna go reach out to.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How does it play into the overall platform when we talk about Windows as a big platform? Is that what you mean by that too, in terms of an operating system? You mean devices...? Obviously, we're growing from just simply desktops to more devices now; what do you mean by a platform?
+**Arunesh Chandra:** Right here by a platform I was not really specific to any OS, but even if you look at -- Node in itself is a platform which people use to write the backend stuff. There's also other things like iOS, there's Apache... There's all these technologies. These technologies can come together to form a platform that any developer uses.
+In terms of the platform, you can imagine the platform also constitutes the operating system; it's the app stack that people are using, so it's the app platform. So it's both of them, in a way.
+**Gaurav Seth:** High-level bit, I think what he mentioned as well was that Node is a really fast-growing application framework, and from the history, Microsoft is always about developers' productivity. There's a huge growth in the developer interest in Node and that's what has us excited about this platform, as well. We're going where the developers are.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That makes sense. That brings us over to the next topic, which is VM neutrality. To go where the developers are, you have to have neutrality, you have to be able to take it beyond V8. I think it was roughly nine months to a year ago, if my memory serves me correctly - you guys forked Node and did something with ChakraCore where you were able to speed it up, and you had your own fork and that was sort of like the way you even got back into -- it might have even opened the door for Node involvement with Microsoft... If I remember that correctly.
+**Arunesh Chandra:** \[04:10\] Last year, we announced our involvement with Node ChakraCore. That stemmed from the fact that the Windows 10 IoT Core was being brought up, and the default Node did not target that platform because of the instruction side difference in that platform. And Chakra being part of that system already, we thought we could bring Node to be powered by an optimized JavaScript engine on the platform, and that's how we got started with Node ChakraCore.
+We've submitted a PR earlier this year in January, with the fork we had.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** My time was roughly correct, then... Roughly nine months ago I think it was -- almost a full year... Ten months or so.
+**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting.
+**Gaurav Seth:** The one thing I would add there though - you did say that it was a fork... It was a fork only in the GitHub sense...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I didn't mean -- exactly...
+**Gaurav Seth:** Yeah, so...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, for the listeners out there, I meant a "good" fork... Which is great, because the platform GitHub, social coding - that worked out great, because you all at Microsoft wanting to target any app developer, any device, that mantra you're sort of driving upon, being able to have that freedom in open source to do a polite fork, in an intention to further expand. And today, fast forwards to I think two days ago's announcement (or yesterday's announcement) of VM neutrality, and this bigger play with IBM, you guys, Microsoft... If I remember correctly, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Node Source - joining forces around Node with VM neutrality... How important is that to developers?
+**Arunesh Chandra:** VM neutrality is something that is really important for Node developers in terms of being able to run their code on any device, any workload, any platform, in a highly optimized way. Currently, you can run Node on a lot of platforms, but with the VM neutrality the vision is that you have this ubiquitous Node platform which is optimized for that particular workload or platform device type. That is the ultimate vision for VM neutrality.
+The way to achieve it is that you allow different VM vendors to kind of plug into the Node infrastructure, to be able to provide that kind of optimization. There's a growing trend of people trying to fork Node into creating their own optimized version, and Node I believe has to kind of recognize that trend, and kind of bring it in its fold to enable the growth we envision for it.
+**Gaurav Seth:** I like what Arunesh is saying here... I think I look at it from three perspectives - from the perspective of people who write code for Node, which is the Node module authors. I think for them VM neutrality or the work that is being done helps shield them from the changes that keep coming in Node in itself. For example, if you move from one version of Node to the other version of Node, many times if native module authors have a dependency, they would have to recompile their stuff as they move ahead. That is the advantage for them, that it kind of shields them from Node in itself moving.
+From a consumer perspective, like "I'm a consumer of Node" - for them it's like, "Hey, if there are these modules that target this new VM neutral Node, I don't have to worry about revving up my modules every time I rev up Node. So you're making those two pieces independent in itself, so that you don't have to rev it."
+\[08:14\] And from a platform or a Node ecosystem perspective itself, I think getting to the VM neutrality is almost like analogous to having more than one browser available to everybody, so that there is more than one party which is interested in making sure that we are pushing Node forward. For example, we work with the V8 team very closely in the web client space. We go together in TC39, we often go into design reviews, we've been designing things together alongside V8, Mozilla and other guys that own WebAssembly.
+Getting more than one VM player into the Node market means that now more than one of the VM players can actually start thinking about the server side functionality for JavaScript, and kind of think about how do we have to evolve that also in a period of time.
+In a nutshell, I think all three win - the people who are writing code, the people who are consuming Node, and even the Node platform in itself.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That makes a lot of sense. As a Node developer, as a module developer, as you mentioned, the last thing you wanna worry about is testing multiple platforms or having that concern... Writing once, and because of this VM neutrality being able to not have that concern as a module developer certainly makes it that much easier, because Node has a very UNIX-like function where a lot of things are broken out into individuals parts; that's why there are so many modules out there, that's why there are so many dependencies out there... Because of that. It's the way to do things.
+For those out there though who may be listening to this that aren't very familiar with Chakra or ChakraCore, can you break down the difference between those two things? Because one is in the Edge browser, and ChakraCore is sort of the core code that anybody else can use... Is that right? Help me understand that.
+**Arunesh Chandra:** ChakraCore, as the name suggests, is actually the core part of the Chakra (JavaScript) engine.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+**Arunesh Chandra:** And Chakra JavaScript engine powers the Edge browser and Windows 10. There are core parts of the JavaScript engine, and then there are Windows-specific bindings around diagnostic APIs or bindings through the browser; if you add those on top of the ChakraCore engine, that becomes the Chakra engine that ships with Windows and Edge.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was about a year ago, I believe, when Chakra was open sourced - is that right?
+**Arunesh Chandra:** Yes, ChakraCore is open source, ChakraCore is cross-platform. Chakra, on the other hand, was open sourced in Jan 2016 - about a year ago.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha, okay. How important was it for the development of Chakra to open source it? Obviously, we're seeing a new Microsoft in terms of embracing open source, but why open source? How has that helped the overall mission of the Edge browser being more any developer, any device, being more open - this neutrality, so to speak, generally across developers? How has open sourcing it made a big deal for the development of it?
+**Arunesh Chandra:** ChakraCore open sourcing has provided us the opportunity to really work with the open source community and developers. There's a lot of people out there, and it has allowed us to engage with that community and organically grow the platform for us. Also, it has given us an opportunity to reach a larger audience with the technology we are building, and allow the innovations coming out of our technology to reach a larger audience.
+It comes both ways: we get to benefit from really organic discussions and PRs and reviews that happen online on our repo, and on the other hand we are able to also bring our innovation to a larger audience in that way.
+**Gaurav Seth:** \[12:12\] I would say that the bigger focus really was mostly about -- we had a technology that we had worked on that we felt was in a good place, and given the model we were in, we had it restricted only to be used in the Edge browser. We really wanted to open up for any sort of developer to come and start using it if they would like to, and at the same time there was also this Node effort that was going on, and we were seeing how much momentum the Node community had behind Node, which was an amazing example, right?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, it's definitely been fast-paced and growing fast.
+**Gaurav Seth:** So Node was one example, TypeScript was another example, because our team works very closely with TypeScript as well, and we were looking at that project and seeing what an amazing momentum the community created for that project, as well. And at that point in time it was kind of clear that "Hey, if you want people to build amazing things with your stuff, you should go open source", and that was one of the biggest motivations. Like, "Hey, let's work in the open, let's innovate in the open, let's help the community in whatever way we can."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Rewinding back to that moment, what had to happen to go from Chakra, which is with Edge's bindings, certain things that Microsoft S needs to have to do Windows 10 and various things? What was the effort needed to top down? How did you have to sell it? Was it developer up, was it executive down? Talk to me about the process to kind of take it from just simply Chakra to ChakraCore being open. What effort had to happen to the codebase?
+**Gaurav Seth:** I think it was neither -- I mean, it was a pretty flat thing... It was neither top-down or bottom-up. But I would say it was more bottom-up than top-down. I think as we were working on things, it was all about figuring out where the people are, where the momentum is, what is the next set of things we should be doing.
+The point when we went open source - there were things where Chakra was already leading in terms of the language support it had. It was already leading in some of the perf(ormance) benchmarks that we saw. Chakra has an amazing architecture which is a dual pipeline of having an interpreter and a JIT compiler, both traded together in place.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** When you say JIT you mean Just In Time, right?
+**Gaurav Seth:** Just In Time, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, just making sure.
+**Gaurav Seth:** So when we were kind of looking at the technological roadmap for us, I think from what we wanna do, I think we had achieved quite a lot of it. Nothing is ever done. It's an era of always improving, in continuous improvement, but at that point in time we were like, "Hey, what is the best big thing that we should do for the community, to help the community?"
+It was suddenly becoming obvious that "Hey, we should not keep ourselves restricted to only one platform and be there, because that is not the way for us to really grow and help the community." We started out conversations internally and we just decided that it's the best thing for us to go and maybe open source the thing.
+In terms of the technical steps that you asked, like how much of an effort it took us, it was actually pretty minimal. One of the reason was, you know, when you think about the bindings we had to the Edge browser, those were already gone when we had started working on supporting the Windows 10 IoT platform, because even when we enabled the IoT platform, that IoT platform could not work with the Edge specific binding. So we had already written this new modern hosting API as we call it, to enable that scenario. It was all about just going and making sure that we open up and we open source that particular thing, and say "Hey, here's the format that you're gonna be using."
+\[15:54\] So we had already been working on creating -- because today, if you look at it... Or actually even when we went open source, it was not only Edge which was using us... Azure DocumentDB uses Chakra, there's Outlook.com that uses Chakra. Both of them are server or cloud scenarios where Chakra was not being used in a web browser context, but it was more used in a SaaS platform context in the cloud. So there were already uses before, and it was just about like "Hey, if folks at Microsoft or products in Microsoft can use it, let's just open it so that anybody in the community should also be able to use the technology..."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That makes a lot of sense, the natural way of trying to open it internally... A lot of people -- I think we even had this conversation with some of your friends at Microsoft on the TypeScript team; we talked about inner open source, that kind of thing. Because you have a natural desire to use Chakra inside of Microsoft in various different platforms within Microsoft, you naturally created ChakraCore, and why not just open that up to everyone else?
+**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah, that's true.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** For those who may be catching up - I'm still catching up to myself, it's a fast-paced world... I think we've broken down Chakra to a good degree, but give me the 10,000 ft. overview of what Chakra is. I know it's not a runtime, it's the engine inside of the Edge browser that runs Node, is that right?
+**Arunesh Chandra:** Yes, that's correct. Chakra is the JavaScript engine that runs and powers Microsoft Edge, all JavaScript applications on the Windows platform, and multiple services like Azure DocumentDB, Outlook.com etc.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. I just wanted to cover that real quick, because it's always catching up for me, too. It's just... New kids on the block, so to speak; you're one year old, so to speak - maybe a little more than that, but still catching up, so...
+Let's talk about the future then. Where is Chakra going, where is ChakraCore going? What should Node developers be looking out for for the future of Chakra and ChakraCore?
+**Gaurav Seth:** I think one of the biggest things that we are working towards is really taking Chakra cross-platform. When we open source Chakra back in January, it was a Windows-only platform and at that point in time it was clear that even to come true to the mantra of "any developer, any app, any platform", we have to make sure that this technology is not Windows-only and it is available on other platforms, as well.
+We've been making pretty good progress, and Chakra is now available both in Linux, in the Ubuntu x64 version, as well as we did a preview on the Mac OS X yesterday, that is available. So on these other two platforms we have a fully functional Chakra engine now, but it is still not as optimized as we would like it to be so that it is sort of on parity with the Windows version. There's still some work that is pending in the JIT compiler and the garbage collection pieces, which we are working on.
+The big thing for us is to make sure that Chakra goes cross-platform and is almost on par in terms of what functionality, performance, and of course, the fundamental characteristics across all of these platforms. So that's one of the biggest things that we're working on.
+Outside of that, I think there are a bunch of innovations that continue to happen on the engine there. We've been working very closely with the Microsoft Research team to advance or innovate the state of the art of JavaScript debugging, and they have been experimenting with their stuff on the Chakra engine. We call that technology time-travel debugging.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting.
+**Gaurav Seth:** We showed a demo yesterday. Up until now, we only had time-travel debugging work in like -- you attach and run, and you can move back, and yesterday we just previewed the ability to record a snapshot in JavaScript and replay that.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+**Gaurav Seth:** \[19:58\] That's something new, and it's all happening in the open. It's not that any of that code is behind, it's all in the open. I think that is another big thing that we're working on, and our goal is to make sure that we get that technology to a stable state so that we can start shipping that in ChakraCore, and maybe with Node, as well.
+I mean, Node would probably be the first target. That's where we started, with Node.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** When you say "in the open", do you mean open in documentation, open in GitHub issues...? Describe open...
+**Gaurav Seth:** The code is in the open. The code is on GitHub.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, the code is in the open.
+**Gaurav Seth:** Issues are in GitHub.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Of course. So if someone's listening and they're like, "Hey, I wanna get involved in this", the easiest place to do that is just to go to the GitHub repo...?
+**Gaurav Seth:** Yeah. ChakraCore GitHub repo.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha.
+**Gaurav Seth:** You've got it all... I mean, our roadmap is completely open, our code is open... It's all MIT-licensed, so it's very easy to get started and to consume...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. This is a new thing from Microsoft, I'm excited. We had Bertrand Le Roy on the Changelog not long ago, talking about .NET Core, open sourcing that; I believe the show was about 1.0-ing that and what not...
+So we're seeing a new resurgence, so to speak, from Microsoft in the fact that you're embracing open source, you're doing things in the open... As developers inside of Microsoft, how does that make you feel in terms of the future of Microsoft, and then also for developers? How does that new Microsoft make you feel?
+**Gaurav Seth:** It feels beautiful from the inside.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Have you been there for a long time?
+**Gaurav Seth:** I've been with Microsoft for over 10 years.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, so you're seeing the transition real-time, then.
+**Gaurav Seth:** I've seen the transition and I think the last two, three years have been the best ride in my career till now.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow...
+**Gaurav Seth:** It's just the amount of intense interactions you can have with developers, how much confidence you can instill in them when you open the codebases and say, "Hey, whatever we are doing, we're doing it in the open so that you can take a look at it. You can always contribute back to it." It's a completely different world from that perspective; you're just opening up, you're being transparent to people, and people love it if you're being transparent to them.
+**Arunesh Chandra:** That's the exciting part... The open sourcing effort of Microsoft is also well received by the community, and there's good appreciation...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, definitely! I'm excited about it.
+**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah, so whenever we go out to conferences and stuff like that, I always meet people and the first thing they say is "This changed Microsoft, this type of open source activity happening, and we love it." That gives you more fuel to go and keep powering through all this.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I missed your demo yesterday, but Gaurav, you had tweeted that Arunesh is demo-ing all this on a Mac for the first time ever in an event. How big of an event was that to do it on a Mac? What's the big deal there?
+**Arunesh Chandra:** Node ChakraCore was only recently made available on Mac, so it was certainly a very exciting time, for the very first time to show that demo on a Mac. So cross-platform is a big deal, and we are working towards it. As Gaurav was saying, we are still trying to optimize it. This was a preview bit that we were doing when demo-ing, and it was really exciting to show this technology on a Mac.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So if the community out there is listening to this and they're thinking "Man, I wanna get involved in ChakraCore... Even from an outsider perspective, I wanna dive into the code, I wanna look at the roadmap, whatever..." - give some waypoints. We talked about going to GitHub, but what's over the horizon? Is there issues people can tackle? How can the community step in to help you take ChakraCore to the future?
+**Gaurav Seth:** I'll talk about the Node ChakraCore project where the TDD technology we are building is still working with the MSR (Microsoft Research) to really push the state of the art here. The community that wants to get involved in this - the best way would be to go to aka.ms/nodetdd.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[24:15\] Okay, we're gonna put that in the show notes.
+**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah, and there I've listed out ways to get involved. One of the best things that people can do is try this new technology on their own app and see how this works, file issues, report problems... If you wanna get into code, maybe just dive into code and see if there are issues they can fix and contribute back. Those are some of the ways they can tangibly and immediately help us harden the technology we're building.
+**Gaurav Seth:** I think that is one part of it. There is another part... The part Arunesh was talking about was really directly getting into the ChakraCore bits. The other piece is also really the Node ChakraCore piece, wherein we're working with the API Working Group to evolve these new -- what we call Nappy, which is the new Node stable ABI layer, or APIs.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What is it called? What's the acronym?
+**Arunesh Chandra:** It's Node.js API.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+**Arunesh Chandra:** What it does is it provides an ABI stability guarantee across versions of Node, and even versions of VM which powers node
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+**Gaurav Seth:** Coming back, one of the other places people can really contribute is to join in that effort and help Node really have the solid Nappy layer. This is basically, in essence, if you think about it, this is the backbone of VM neutrality. We all need this layer and we wanna make sure that this layer is great. It's seamless from a functionality perspective, it has great performance etc. So that's another big place where people can contribute, and it's all, again, in the open; it's in the Node Core project, in the API Working Group.
+**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah, and the part that could also use a lot of community help is the Nappy project.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where can I find this Nappy project? Is it on GitHub as well?
+**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah, it's on GitHub. You can go to github.com/nodejs/ABI-stable-node. That repo also has steps to get involved. As Gaurav was saying, Nappy is supposed to be the stepping stone towards VM neutrality. This provides the fundamental piece of technology where we create the stable Node API for module developers. The current stage we are in - it's a very early prototype stage right now.
+We have converted two native modules onto this API, and the third one is being converted right now. The help we can use here is that people who own native modules, they can come and take a look at these APIs, try to convert them; if they find some gaps in the APIs we have provided, they can file an issue and let us know that "Hey, there are some gaps in this API", or if there's performance concerns... Things of that nature.
+Or, if people have a folk version of Node, with some sort of runtime of their own, we actually invite them in this project as well, to be able to give us a perspective of the API design we are doing from their VM point of view. Because currently we are involved -- there's some expertise in the V8 way of functioning, certainly we bring the ChakraCore perspective, we have also folks from Mozilla who provide the SpiderMonkey perspective on some of these things...
+\[28:12\] We actually want a more diverse set of VM vendors to kind of really test out this API design we are currently working on. So there's a ton of ways to get involved in this, and certainly this is an exciting area for the future of Node.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was looking over the docs as you were talking there, so I think I've broken it down - Nappy stands for Node API...?
+**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, because I was like, "What's Nappy?" I was catching up as we were talking here...
+**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah, we'll probably change the name to call it N-API.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** N-API? \[laughter\] It's almost the same...
+**Arunesh Chandra:** It sounds cooler.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It does sound cooler. So let's talk about anything else that I might have missed. We're sitting down here, we're at this conference, Node Interactive, you gave a demo, we're excited about this new VM neutrality, a lot of stuff is changing here - a lot of stuff for the good - but what is out there that we haven't covered yet that's just important on your mind? So that anybody listening to this can see where Microsoft is taking Node, and the involvement in Node, and obviously Chakra and ChakraCore.
+**Gaurav Seth:** Yeah, I think one of the big pieces that we have not talked about is stuff that's happening outside of ChakraCore, and the work that we are doing for Node in general. One of the things we're doing is, given that -- Node ChakraCore is one piece, but one of the efforts that we've been working on is like, for today's Node developers, you wanna have a great experience of allowing them to use Node on Azure as a cloud platform.
+We've been doing a lot of work, ranging from "How do you really improve your inner loop scenarios?" When I say inner loop, it's like as soon as you start to code up your stuff right from editors such as VS Code, there's a lot of effort that has been going there... How you use the programming language; there's a lot going on in TypeScript that helps and works along with VS Code and powers some amazing experiences in VS Code, to kind of now enabling and working with Docker and the container servicer to bring all of these things light up on Linux, on Azure... Which people typically think like "Hey, you talk Azure? Azure maybe is just like a Windows cloud", which is totally incorrect.
+So kind of taking these things - VS Code, TypeScript, Docker is working on Linux, on Azure, either in the form of PaaS or Azure Container service, bring your own container... Then, once you have your app deployed, how do you go take the next step with app insights, and have some amazing experiences from a production diagnostics perspective? That is one.
+The other thing is having the ability of full stack diagnostics experiences in VS Code, which is like "Hey, I've got the backend and frontend both in JavaScript - how do I target both of them in the same editor?" So there's actually a lot of work that's going on right now, to make sure that we kind of go nail the end-to-end experiences, so that as developer start working with Node, they have an amazing amount of productivity and they can get to the end solution that they wanna get to, in as minimum time as possible, let me put it that way.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Awesome. Well, let's leave it there for now. Thank you so much for sitting down with me, thank you for all the work you're doing on Node and playing a great part there from Microsoft's perspective. I'm excited for the future of both of you at Microsoft and the future of Microsoft itself with being far more open to open source. I'll say it for the entire community - we're excited about that change of heart from Microsoft. We're excited to have you all back on the Changelog and doing fun stuff with us, so it's a bless seeing you guys here.
+**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah, thanks for having us over.
+**Gaurav Seth:** Thank you, Adam.

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+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[00:31\] Welcome to our Spotlight series titled The Future Of Node, recorded at Node Interactive 2016, in Austin, Texas. We produced this in partnership with the Linux Foundation, the NodeJS Foundation and it's sponsored by IBM and StrongLoop.
+**Break:** \[00:43\] to \[01:05\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In this episode I talked with Rachel White, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, about Node, IoT, robotics... We talked about making robots, inspiring developers to try new things, having fun as a developer, letting go of impostor syndrome, RFID implants and making stuff for fun, outside of our day-to-day jobs. Take a listen.
+\*\*\*
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So all I have as notes is IoT. That's all I have for notes.
+**Rachel White:** Okay, that's fine.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about NodeBots, let's talk about IoT... Are you part of Edge? What do you do at Microsoft?
+**Rachel White:** I'm just a technical evangelist at Microsoft. I basically just work with developers and utilize Microsoft technology like Azure with Node deployment via pushing to GitHub; you can make a web app with Node super easily, and we have a whole slew of cognitive services, like facial recognition, emotional analysis, text-to-speech stuff... I've been making interesting and fun web application demos in Node, so that...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** kind of have some of your story then, because you were saying that you don't write...
+**Rachel White:** Production code.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...production code, but you create demos to get people excited about the production code and what they could do with it. It's a unique position.
+**Rachel White:** It's great, I love it. My only drawback is I need to stop making so many things with cats.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay... You're a cat fan, I assume. I saw your phone.
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I love cats, in a totally healthy, cat-lady way, not a "I'm gonna be buried underneath lots of boxes and sweaters" way. Some of the web apps that I made though... Yesterday I spoke about a Twitter bot that I made utilizing a Twitter streaming API, Microsoft's Face API, which is facial recognition... It's really cool; it's a REST API, you hit an endpoint with the path to the image that you're going to use - in this case it's selfies... So people will tweet a selfie at this Twitter bot, which is called Magical NQ, and I grab the image, I run it through the face API and it gives me X/Y coordinates of a bunch of face landmarks, and then I run it through GraphicsMagick and do a bunch of overlays for cute noses and cute ears, and it does this whole new composited image that then gets tweeted back at the person.
+I get paid to make things like that. I can get people excited to try out-of-the-box things that they might not necessarily be able to integrate into enterprise applications, but facial recognition could totally be...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Fun stuff!
+**Rachel White:** \[03:47\] Yeah. You could totally use it for more applicable things. I would like to think that I am more reaching out to the people that may not have had too much experience with Node, and then they'll see this application -- I always open source everything that I make, and I write the readme super documented, not making any assumptions about what the user might know, down to "Go to the website and install Node" and "Install npm, and do all of these steps", so hopefully they can make their own weird and cool stuff by the end of it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's really interesting, because you get a chance to 1) open source fund interesting projects, but also use a creative side to yourself that -- I don't wanna say not important, because it's not production code, but at the same time you have this level of freedom in your code that isn't restricted by business requirements, isn't restricted by revenue-generating things, that you can kind of like whimsically tinker, which to me is like a box of legos.
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, and the extra interesting thing is I've only been working with Node for about the past year. After JSConf 2014, I was sitting in a NodeBots panel and I saw all the really awesome stuff that Rick Waldron and Kassandra Perch and Francis Gulotta were making, and I was like "I wanna do this!" And then it took me a week to blink an LED, because I used a yellow LED and it was too bright in the room, so I didn't even know that it was working.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Whaat?!
+**Rachel White:** And that was my first foray into Node, which I then kind of just pushed it aside because at that point in time I still was a frontend/full-stack JavaScript developers, and I didn't have that much time. I actually just got the Facebook memory on my phone yesterday - a year ago yesterday I finished my first Node project, which was also my first hardware project, and it was an automated cat feeder that I built utilizing Johnny-Five (a Node application) with a webpage, where you go and push a button and it turns a servo and cat food comes out.
+It was kind of exciting, because that one was the longest readme I've ever written, and I was so exhausted from finishing it... I published the repo, I tweeted about it, I posted it to Hacker News, I went to sleep, I woke up and it was all over the internet. Some site in Japan wrote about it...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I bet! They love cats there.
+**Rachel White:** Yes. It went over really well, and so many people came up to me after giving talks about it, saying "I've never done any of these things before and you really inspired be to try." That's something that I keep on hearing, and it makes me feel so good, because I want people to try new things. It's cool.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was reading a book, Essentialism. Have you heard of the book or read it?
+**Rachel White:** No.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I always ask that question, because a lot of people that I ran into have read it, especially in the tech community. One thing they said in there about learning is that you have to make learning fun. If learning is kind of boring, you don't absorb it the right way. It's that childlike -- when we are kids, we learn so much better than... Or probably not so much better than an adult, but kids are sponges, and the reason why they are is because most of what they approach is in a fun way. You probably agree with this, since this is kind of like your core role now - whenever you approach things with a fun attitude, it's so much easier to kind of just get lost in it and achieve flow quicker.
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, and another thing too... A term that I learned recently from a good friend of mine who's a self-taught chef - autodidact learning, where you learn by doing, is pretty much the only way that I am good at absorbing any kind of information. If I can't visualize exactly how something is working, then I'm not going to get the concept of it. You could explain theory to me all day and it's gonna fly in one ear, out the other.
+\[07:58\] I've been programming for like 15 years; I don't have a CS background and I'm still really terrible at memorizing syntax, or... I don't know anything about any kind of SWORDing - I don't know any of that stuff, but I can probably figure anything out. I always tell people that I'm not a good engineer, and then there's always like "Oh, don't say that..." I'm like, "No, it's fine... I'm really good at problem-solving though", which I would rather be proud of, because I could figure something out; it might just take me a little bit longer... So it's probably good that I'm not writing production code.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you feel when I say this: "Not an impostor"?
+**Rachel White:** That was something that I struggled with for a really long time because of the situations that I was in, where when I did have the stress of writing code with testing and deadlines that people needed to use, I felt like I wasn't good enough because I wasn't fast enough. I don't really feel that way anymore now that I'm lucky enough to have the freedom to be able to kind of control what I output into the world, and really the only measure of my success in terms of my job is how many people like it, or how good I am at conveying my message. It's kind of hard to feel like an impostor when all I'm doing now is being myself, and feeling comfortable in it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The reason why I ask that is because for The Changelog, our main show at Changelog (which is our overarching brand) we've come to grips with what we feel makes the show good (my co-host, Jerod, and I) is that we face our impostor syndrome so that our listeners don't have to. So over the last several years we've kind of coined certain inner taglines, so to speak, that kind of define us. "Hacker to the heart" is our main one now, because we feel like that's what really defines who we are. We're hackers, but we also get to the heart of the story. And we always felt that anywhere we go, we always feel some level of impostor syndrome.
+Earlier, when I was sitting here talking to Thomas and Sam from IBM, I was thinking like "I don't belong here." Not that I'm saying, "Oh, I DO belong here", but I had this level of anxiety in me, thinking "I don't belong here!" And I was just thinking about the idea of people out there that feel like they don't belong... And what I think is cool about what you do is that you do it in a fun way and inviting people, and it's almost like a permission to mess up.
+If you're doing it for fun, you can approach it and mess up, and be like "Ha-ha-ha! Whatever..." And the same with the people you're approaching - they don't have to feel like, "Oh man, I gotta be an engineer, I gotta get this right, I gotta have this certain way that defines who I am, or whatever." You can kind of like go that impostor syndrome.
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, and I definitely mess up all the time. I don't think I've ever given a conference talk without having some kind of technical difficulties... But you know what? It doesn't phase me anymore. I just talk through it and make jokes. Especially giving hardware demos at conferences - it always goes wrong.
+I gave a hardware talk at Node Interactive EU and I was doing four hardware demos. They all worked, but one of them - I switched to USB cords, and had a lot of serial port issues. I was like, "I don't know what's going on", and I started having a live conversation with someone that was in the front row of the audience - it was Kassandra Perch - and we were live debugging and figuring out the issue; it only derailed like three minutes, and then it was okay.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Anybody else might have just crumbled under the pressure.
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, and I'm like, "Oh, whatever... I have to get through this, otherwise we're gonna sit here and stare at each other for 20 minutes." And even yesterday - I'm not giving hardware demos at the moment - I was demo-ing a new bot, and the internet was kind of spotty. It was still working, and surprisingly, I didn't have any code errors... I forgot how to use PowerPoint!
+\[12:03\] So during my presentation, after I switched from the PowerPoint slides over to some live coding demonstrations, I needed to get back to my slides, but we were already halfway through, and I couldn't remember that they key command on Windows is Shift+F5 to get to a specific slide...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Of course, why would you remember that?
+**Rachel White:** Well, I tried Alternate, I tried Control and I tried Function+F5 and it all didn't work, so then I just started clicking on every single slide to get back to the 23rd slide... And I was just like, "So, how's everybody doing? This is great..." And then even the workshop after that, the code that I deployed for people to use had a bug in it, so we had to fix it together in order to get it to work. But it did work eventually, and then everybody was really excited.
+I think that mistakes are such a natural part of making something, and I kind of think it's more human to have that happen organically. I know that that stresses out a lot of people, especially when you're putting yourself out there, but I think that if everybody embraced their mistakes, we would be able to feel a lot more comfortable discussing a lot of different technical and even societal things...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I think a lot of people get hung up on the things they feel like they're not good at, and it sort of paralyzes them, and that doesn't do anybody any good, because they get stuck, they never produce what would have been cool, and then the world doesn't grow from it.
+**Rachel White:** Yeah. I think that that fear prevents a lot of people from making awesome stuff. I fall victim to that, too...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We all do.
+**Rachel White:** There's a ton of stuff that I still wanna make that I've been putting off for like two years, just because I'm afraid of starting it and then having to finish it, like video games...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sometimes we don't do what we wanna do because we're scared we'll succeed. We're like, "But if that actually worked, I'd have to do it..." And it's like, "Not today... I'll procrastinate."
+**Rachel White:** That's exactly how my first conference talk happened. I'm really good at writing abstracts, apparently, and I submitted the Robokitty abstract, and I was like, "Well, if it gets accepted, I guess I'll build it." And it got accepted, and then I had to build it, and I was like, "Oh, great... I put myself in this situation and now I have to do it."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So tell me about Robokitty. What happened there?
+**Rachel White:** That was my automated cat feeder.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I didn't know what the name was.
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, it's called Robokitty. I was sitting at a bar with Jenn Schiffer, and I was like "I think I wanna start talking at conferences", because I spoke at JSFest in 2014, but it wasn't a technical talk; it was a part of DHTML Conf 2000, which was satirical talks, and instead of giving a satirical talk, I spoke about my life as a kid and a teen, creating problems for other people on the internet because I was a total script kiddie on AOL, and have created a lot of problems. And it was really fun, and I was like, "I think I wanna talk at conferences and do technical stuff. It would be really fun."
+She encouraged me to just apply, and I did. And now, here we are. I get to torture everyone with all of the fun things I make.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How many talks later are we?
+**Rachel White:** Oh my gosh... Well, over ten, definitely. This year I was invited to speak at Amazon, I spoke at CascadiaFest, DinosaurJS... I was in Europe for two weeks in Stockholm and Amsterdam, and I spoke here... I've lost count. It's been a lot.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Too many to count.
+**Rachel White:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you enjoy that, I assume.
+**Rachel White:** I do, I enjoy doing it. The majority of that was before I took the role of technical evangelist, so it was all in my spare time.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:06\] Yeah, and now it's what you do.
+**Rachel White:** I thought I was tired when I was doing it outside of work, and now that it's my job, I'm even more tired.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So let's talk about hardware for a bit...
+**Rachel White:** Sure.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...which blends into the internet of things, and this new world we're in. I was actually talking to somebody several months ago who was a mechanical engineer. For whatever reason, his job was drying up; he had really good smarts as an engineer, and I was encouraging him like "Hey, you've got the kind of mindset to get into software development and you love hardware; you already know about all these things. Have you considered learning JavaScript and getting into these things?" For people like that, since you're an evangelist, it seems like your focus is on -- is it on bringing new people in or is it nurturing those who are already there?
+**Rachel White:** It's both.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a balance of both?
+**Rachel White:** It's definitely both. An interesting thing... A colleague of mine in New York, who's also a technical evangelist at Microsoft, who was a friend of mine before either of us worked at Microsoft, he comes from that electrical engineering/mechanical engineering -- I'm not sure which one it is... He does a ton of hardware stuff, and he's so smart...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's what he was, from electrical engineering, but he has a mechanical engineering degree.
+**Rachel White:** So his name is Andy Reitano and he makes custom hardware for the NES. He made custom mappers for additional memory, so you can do more stuff with a Nintendo, and now he started learning JavaScript and Node, and made this amazing thing called NESpectre, with another guy, named Zach Johnson. What it is it's reading the memory from the Nintendo real-time, using NodeJS and Socket.io, and it runs in the browser, so you can connect to it on your phone while people are playing games. There's things that you can modify, but every second you wait, you get another point...
+For example, if somebody's playing Contra, you wait, and they get 25 points and you hit in the browser "change random gun" and one of the players get a random gun while they're playing their own. That's something I love, especially people that don't come from programming backgrounds... They have a completely different way of thinking about stuff, and they have different situations that they can apply to things.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's what I was trying to tell him, like... "You really should consider this, because..."
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, it's really awesome.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You have a different approach than, I think -- well, on the Changelog, one of the things we ask most guests on that show is their backstory, and more often than not we ask them "What got you into programming? When did you fall in love with it? Where were you at in life?" and more often than not it's gaming.
+It's a T3i, the texas instruments T3i I believe that's what it was called, but I didn't know. Jerod did, Mitchell Hashimoto did, and several guests who came on the show have started out -- it wasn't Mitchell, it was somebody else; I'm mixing up names. Either way... Gaming was this epicenter, a breeding ground of software developers. These are people who have gone on to do some really cool stuff.
+Putting that back to you, do you find that the fun mechanism in what you do is what catches people? What is it that you feel attracts people to software development that may not have otherwise done so, or dig deeper where they may not have thought so?
+**Rachel White:** I think that the fact that I don't speak about things in overly technical terminology, and I really try...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You seem very down to earth...
+**Rachel White:** \[19:52\] Yeah, I really try and explain stuff in a way that makes sense. Like, I'm talking about Markov chains, I'm talking about stochastic stuff -- I had to look it up; I was like, "I don't know what this means." I know what Markov chains are and how they work - kind of - so I'm explaining it and I'm giving the technical definition and I'm like, "Yeah... Let's just look at a visual aid of how this works." Or really just breaking things down in a simple way, so that that is approachable.
+I also think the fact that I'm presenting things in an interesting setting is interesting to some people, though at conferences you can definitely tell... You get a lot of different people. You get the people that are sent by their company, that are already developing enterprise applications; they could not care less what I'm talking about, but I'm not there trying to speak to them; they already are involved in the community and utilizing it. I'm there for the people that are like, "What if I could do that?" and I just want people to feel like they could.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We got derailed at the mention of my buddy trying to learn, and we kind of got back into this other groove, but I wanna go deeper in the hardware, and that kind of fun stuff. So you've done some things with NodeBots, I believe, right?
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I'm involved in a lot of NodeBot stuff. I did the cat feeder... Another talk that I have is just about simple things that you can do with hardware that are impressive. People love lights, so there is one where you're controlling an LED strip that you have a flex sensor and it makes the lights light up incrementally. It's something simple, but it's super impressive.
+There's the NodeBots NYC group where people go and they meet up, and the format is like one person gets up and presents something really cool that they've made. Then there's like a little hack night, or something like that. But most of the stuff that I've done is just freely weird, and I just remembered something that you're probably going to enjoy to hear about... I actually have an RFID chip implanted in my hand.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What?
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, so I have a little RFID chip right here...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you feel it?
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, do you wanna touch it? It's right there.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, I feel it. That's crazy.
+**Rachel White:** \[laughs\] So I did a project where -- I don't know if you've played Fallout or if you remember those old terminals... The green CLI that you would get - I made a CSS version of it in a browser, that you scan an RFID tag, and if it's not me, like if it's any other RFID tag, it says "Access denied" and it flashes on the screen, and there's like a glow on the text. But then if I scan my hand, you get a bunch of 1990s hackers scrolling text with an ASCII skull that says "Access granted", and that project is the most ridiculous thing to show people, because obviously, they can't replicate it unless they go get an -- well, they could, but not with one in their body.
+But it's a hardware example of something that's super weird, but all it is is a NodeJS application with Socket.io.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Dedicated.
+**Rachel White:** ...and some fancy CSS. That's probably the weirdest thing that I've done.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, so how did you get it into your body.
+**Rachel White:** I went to a professional piercer in Brooklyn, and there's a company called Dangerous Things that sells them. It's a tiny RFID chip that's encased in surgical grade medical glass, and they have a syringe that has a really wide opening, and all they do is inject it into the web in your hand and pull the plunger, and that's it. It's in there.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Just like the movies. I've seen that in movies, and they're always like "UURRGGHHH!" Wasn't it in Bourne Identity? I believe he had something in and then he finally dug it out, or something.
+**Rachel White:** I didn't see that one. I mean, it's exactly the same thing as the one that they put in pets. They'll put it in a shoulder blade for a cat or a dog and then scan it if they get lost... I have one in my body. If you have... Is that an iPhone or an Android?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** iPhone.
+**Rachel White:** \[24:04\] Oh, iPhone closes off RFID stuff... But if somebody with an Android phone scans my hand, the text that pops up is "Follow me on Twitter" with my Twitter name.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What?!
+**Rachel White:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, my...
+**Rachel White:** It's readable and writable.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you change it?
+**Rachel White:** Yeah, I can totally change it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How?
+**Rachel White:** It's not powered... It has a wire antenna that's wrapped around the chip, and the power comes from the devices that you're doing the scanning with. When it's close, then your field communication stuff allows you to -- it's really small; I don't remember the size of text on it. I can pretty much just store a URL to a website or some text, and stuff like that. No sensitive information, or anything.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay... Very, very interesting. So this series we're doing for the conference is about the future - the future of Node. Someone with your experience, 15 years of experience developing software - the coolest job ever, in my opinion; hardware in your body - what role does Node play in the future of hardware, IoT...? Where are things going?
+**Rachel White:** Oh my gosh... Hopefully they're still going in a weird direction, for me at least; otherwise I'm gonna be out of a job. I hope that, honestly, there's more of a focus on making secure systems, especially the state of our world... I think that a lot of information needs to be more private. The big problem with hardware and IoT devices now that a lot of manufacturers are making are they just don't care; they're not assuming that their information's gonna be vulnerable on their Wi-Fi connected crock pot. But the botnet thing that just happened recently - it's a careless process that people are taking into account, and one thing that I've seen a lot in the Node community and the hardware community - people are trying to think of ways to utilize these skills that we have using the technology that we have to help make things better for people, whether that is making a Twitter bot that automates your streaming timeline to make sure that you're not being harassed, and it will automatically report that to Twitter, or it will block the person that's harassing you... Or Node-powered hardware that helps people...
+I hope that the future just encourages people to keep on being innovative and finding ways to utilize technology in ways that are more important than necessarily enterprise-based.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hopefully this background noise isn't distracting to you, because this is the loudest it's been since I've been sitting here. Most people respect the fact that we're sitting here recording, but clearly not the people that are passing by.
+**Rachel White:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Anything else on your mind? I know that you're an interesting person with fun ideas...
+**Rachel White:** I just really hope that people keep on making stuff outside of their day-to-day job that they're interested in... You know, it's easy to say, "Yeah, I only wanna program if it's gonna make me money", and I understand that's super important, but if you have the time and the capabilities, make cool stuff and weird stuff that people find interesting, that will get new programmers interested in trying something new, that will inspire a student that maybe just is writing Python or Java stuff...
+\[27:52\] I also help out at a lot of hackathons, and some of the students are trying Node applications for the first time and they're like, "I can't believe how easy this is." It's a really good feeling to be able to expose people to something that they wouldn't have picked up and tried on their own.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess maybe one closing thought I might have is what - on the hardware side, or whatever side is more interesting to you - what's happening in Node right now that you're most excited about?
+**Rachel White:** The Tessel is really, really great. I haven't gotten to play with it that much, but it has Node on it, so you don't have to run things... If I'm working with the Arduino and I wanna run Johnny-Five, I have to just use an Arduino as a middle point, I guess. The code runs on my machine, instead of running on the microcontroller, but Tessel makes it even easier for people to run Node on the micro controller and not having to be constantly tied to your computer.
+I think that we're gonna see a lot more community support for people that are building more Node-based hardware, now that they have the means to do so.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, especially with the VM-neutrality thing, it makes it a lot easier to open up the VM market, at least.
+**Rachel White:** Yeah. Also, the Johnny-Five that came out - it also has a kit that is gonna be able to have people make so much more Node-based hardware, and I'm really excited to see what people are going to make.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** When you say Tesla, do you mean the car?
+**Rachel White:** Oh, Tessel.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tessel?
+**Rachel White:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I thought you said Tesla, and I'm thinking like, "Dang! You must make some good money that you own a Tesla." I'm just kidding.
+**Rachel White:** No, I don't have a car. \[laughs\] The Tessel.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What is a Tessel.
+**Rachel White:** The Tessel is a micro controller that has -- let me look... I can't remember. I'll pull it up. This is what I said, and I can't remember anything ever, unless it's weird facts about things...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No worries.
+**Rachel White:** So, "The Tessel 2 is a robust IoT and robotics development platform that leverages all of the libraries of NodeJS to create useful devices in minutes." It has a ton of stuff already on it, which is great, too. Before, you would need to get just a regular Arduino that doesn't have Wi-Fi, and you have to add a Wi-Fi thing on it, or you have to use a particle photon that already is Wi-Fi-enabled and you'd have to get other things to be able to make stuff...
+I'm really good at speaking vaguely, but it has a ton of stuff already built on it - it has two USB ports, Wi-Fi, it has an Ethernet core if you need it, it's super fast... I've only done a little bit of work with it, but I know a lot of the people that are involved in the development community for it are working super hard... Plus, it's open source. If somebody wants to make some modules for it, they can just go ahead and do it, and submit it, and try and get it added in.
+I think that it's only gonna help especially the Johnny-Five community grow even more. Because before, we would have to rely on Chris Williams' voodoospark firmware - which was great, and that's the first thing that I tried hardware on. That's what I had to install to get hardware to work with Node, but now there's such less of a boundary for people to just get up and running, instead of having to install some stuff in order to get where they need it to be.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[31:16\] Yeah. Any closing thoughts? This is, like I said, The Future Of Node Series - we're trying our best to inform and encourage the community to try new things, to get involved.
+**Rachel White:** Yeah. If you're thinking of making something but thing that people might not like it, do it anyway, because you're never gonna know unless you try. I heard a quote from David Lynch once that was in regards to his films - when he has a vision, all of the creative process that he has that goes into it is super important to him, and it has a lot of meaning while he's making something. But once you're done and you release that into the world, your vision doesn't really matter anymore. That sounds unencouraging, but just think of when you put yourself out there the way that people will view the art that you're trying to make. Because I think that code is art - you're still making something from nothing...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Totally...
+**Rachel White:** ... and I think that that's something that a lot of people don't think about, and I just want them to try.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a good message.
+**Rachel White:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you.
+**Rachel White:** Thanks.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was nice talking to you.
+**Rachel White:** Yaay! \[laughs\]

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+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[00:31\] Welcome to our Spotlight series titled The Future Of Node, recorded at Node interactive 2016, in Austin, Texas. We produced this in partnership with the Linux Foundation, the Node.js Foundation and it's sponsored by IBM and StrongLoop.
+**Break:** \[00:43\]
+In this episode I talk with Mikeal Rogers about some of the back-story of Node over the past few years to get to where we are today. We talked about io.js, the fork of Node, what's happened in the community and the code since that timeframe, how the Node Foundation has helped to solidify the foundation on which the Node ecosystem is being built on, initiatives and focuses in the near future, and more. Take a listen.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where to begin, man? I think the last time we had a deep conversation like this was in the io.js/Node fork timeframe; we had you on the Changelog, talking about the rise of io.js. That was a good thing at the time, because it helped a lot of the community to have some power it didn't think it had, and to take it back in a way, to say "We desire a different feature for Node, and it's important to us, so we're gonna do what we need to do to make that happen."
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I think also we were able to adopt some governance practices that were relatively new. They were based on some ideas that we had tried out in the ecosystem, like liberal contribution agreements and stuff like that, but no project of that size had ever done it... So the argument that "You should adopt this brand new governance model to Joyent" when we're trying to negotiate any kind of governance model was a really big sell, and I think having some time with io.js to prove it out, to grow the contributor base, to see how it really pans out, that was a really important proving ground for that model. Then after Joyent started the Node Foundation with the Linux Foundation...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's about nine months after?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No... They announced it about a month after we announced io.js.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What year was this? 2015, right? Not this year.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, 2015. The day after Thanksgiving 2014 was when we announced io.js, and then in January 2015 there was a Node Summit conference and they announced that they were forming the foundation then. Foundations take a long time to really get off the ground and get the ball rolling...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Announcing it and launching it is two different things.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, so they announced intent to form, they had some initial members signed up, but they needed more members. Those members, in turn, wanted to put the fork to bed and bring a merger in... So I negotiated with the foundation and the io.js community to kind of bring everything in and merge the projects back together. And part of that was taking the governance model pretty much wholesale, but it's important to remember that the governance policies and practices are mutable, and they're mutable for a reason - because as we scale, we need to change things.
+\[03:48\] Even just merging into Node required us to immediately iterate on a lot of these policies. In io.js we really didn't have to worry about a lot of backwards compatibility or breaking changes and things like that. Because it's a new project, not everybody's already depending on it; you can do a lot more. So when we moved and started to merge in, a big part of that was adopting this new release plan where we would kind of balance a lot of the enterprise needs and a lot of the "don't break things" needs with this really diverse, broad community that wants to see change and new things happening. So we kind of get the best of both worlds.
+We have a really liberal policy about getting stuff into master and making some changes, then we have a really good cycle and a longer review process to get things into the LTS releases that enterprises depend on.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So this fork from back in the day, Thanksgiving 2014 - it's been a while since then, so we just asked... Thanksgiving 2016 it's been basically two years - give us the overview of what's happened in the last two years, in terms of not just the io to Node and also the Foundation, but to the community. How has the momentum changed, the technology, the community budding up around it, and even including others that weren't just developers. We talk about them on Request For Commits quite a bit, this community that's beyond just the developer, that's completely required and completely needed, and doesn't always feel invited.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I mean, that was some work that we kind of started in the io.js days. I think we had this evangelism working group, we had a website working group, and when we merged in, a lot of that stuff came with us. And a lot of those ideas came with us, especially around "If you value different types of contributions, those kinds of people will show up and do stuff."
+I think that the main thing that's happened between then and now is that it went from a proof of concept to our actual sustainability strategy. The reason that the project was able to stay up and get more stable over time is because of these policies. We're not testing them out, this isn't proving ground anymore.
+The person who runs the CTC meetings now, the meetings that are kind of about making top-level core decisions - he primarily works on tests, something that we hardly ever got contributions in before. And just starting to value it, having the same kind of technical achievement ladder for other kinds of contributions... He showed up and saw that people really valued it and it really took off in testing...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Who is this person?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's Rich Trott.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And also, we've seen a huge growth in overall contributors, but also when you look at the top five contributors, they're not the same people as they were two years ago, which is great.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So we're not depending upon the same people, we're not burning them out.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Exactly. I mean, one of them is the same, I think. A couple of them are the same. But also, the overall share of the codebase is a lot of those five contributors is going down. It's now I think below 50%. So we're getting much broader in terms of...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you measure this stuff?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I mean, GitHub is actually really good for measuring this stuff. The fact that we do everything on GitHub means that we can get a lot of these kinds of metrics out.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm just trying to think about the GitHub interface - is it pretty easy who has -- I mean, you can see easily who's contributing and how many commits they've had, but does it say percentages and stuff like that?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** GitHub has very good data when you're looking at recent activity and when you're looking at top line activity. You really need to dig into the API to get at some of these metrics... In particular, one of the things that we really like to look at is which contributors that are brand new contributors have contributed each month, so how many pull requests have we gotten from people that have never sent one before - we keep track of that, and that requires some API work.
+\[07:54\] We onboard a lot of new committers all the time, so we need to be looking at what are the last month or three months of contributions from people that don't have a commit yet, like what does that look like and who is that list, so that we can prioritize who to onboard.
+We're approaching a hundred committers in core now... It's crazy.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a lot.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's a lot of people, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How does that contrast to other platforms similar to Node? Have you done any comparisons to other -- in a language like Swift, or anything else... Even Rails, I suppose, or Phoenix and Elixir, since we're fans of Phoenix and Elixir.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, a lot of these platforms are in very different situations. A lot of them still have BDFLs, a lot of them are either entirely propped up by one company or have three companies keeping them afloat. We're really trying to measure ourselves against our own ecosystem, in a way. We're never going to have as many contributors as the Node ecosystem working on core, and we're trying to take some of the practices that we see working in our community and kind of adapt them. So we keep resetting the goal posts.
+We also look at "Are we doing better than we used to do? Are we slowing down in terms of onboarding new committers, are we still bringing in new people?" We try to measure against that more than we try to measure against other languages, just because there's so many differences between the communities.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So in a quick form, give me a recap on these last two years, so we can answer that quick and move on to a deeper topic.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We've quadrupled in size in terms of our user community. There were 1.2 million using Node around the time that we did the io.js fork, and today it's 5.7 million. It's a hundred percent year-on-year growth; it's crazy.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that Node, or is that JavaScript, or is it both?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's Node.js.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I know it's Node.js, but do you think that's because of JavaScript itself, or is it the attraction to Node?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** JavaScript itself, if you count the whole web, it's hard to find comparisons. You start to arrive at numbers that are far greater than the number of programmers.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But we've done a lot to broaden our view of what our community is. We don't think of Node as just the server-side thing. There's a lot of people doing great IoT stuff with it. There's an entire new genre of frontend frameworks like React that are built as Node.js toolchains. Those are our users, that is our user community, they're very important.
+We have growth in all of these sectors, and we continue to see new sectors pop up, like desktop. Electron comes around and all of a sudden desktop is a thing. So we try to keep ourselves open and keep our view of our users really open as well. So yeah, that's just a lot of people using Node. It also means that in a given year, 50% of the people that are using Node are new to Node that year.
+We have a lot of challenges in terms of continuing to keep things simple, keep things easy, keep a lot of educational materials out there. We really benefit from Node being something of an outgrowth of the web community, and there's a lot of values around keeping things simple, bringing in new people, teaching "non-professional programmers" how to do things.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** A lot of those are the values of the web and we've really taken those to heart.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So quadruple growth, merged, obviously... Created a foundation... Is this the second iteration of Node Interactive or is it the third? There was one in Europe, one in Austin... Is this the third one?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We've done two this year, so it's really the second year of conferences. I think next year we'll scale back again to one.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is this part of the -- obviously it's the Linux Foundation and Node.js Foundation, so this is an extension of all the efforts that came from the last time we had you on the Changelog with the rise of io.js?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. This is a Linux Foundation conference. The Node Foundation pays for it and we contract the Linux Foundation to run it, essentially. But this entire thing is new, for sure.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[12:06\] It's a great conference. Great location, a lot of diversity efforts... I like the stickers that were out there, the college stickers, the offering of childcare... It's very inviting, inclusive, respectful... I don't know what better adjective to use.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, Node.js is a pretty nice community. It's definitely a more diverse community than others, especially certain sectors. You look at the Nodebots community, for instance, and it's really great and diverse. So we benefit from a lot of community support for that kind of stuff, but also now we benefit from some institutional support. There are some Linux Foundation-wide efforts... I don't think we would have been able to do the childcare component if the Linux Foundation hadn't already built up a service doing that, knowing how to run it, how to get all that going.
+That community conference - that's a lot of additional infrastructure to take on that we haven't necessarily built up a competency for yet. So that's been really great to see here, as well. Obviously, I started NodeConf, I went to a lot of community conferences over the years...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You have the shirt on too, by the way. Nice shirt. I dig it.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... Well, when you print them, they're essentially free, so...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. You probably have a closet full of them, so you're like, "Which one will I wear today?"
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Exactly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A black one. \[laughter\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, but one thing that we get here that you don't see at community conferences are the kinds of Node users that you don't see on Twitter, you don't see on GitHub... They are really behind the desk all day, writing Node. They are users, they are a community, we need to understand them in order to empathize with them and get what they need, but they're very hard to reach. Unless you get a hold of their company and sell them a block of 20, 30 tickets that they hand out to all their developers, they're just not gonna be at the conference.
+So it's been great to get, at this event, a big mix of the foundation bringing a lot of the core groups together, the core community, a lot of outreach from me and Tracy to get a lot of really big community people here, but also a lot of Node users that we just don't get a lot of access to that we can hear from. That's been great.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tracy Hinds, right?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, Tracy Hinds.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We like to say last names, so that it's not inside our baseball.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, she's fantastic.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** She wrote I believe the recent VM neutrality post on Medium? Am I correct on that?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Probably not.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I thought she wrote that...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That was probably \[unintelligible 00:14:38.11\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm thinking of the diversity effort... That was...?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that was Tracy.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it's an interesting perspective, too. I mean, that's gotta be a big change, a big shift from the way things were for Node before, to fork io... It wasn't just a code problem; it wasn't a release problem, it was also a community problem. That stems to inclusivity and diversity.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I think one of the big shifts too though, and with the work that Tracy is doing... We have an institution now and we can provide certain kinds of institutional support and get access to those kinds of resources that we couldn't before. Figuring out what the community needs on the one hand, and then bringing to bear the actual foundation resources is more difficult than you would think, because there are a lot of constraints in what you can do as a foundation, there are constraints in the budget, and people and all that kind of stuff.
+Tracy works for the foundation now, she's a community manager. She's amazing. Having her come in and being able to know what we can do as a foundation and then work with the community to figure out what we can do for them has been really great. We're not just guessing anymore.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[15:55\] Right. The post I was referring to was titled "Working towards a safer, inclusive event", talking about this even here in particular, talking about the various things you've done... Again, I love those stickers that you did. For the listeners, there's a red, green, blue -- there's probably one more color in there... Yeah, four colors; I'm not an idiot, except for when I'm on the mic... And they all kind of label how open you are to mixed streams, I suppose. I'm probably wording it poorly, but...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, and also don't photograph...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, photograph... It's sort of like giving people a soft way, an unspoken way of how to approach them, right? So that you're just being respectful without even having to say a word. Who's idea was that?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I mean... In communities like this you get a lot of people with social anxiety, or especially people that are going through a gender transition... There's certain things that you just don't want to have to say to every fuckin' person that comes up to you.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** If you're just not generally comfortable with that, please don't come up to me all the time if you don't know me, and things like that. So that's really good. That's something that was definitely pioneered in the community. I think that some of the community conferences have done different colored lanyards and stuff like that for "Don't photograph me" and stuff like that.
+Tracy, in general, has been a pioneer in diversity/inclusivity work in community conferences. She's been involved in EmpireNode and EmpireJS and CascadiaJS. She's been doing this work for the past four or five years, and now to have her on board at the foundation, she can really inform the Linux Foundation that's running the event on all these relatively small things that really matter.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's the small things, it's the details.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. These stickers are not that difficult to get, you just need to know about it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Organize it, and even think about it. That's that detail that you don't think about, unless it's top of mind to care. Unless you're the Linux Foundation, without the resources... If you're just an individual person that says, "I really care about the community and I wanna produce a conference", you don't have the years of experience that you mentioned Tracy has, so you haven't been able to blood your knuckles, so to speak, so sometimes you make mistakes... And they're not intentional, it's just -- you've thought the details of this conference to do to that level, to make people feel invited...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, honestly... You have to remember how recent a lot of these practices are. The first NodeConf that I ran was in 2010, alongside JSConf. Chris Williams helped me out and we ran them together. That JSConf was the first conference that I'd ever seen that had a code of conduct. He had to draft one from scratch, which is now the basis of the Conf Code of Conduct that everyone uses. But that was... It's only 2016, that was 2010. So getting from there to actually having preferences about how to approach people is a really long journey.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about some things that you've experienced here at the conference so far. You gave the keynote, opening things up... We've got things like the VM neutrality happening, we've got a lot of interesting new announcements, so to speak. What are some of your favorites?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** The VM neutrality for me is really, really cool, for a bunch of reasons. It's gonna be great for users... Even if you've never swapped out a VM, it's gonna be great for users. One, it's gonna really increase the competition between VM developers. I've gotten to know a lot more VM developers over the last few years, and they're surprisingly driven by vanity benchmarks.
+\[19:52\] There's not a lot of people that can do VM development, right? It's a relatively small pool to do that kind of work, and they're in really high demand. So all these different places that hire these developers -- what was the term that Brandon used? "Birds in gilded cages", or something? They're given a lot of freedom to do whatever they want...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...within a box.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, exactly. So you really have to motivate the individuals, right? It's not just market needs and all this kind of business concerns; it really does come down to some of the individuals, and now that we're gonna be able to have benchmarks that show particular Node.js workloads on different VMs, you're gonna see better performance in every VM further down the road.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. I talked to Arunesh and Gaurav, I believe is how you pronounce it...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Gaurav, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gaurav, yeah... I messed it up two times when I talked to him too, so... It's my thing, people are used to it; I mess people's names up, and I have a long last name, so I can unapologetically mess people's names up, because I get mine messed up...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I get called Mikeel four times a day, so... \[laughter\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But I was talking to him about ChakraCore and VM neutrality, and they're very excited about it. They're excited about open sourcing ChakraCore and the fun stuff that's happening there, and just the involvement inside of Microsoft. With ChakraCore, it was kind of funny the way that they described this story. I was asking them about Chakra and ChakraCore and how they went about open sourcing it or even making ChakraCore, and they were like, "Well, we were really motivated internally first, then we realized that we were already trying to extract Core to use it on our own, to use it on Azure and elsewhere, so why not just open source it?"
+Rewinding back a little bit, you said, "Other VM developers" - give us an idea of what VM developers are out there; what other VM developers are out there that matter?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I mean, V8... There's a whole team of people doing V8 stuff. Actually, now there's a couple. Inside of Google, Chrome uses V8, so there's a whole team inside of Chrome, but there's also now a few people in the GCP (Google Cloud Platform) that work on V8 specifically for Node for the cloud. So you're starting to see a lot more of our concerns make it into Core. And this VM neutrality is actually a part of that. Breaking on every major release for them was really frustrating, because it means that if they want something in for GCP, they've gotta get into V8, they've gotta wait for 3-6 months for it to land in Node, and then they have to wait another six months to get into an LTS release, and that's if they time it right.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So if we were able to take new V8 releases inside of a major, they could cut that down to 3-6 weeks. So now they're really feeling that, whereas before, the V8 team that's on Chrome binds it to Chrome. They can break the native API whenever they want and they just have to fix the binding layer in Chrome to make it work again. So it's great to see... You know, everybody has the same problems, so we're all working together to solve it.
+That's another great thing that comes for all of our users. You're gonna be able to get new versions of the VM inside of major releases, you're gonna be able to upgrade the major releases without breaking all of your native add-ons, which happens now... These are all amazing, awesome things for our users, even if they never swap out of VM.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So this wasn't possible before? What are the actual efforts behind making this possible?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Man, there's a lot... So there's an effort to create a stable API inside of Node...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nappy... Is that right? Node API?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... Basically, that's what Node binds to, and if you have a VM, you can expose that API and we will bind to it. That allows native add-on developers to just bind to that API and work with every VM and new versions of VMs, without having to go through a whole recompile because the API changed, or whatever.
+\[24:00\] This is something that I don't think would have been possible without the Node Foundation. We got all these different stakeholders to the table and committed to supporting that API long-term. If we still had a relationship with V8 where they were working on a VM and threw it over a wall and then we bound to it, we would never be able to do something like a neutral API, because how can we guarantee that they're gonna support it long-term? Even if we're writing the binding layer, how do we know that there aren't gonna be low-level changes in V8 that are just completely incompatible with this?
+Being able to bring all these different people to the table to come up with this API that we can all commit to supporting long-term has been really valuable.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is all building upon the governance model that wasn't there the last time we talked on the Changelog, back to that episode, The Rise of io.js... I mean, I see a lot of interesting effort happening here that is just unquantifiable. You can rewind it and play it back a little bit, but there's just so much that has compounded... You mentioned the Node.js Foundation, without that not being able to bring people together... At that day, when it was stewarded (I think that was the word being used by Joyent)... Why were they the steward? Remind me about that.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No historical purpose... So Ryan Dahl built Node.js in his own time...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And was employed by them.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, he wasn't employed by them yet. He built it, he...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's what I mean... He built it and then was employed by them.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** He debuted at JSConf EU and then they hired him. They also acquired the trademark. He was working there for a while... Also, during this time when Joyent was stewarding it, they were also putting in a lot of effort into marketing it, particularly to cloud use cases and to enterprises, right? And it's very new at the time, so having that kind of support is really invaluable. When you're on the beginning of your growth curve, having that extra institutional support is really valuable.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Let's pause it for a second... So at that point, in terms of governance models, it was a BDFL, right?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So it's transitioned from that... Which is now sort of frowned upon, from what I understand. I mean, you have opinions, share as much as you like, but the BDFL model has its pros and cons.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think at the time there wasn't a lot of negativity about the BDFL model yet. By the time that we did the fork there was, but at the time there really wasn't.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it needed more governance, that's the point I'm trying to drive home here.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I would argue that the entire time that Ryan ran it, it really didn't. By the time that Isaac took it over, you could see it growing beyond what Joyent was really focused on. I mean, they're a company, they're a business, they need the funds; they were focused on cloud services. By the time that Isaac took it over, it was starting to become evident that frontend was really growing, IoT was growing... There were a lot of other things that were happening, and also the community was just expanding at a much greater rate than any single company can invest in a project.
+I mean, when you're growing a hundred percent a year, you can't double the engineering on that project every year; that's just not doable. I think when you look at something like the Go project inside of Google, they probably have added a lot of resource to that project as it's grown in terms of usage...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's a lot of disconnect too, speaking of Go, between the community and the core team.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and still they have that problem, right? But they're definitely putting a ton of resources into it. I don't think that any company could have doubled every year their investment in Node.js at the time. So eventually, Isaac also left the project and handed it over to another person at Joyent... And this was around the time that we could see how the community really wants to be involved in the project and really can't under the current governance model; they can't really own it, there's a lot of older development practices that they were not able to change, and we're seeing in our own community a lot of amazing, new governance models driving things.
+\[28:04\] Rod blew out his voice so he couldn't join us today, but Rod Vagg, who's now elected to the TSC chair, he didn't write any core code before io.js, but he had the chops to do it; there wasn't that technical barrier. He wrote NAN, which is the native binding layer that everybody uses; it's all C++ code, it's really deep in the guts of Node and into V8 - he wrote that. He definitely had the chops to work on it, but he didn't feel enough ownership or agency over it.
+Rod had pioneered a lot of governance models around liberal contribution agreements in the level down community and even around then... So he just didn't get involved. And when io.js happened and it had its open governance, he immediately got involved. Now he is elected to be the leader of the project. These are the people that we just weren't able to attract or retain under that kind of closed governance model that we had before, and now we can. We went to from five to almost 100 committers now.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So we got to this subject here because we were talking about VM neutrality and how that wouldn't have been possible had that not been for the Node Foundation being able to bring together the right kind of team, the right kind of VM developers to care enough, bring the right kind of people to the table and say "Let's support NAPI" (I think it's called NAPI... At least that's what Arunesh said; we'll link that up in the show notes). But just having a stable API you can bind to and supporting that... So it's part of this long-term vision of a better Node community, better governance of the Node community.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What else has got you excited? So VM neutrality is a big deal, but what else...? How does that play out into other things?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You'd mentioned IoT, you'd mentioned Node in other places that isn't just the web...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, VM neutrality also really helps us with IoT as well. There's work that isn't public that various people are doing on more JavaScript VMs, essentially, and even JavaScript VMs that are entirely on device, and stuff like that. And without a stable native layer for them to expose and for everybody to bind to, it's a really tough sell for them to just integrate that in core, emulate the entire V8 C++ API. So there's a bunch of stuff there that unfortunately I can't really get into the details of, that is gonna be great for IoT.
+I also think that if you're currently a Nodebots or IoT developer, one of the biggest headaches that you have is that you're dependent on native APIs; you're dependent on serial port, like Chris Williams, actually, from JSConf. But that's sort of the base underlying library that everybody has to bind to, and every major release of Node it breaks; then everybody lags behind, and there's this huge... I mean, the testing matrix for Node serial is crazy; it's worse than Node Core, because it's every random IoT device, so it takes a long time for that to get updated. That will get fixed, which is great.
+In terms of other things to get excited about... Oh wow, let me back up a little bit and try to take my head out of just thinking about really specific -- oh, I'm excited about the security work that we're doing. Security has become more and more top of mind in end developers and enterprises and everywhere. Security is something that everybody has always said is important, but it's always the last thing that people think about, and that is really changing. We're starting to view our applications not as these things that we throw up and hope that people don't try to break into, to now when we put services live, we're entering a hostile environment. We need to really think about this.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[32:02\] Right. Do you have any examples?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Examples of things that have happened recently...?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Change of focus on security.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So the giant outage that we had a couple months ago, that was basically driven by a botnet of compromised IoT devices... That was a big one. Bruce Schneider has a great quote about this, he's like "Big vendors have done a pretty good job of security for a long time now." So when you're relying on that kind of infrastructural software and big vendors dominated most of the software that was out there that could be compromised, you are in a much better situation than you are in the current IoT landscape, because while there are a couple big vendors putting out chips and stuff like that, the products are all coming out from small companies that add a ton of code to the device that is just not secure.
+These devices are incredibly weak in terms of security, get compromised really quickly, and now people are turning them into botnets that basically take down the internet. That's really problematic. We need to start thinking about security at every layer; it's not just an operating system problem, it's not just a packaging system problem, it's not just a developer problem, it's everybody's problem.
+We've seen a ton of announcements... The new Node Source work that they've done is mostly around security. I think three of the five features that they released in their 2.0 release this weekend, are all security focused.
+We've worked with the Node Security Project, which was lead by Lift Security (a small consultancy), but they were doing a lot of ecosystem security work. They've done a really good job; we've been talking with them for a while. We have a really sophisticated, really good disclosure and security policy for Node Core, but we really wanna take responsibility for the Node ecosystem in terms of the security. Lift is bringing that Node Security Project into the Node Foundation and we're creating a new working group about these security vulnerabilities and go through the responsible disclosure and we'll have a lot of the same practices that we have around Core there as well.
+But just taking more responsibility for the Node ecosystem - which is what everybody relies on; it's not just on Core - is really important for us, through the lens of security. I think we tend to try to not involve ourselves in the ecosystem when it means picking a winner. We really want a diverse ecosystem, we want different implementations to flourish and to compete with each other and to have some kind of market decide who wins. So the foundation tries to stay out of the ecosystem from that point of view, but we really do wanna support the entire ecosystem, support the growth of the entire ecosystem, the stability and security of the entire ecosystem. I'm really excited about bringing in the Node Security Project into the foundation.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you've got VM neutrality, security... What else?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think we're also gonna save the world, I don't know... \[laughter\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you think Node will continue to grow at a high percent rate each year?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We don't have any signs of it slowing down. In fact, it's gotten a little quicker, but we're cautious about making statements that it's growing quicker than it was, because...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right... Is it healthy growth? And how do you measure that?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that we can measure the health of the projects and repositories that are inside of the Node Foundation. Those are very healthy, and growth there is really healthy. I think it's very hard to measure if growth is healthy or not in the ecosystem. I mean, how do you define the quality of a package that went up, right? And is it really that big a problem with a bunch of low-quality packages that nobody depends on? I mean, that's like the tree in the forest that nobody hears, right?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So I'm not too worried about that kind of stuff. One of the reasons that we hired Tracy this year is that the focus on the Node Foundation needs to be on education; when half of your users every year are new, because you're doubling in size every year, you really need to worry about what the onboarding and education looks like for the platform.
+\[36:04\] We've now entered a point in enterprise adoption where it's not a new team that gets spun up -- this still happens, but there's a team that gets spun up, they adopt Node.js, they have a lot of success, they're on microservices, they're doing all this kind of new technology stuff, they're trying to drive digital transformation inside of an organization...
+We're now getting to the point where at a very high level - CIO/CTO level - they decide to make a decision to invest in Node, which means hiring sometimes hundreds of Node developers, or retraining hundreds of Node developers - that means people that used to write Java and .NET. When those kinds of developers come to Node and look for education resources, the kinds of resources that they're used to, that they used to learn the last platform sometimes aren't there.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So is this documentation, is this video tutorials, is this [Pluralsight](https://www.pluralsight.com/) stuff, independence?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We have all that... We have documentation. We couldn't have more of an ecosystem around that kind of an education, which is why we continue to grow so quickly, but formal certification programs, formal training programs, that kind of stuff...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So is this a Node Foundation thing?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** The Linux Foundation administers the Linux Certified Admin program, and quite a few other programs for certification, and we're working with them to build out a baseline Node.js certification program, so that when developers who reach for a certification when they wanna prove that they learned something new inside of their organization, they actually have that tool available.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's not all that we're doing in terms of education. When you look at Node School, which is an amazing community that I was really involved in when we were starting out - it's grown into hundreds of local trainings that are run by community volunteers; all of the materials are being created online... It's amazing, but it's now having the same kind of scale problems that we had in Node.js, that we've had in every project that gets so big with that kind of community and doesn't have any structure around it.
+We're starting to dedicate some of my time, some of Tracy's time to work with the Node School community and some of these other educational communities that have just grown so big that they're becoming kind of unwieldy, and are having some scaling problems that we can work with them to resolve -- and may even need some institutional support from us... So we can actually provide that.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about sustainability, to a degree. One question I have is...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We have a whole podcast to talk about that...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I know we do.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Request For Commits plug.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, definitely. Rfc.Fm - if you don't listen, it's a shame. The latest episode, by the way... Phenomenal. I'm like, "Gosh, man... That was such a good show."
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But on sustainability, one thing I was thinking about is for those developers -- actually I had a conversation just before you sat down with Athan Reines, and he was talking about how math has broken in V8; he was talking about how he's bringing this library called Standard Lib, and data science type stuff to JavaScript. He basically said, in his own terms, that if you went into a job interview for data science and you tell them you do it in JavaScript, they look at you and ask you "Why?" - why you're not using Julia, or R, or Python, or something like that.
+Right now he is living on his own savings, focused on this open source project... For those out there who have ideas, what kind of support can they look for from Node Foundation? Is that important? Is that something you ever plan to do? Not so much to sustain, but to help the community find a sustainable way to bring new research projects like that, experimental projects that are pushing the boundaries, innovating.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. So I've spent some surprising amount of time looking at this space, because it's one of the few areas that we haven't seen a huge amount of growth in.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[40:03\] Haven't seen what?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** A huge of amount of growth in, the kind of growth that we see in other places. I've spent a lot of time actually figuring out what we could do here and what our current barriers are. One barrier which I think is a problem and it needs to get resolved, but it's not the number one problem, but it is a problem - JavaScript standards have not given us some of the tools that we need at the language level to do some of this.
+This is kind of hilarious - now that Brandon has a company that's doing Crypto in the browser, he is shifting some of his focus... Because he does a bunch of standards work as well, and there are some new 64-bit stuff and some new math stuff coming out that Brandon is pushing forward into TC39; also, the Node Foundation in partnership with the JS Foundation - the JS Foundation is a member of TC39, the JavaScript standards body, they've started to send me to those meetings.
+There's one right now that obviously I couldn't be at, but I went to the last one that they did and resolved a lot of the module stuff, a lot of the concerns that we've had about how do we integrate these module systems; we were able to work that out. And I'll continue to go, to start to try to resolve some of those problems.
+Another thing we have to think of is should we try to reach a system like R and Python have, or should we try to go about this in the way that has brought us a lot of other successes? If you look at the early days of Node, we weren't able to bind to a lot of low-level C libraries, and because we weren't able to do that, we ended up building a lot of our own competencies in those areas, and building out things that would have been a native layer, like just binding the C, for something like Redis where we got a native Node.js as a client, that's actually in a lot of workloads faster than the C library. So there's a lot of value there.
+Mikola Lysenko, who's here, he was a math PhD and got really involved in the Node.js community and started building different algorithms as just single modules. So you have this modular way of looking at things, which is not the way that we've done math and science computing before. There are these giant libraries in C or Fortran a lot of the time, that are huge and really unwieldy, and a lot of it is entirely unmaintained, but it's the only place to get this particular algorithm.
+So do we wanna enable a broader ecosystem of people building that kind of stuff out? I think we currently have the most compelling ecosystem for 3D computing, I think, all built for WebGL, obviously... But Mikola has a project called Regl, which is a phenomenal suite of toolchains for doing modularized 3D programming. He's written a ton of different modules for all this stuff. A lot of it is built on a data structure called ndarray, which is an N-dimensional array, which is incredibly fast; it has gone through four years of optimizations now. There's a Mincecraft in the browser called voxel.js that you can look at that's built on a lot of this stuff. It's actually built on earlier iterations of this stuff. So there's a lot of good movement there.
+I don't think that we're going to figure out a way to have a better Fortran binding layer, or cross-compile these Fortran libraries. R is mostly Fortran code. It's a layer of bindings on top of a lot of very old Fortran code that SciPy also binds to and their libraries bind to. We're not gonna get to a point where that is compelling. I think we're gonna have a slower road to it, but we're eventually gonna get to a better place where we have a more modular ecosystem of independent algorithms that can be plugged together really easily. I'm excited for the future of what this looks like, but it is gonna be a long road.
+\[43:58\] I think lastly SciPy - R as well, but SciPy, I really look at... They did a ton of outreach and community building with the academic community to get them onto SciPy. Over the years, I've met a few of the people that have really pioneered that work. It's hard community work, you're working with a lot of older institutions, you've gotta have a real passion for it. But I would love to see us as an institution take on some of that. It's one of the things that me and Tracy wanna try to get to at some point - building much deeper inroads with the academic community and building that up.
+Python is not uniquely good at scientific computing; I mean, not a knock against Python, it's just not better than any other particular language for that. They don't have great bindings to all these old Fortran libraries, it's relatively slow... They've just built a great community and a great support system for it. They've done a phenomenal job. They have great documentation, they have a lot of people that have written great blog posts about it, there's a ton of knowledge about it, and there are just people out there doing the hard work, getting adoption. I think that's the thing that we can strive for and we can actually make an impact with at an institutional level in the Node Foundation.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How does that actually play out though, at an institutional level? How do you play out that support? Is it similar to the Apache Foundation where they kind of adopt projects and they incubate them to a degree and then take them on full-term once they matured to a degree? Is that some sort of plan? How do you nurture those developers who are living on their own savings or making sacrifices? I know that's open source at large, so you're preaching to the choir when it comes to the sacrifice we all make to move it forward, but I'm just curious what your general thoughts are for a future outlook on that?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I don't think that we have a lot to offer at the project level, mainly because there are actually a couple non-profits now that have spun up to help back a lot of this work; SciPy isn't one of them. Those institutions are set up to take in grant funding as well, because a lot of the ways that those libraries get funded is through grant funding. We're just not an institution that's set up to do grant funding. We could, but it would be like building an entire other competence. But what we can do is we can reach out as the official place for this stuff. We can connect people to communities that are of value...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So if someone's listening to this, that's like...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** If you're at a university, If you're at an academic community, definitely reach out to me and Tracy. I'm @mikeal on Twitter. Also, the foundation bylaws... I think almost all of the Linux foundations that have been set up under the LF have an allotment for a membership tier that can be for non-profits and for academic institutions. We actually have the ability to bring in universities and institutions like that, bring them into a community where not only are we connecting them with the people in the community that are doing good education work (so they can access the materials and stuff like that), we also connect them with each other, and they can learn from each other.
+I think a big part of this is that you have really passionate people at different academic institutions that love Node.js, that love the web, that push for these technologies. What we don't have really is a venue for them to talk with each other about what's working and what's not. I think that they probably have more to learn from each other than we can teach them, so... I really want us to work on some of that, as well.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So we're two years past the biggest shift in the Node community, which was the fork of io, merger back into Node, Node Foundation, several iterations of this conference, year-over-year growth at a hundred percent rate, so a growing community... You've touched on educational pieces, you've touched on ways you can support module developers or people like Athan that are experimental, so to speak... We talked about diversity... What else can we talk about?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[48:05\] That's a lot of hot points, isn't it?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's a lot of highlights, I think, and it's pretty close, but just in case there was something that we couldn't leave this conversation without you talking about...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** One thing, if we're looking at the future of Node -- I mean, if Rod were here, he could talk a lot more to the technical side of things, but I'm definitely more focused on the institutional level work that we've been doing. We've done a lot to re-message and promote Node. By that, I mean a lot of the stuff about the new full stack, a lot of the broadness of Node, and a lot of the strength of Node being in how you can have this unified toolset across these different platforms and areas.
+We've really built that out since the foundation started. Because we've taken this broader message and we've really focused on the connections, we haven't been as aggressive in framing how good Node is at a few particular things... Serverless is obviously a huge growth area for us. If we did nothing, it would probably still grow immensely. I'm incredibly bullish on how good Node.js is for serverless. We keep getting even better at resource utilization in terms of memory and CPU, so you can do more io in less resources in Node.js than really any other platform. Our startup time continues to be a source of pride for us, something that we continue to work on and try to whittle down. These are really important in serverless environments.
+I think that in the future you're gonna see us talk about these verticals a little bit more and be a little bit more assertive about how good we think that we are in those particular cases.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, Mikeal, that's all I've got, man.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, great.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's been great. The future of Node is bright... I'm glad to have you in the position you're in; I know it's been a long journey getting here, but fun times ahead. Great community, great work.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Thanks!

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+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:05\] In this episode I talked with James Snell from IBM, the Technical Lead for Node. James is also a member of Node's Technical Steering Committee, as well as the Core Technical Committee. He is currently working on Node's implementation of HTTP/2. I talked with James about the state of HTTP/2, what this new spec has to offer, but more importantly, what the Node community can expect from this new protocol.
+\* \* \*
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So what's the state of HTTP/2 in Node? I know you're working on it now, you've recently tweeted about a prototype server...
+**James Snell:** The current state is just trying to figure out how it would work in Node. There's a lot of new things within HTTP/2, it's a brand new protocol, even though it's got the HTTP semantics, request/response, headers and that kind of thing, on the wire it's very different, so it requires a completely new implementation. We're teasing the edges of what that implementation would need to look like, how it would work, what the issues are, what impact the additional state management is gonna have on Node... We're trying to figure out what that impact is going to be, and then if we were gonna put it in Core, if it's something that was gonna land there, what would that look like in terms of APIs and in terms of the performance profile and that kind of thing. That's where we're at.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We had a discussion earlier with Thomas Watson and Sam Roberts from IBM... Sam was really passionate about talking about keeping Node small, and Thomas actually coined - I don't know if it's him or not - the term SmallCore. One of the discussions we had in that conversation was what should or should not be in NodeCore. As you're developing HTTP/2, you've gotta be thinking about HTTP/1 being there, whether it should stay there, if you did deprecate it how you would do that, and that argument between them, because they didn't really come to a conclusion of what should happen. Do you think HTTP/2 should be in NodeCore? Should it be a module?
+**James Snell:** Personally, I think it should be in Core. The reason for that - Node has always been a platform for web development; there's always been that web server.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true.
+**James Snell:** It's a primary use case, even though there's so many different places Node is being used, and in different use cases, a lot of it always goes back to having Node. If you look, there is no standard library in Node, but there's HTTP, there's URL parsing, there's support for these fundamental web protocol that are built in, and that's the only thing that's built in.
+Now, if HTTP/1 wasn't already there, I wouldn't be thinking that we should add HTTP/2.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You'd think module at that point.
+**James Snell:** \[03:44\] Right. There are other protocols that are becoming increasingly more important to the web - WebSockets, for instance. We don't have WebSocket support in there, and we shouldn't have it, because it's not already there. Quick is another one - it's a protocol that's starting to gain a lot of traction relative to TCP/IP. It's got a long way to go, but it's a very good protocol. I wouldn't support any effort to actually get it in the core unless it became much more fundamental to the web architecture.
+With HTTP/2, the decision basically just comes to -- we already have HTTP/1; we know HTTP/2 is gonna continue to grow in relevance, we have a lot of people asking for it... It just makes a lot of sense to have it in Core and have it available.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We also talked about - and maybe you can even end this argument, too - how you define what should and shouldn't be in Core, and you it sounded like you said - maybe I'll answer this for you, and you can agree or disagree - around web fundamentals. If it's fundamental to doing web stuff, it makes sense to put in Core, but what do you think about keeping the Core small, or how to define what should or shouldn't be in NodeCore?
+**James Snell:** If it's not already there, then it shouldn't be added. Another example of this was URL parsing. We have URL parse, but it's fundamentally broken in a number of important ways. It's there, it fundamentally works, but there is quite a few use cases where URL parse just doesn't function correctly, so we added a new Web WG URL parser. It's the same parsing API that you use in the browser for a new URL, and that kind of thing. So now we have two URL parsers in Core, and there was a big debate whether that should just go out as a separate module, or does it belong in Core...? The question's still not completely settled. The only reason that would be added to Core is because URL parsing is already in Core, and I think that is the key distinction.
+We're not adding something that's brand new, that doesn't already exist as part of the platform; we're just evolving what's already there. That's where I think we draw the line.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** For those who may not be as familiar as you might be with NodeCore, what exactly makes up NodeCore to make you say "Don't add more to it, just keep things in modules"?
+**James Snell:** The basic protocol supports DNS, UDP, TCP, TLS, HTTP - these fundamentals of basic web application programming. That is what Core is to me. Now, there are things that are in support of that. Obviously, we have to have a file System.io, we have to have a Venting System, buffer for just basic data management. I view those as being more utility capabilities in support of the web platform capabilities that are there. To me, that is a large part of what Node is, and if you look at all the different use cases where Node is being used, those are still the fundamental things that are being used the most.
+Even if you look at Electron, there's basically web applications that are bundled into a native app. You cannot get away from those fundamental pieces of that basic protocol support, and that to me is what defines Node.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's almost what you said - I said you said, but you said it - web fundamentals.
+**James Snell:** Web fundamentals, right.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** If it's around that, it belongs in Core. Otherwise...
+**James Snell:** Otherwise push that to the ecosystem.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...module.
+**James Snell:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you're working on HTTP/2... What's interesting about HTTP/2 for the Node community?
+**James Snell:** That it's actually a very different protocol than HTTP/1. It has the same name, but that 2 is really important. The fact that it uses a binary framing instead of a text framing, and just line delimitation... Stateful Header Compression adds an interesting dimension of -- there is a whole lot more state management that has to occur over long-lived sockets, that just doesn't exist currently in Node when you're dealing with HTTP/1.
+\[08:08\] With the Header Compression and the multiplexing stuff at the protocol levels you can get much more efficient use of your connections. When we start getting into the real-world benchmarks of real applications, rather than the peak load type of benchmarks I've been doing currently, I think we'll see much more efficient use of Node and of the connection there. But it does require a different way of thinking about your web applications and your web APIs, because you're not just pipelining individual requests one at a time.
+The protocol provides no limit to the number of in-flight requests and responses you can have simultaneously over a single connection. Then you add things like push streams on top of that - it adds a significant new thing that you just have to consider of how you're building your applications and what the interactions are going to be in terms of performance, concurrency and all these things that you just don't currently have to deal with.
+I think there's going to be a lot of coming to terms with the protocol and getting experience with the protocol, and kind of figuring out what those best practices are, because it's still a very young protocol and there's not a lot of industry best practice to draw from. It's just kind of "Let's get it out there and get it in the hands of people to use, and see how it evolves from there."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I talked to Mikeal Rogers earlier about kind of the "state of the union", so to speak, for Node.js and he was coming at it from a direction and governance side and less of a code side. But one thing he said was a really important factor in this next year - security. How does the work you're doing at HTTP/2 support the overall mission of being more secure?
+**James Snell:** There's two things there. With HTTP/1 in Core right now, a number of design decisions were made early on to favor performance over spec compliance. It turns out that there are a number of compliance things in the spec that says "Don't allow white space in headers", right? And there's very good reasons for that, because you get into request smuggling and response splitting, and there's a lot of real specific security issues that come if you allow invalid characters into an HTTP/1 request. Node was like, "We want things to go fast, so we're not gonna check this, we're not gonna check that", and it was a very deliberate decision not to fully support that HTTP/1 spec. And what we found is that that caused a number of security issues that we have been dealing with over the past year or two years.
+With HTTP/2, we're gonna be taking an approach where we're gonna be very spec-compliant. We're not favoring performance over that. We're not sacrificing one over the other. It is going to be absolutely compliant to the specification, without taking those performance shortcuts. And that is something that I am emphasizing in my own development as I'm going through this, that making sure that we're hitting all of those "You must do this" or "You must not do this" that are found in that specification. By adhering to the spec as closely as we possibly can, we mitigate a lot of those potential security issues.
+\[11:47\] The other important thing is that even though HTTP/2 does not require TLS - per the spec you can do plain text if you want - the browser implementation's the primary client of HTTP/2 right now... Chrome, Firefox, Safari and some of the others, they require that they will only talk to HTTP/2 server over TLS. It's just mandated. They won't even connect to a plaintext server, so automatically out of the gate you're using secured connections, and that alone is going to be a significant improvement to security.
+The one limiting factor there is Node hasn't really had a great reputation as a TLS terminator. A lot of people, just as the best practice, put a proxy in front of it, and then they'll reverse proxy back over a plaintext connection back to Node just to ensure the performance. A lot of that has to do with the way the crypto works with the event loop and OpenSSL and that kind of thing. So I think a lot of work is gonna need to go into trying to improve that if we want to improve the performance of Node as a TLS endpoint and improve on that story.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What gets you the most excited about HTTP/2 being available? I know you're working on things like -- we've talked about the state of things, but what's the most exciting to you that's gonna change things for...?
+**James Snell:** Just getting it into the hands of developers and seeing what they do with it. It is a very young protocol, it is brand new and I have my issues with it. I was actually involved with the working group for a while that was actually creating it, and I was one of the co-editors on the draft. It was early on, I had some interest in where it could go... Then I got out of it for a little while; I had some issues with how it's designed, and I'm not completely happy with the protocol by any stretch, I do have my issues with it. But I wanna see what developers do with it.
+I love seeing all the different ways that people are using Node today in ways we didn't even imagine that they could or would. And I wanna see that also with the protocol, just the experimentation and all the different new types of applications that could be developed, or all the different ways that it could be innovated on and built on.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Any ideas, any pontification you could do on what could be built?
+**James Snell:** There are all kinds of opportunities for more interesting RESTful APIs... Push streams are something really interesting, and so far they've only been looked at as a way of pre-populating a request cache, right? "I'm gonna push it out so you don't have to do it." But I think with REST APIs push streams offer some really interesting opportunities for new kinds of APIs that are writing event notifications, or the server is more proactively pushing data to the client.
+One person I was talking and one of the ways that they were prototyping stuff and using HTTP/2 is they would create a tunnel over an HTTP/2 connection where they would open a connection with a client, but then once the connection was established it would switch roles and allow the server to act as the client, and the client was acting as the server. They were doing this as a way of doing testing over their network environment.
+You can't do that with HTTP/1, but because of the multiplexing and the communication model that exists in HTTP/2, that kind of stuff is allowed, it's something you can do. HTTP/2 is gonna enable new extensibility models, new possibilities for new kinds of protocols that kind of co-exist with the HTTP/2 semantics. And we already see some of that work already happening within the working group; there are proposals for other kinds of protocols that are layered into the mix. And you kind of wonder, "Well, who would do that kind of thing?" Well, look at WebSockets, right? Look how WebSockets emerged in its relationship with HTTP/1 and the difficulties that existed trying to get those two things to work together. With this, the framing model is going to allow you to more naturally experiment with those kinds of new protocols without the pain that we had with trying to introduce WebSockets.
+\[16:26\] There's a lot of new types of innovations I think that could come out of it, but we need to build a collective experience working with it in order to be able to tease those things out.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You mentioned some things you're not happy with with the HTTP/2 protocol, and I couldn't let you not tell me what those are. \[laughter\] What are the "gotchas", what are the things that are just bugging you about this protocol?
+**James Snell:** Staple Header Compression - it's very effective, right? Headers in HTTP are very repetitive; you're sending the same data over and over again - cookies, user agent strings, all these kinds of things. When it comes to actually what's transmitted over the wire, it's a lot of waste, like a date. In HTTP/1 it's 29 bytes, because it's encoded as a string. That could be more compactly encoded as just a couple of bytes, if you're using a more efficient encoding. So it's very wasteful as it exists today.
+HPACK, which is the staple Header Compression protocol in HTTP/2 uses this state table that's maintained at both ends. There is actually two in each direction: the center has two, the receiver has two. The receiver gets to say how much state is actually stored, the center gets to say what's actually stored in that table.
+But for the entire life of the connection of that socket, however long that socket is kept open, you have to maintain the state, and that doesn't exist in HTTP/1 today. HTTP/1 is a completely stateless protocol, and HTTP/2 switches that and makes it where you have to maintain state. You have to maintain this server affinity over a long-lived connection. Even though you're multiplexing multiple requests in flight at the same time, you have to process those headers sequentially, and serialize the access to those things, because if that state tablet gets out of sync at any point, you just tear down the connection, you can't do anything else on it.
+Even over multiplexed requests, all of those requests and responses share the same state tables. It adds an additional layer of complexity that just didn't exist previously. Personally, I don't think it was needed; I think that there are other ways...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What would you have done differently?
+**James Snell:** I actually worked on the spec as one of the co-authors and I had a proposal for just using a more efficient binary coding of certain headers like dates, right? Instead of representing numbers as text, representing them as binary, right? The compression ratios work as good, but you could transmit that data without incurring the cost of managing the state. So it would be just like what HTTP/1 has today, where you're still sending it every time, but you're sending less every time.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. It makes sense to shrink it, rather than... \[cross-talk 00:21:46.08\] I kind of agree with you on the state, because it seems like it's adding this extra layer of -- it's almost like somebody shakes your hand and doesn't let it go.
+**James Snell:** \[19:49\] Yeah, in a lot of ways that's exactly what it is. Now, Google has a ton of experience with Speedy, and a lot of what's in HTTP/2 came out of the work that Google did on Speedy and I have a huge amount of respect for everything they did and have provided. HPACK also came out of Google, so they did a ton of research in terms of what would work. They had concluded that staple Header Compression was the only way to get real benefits out of HTTP/2.
+I disagreed with some of those conclusions, but the working group decided, "You know what? This is what we're gonna move forward with, and that's what they did." At this point it's like, "I don't like it, but that's what it is, and that's what we're moving forward on."
+Some of the other things in terms of additional complexity is HTTP/2 has its own flow control, has its own prioritization; you can have streams depend on other streams, and when you set the priority on one, it sets the priority for the entire graph. There's just a lot there that doesn't exist in HTTP/1. How much of that do we expose to developers? In Node we have to provide an API for this stuff. Do we provide an API for flow control? That doesn't exist in Node currently, right? How would we even do that in a way that's efficient? About prioritization, what kind of APIs do we do there?
+This additional complexity is something that in NodeCore we're looking at this and we have to decide how much of that do we pass on to the user, versus how much of that do we do ourselves? If we do it all ourselves, we're providing fewer knobs for the users to turn, to tune things, and we're making it less interesting for them because we're hiding some of those features, we're hiding those capabilities, and is that the right thing to do...?
+The additional complexity is not something we can easily deal with. It's something we have to kind of...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's right there in your face, you have to do something about it.
+**James Snell:** Right, you have to do something about it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So stateless compression - that's one thing; maybe give me the flipside of that. I guess you've already kind of described it to a bit with the complexity, but what's the worst that could happen?
+**James Snell:** The server affinity issue is actually the biggest issue here. A lot of the proxy software vendors had some real significant problems with HTTP/2 as it was being defined, and you had a lot of criticism being put forward -- I can't remember his name, but the author of Varnish proxy, he's very public in his discontent with the protocol because of the binary framing and the way the headers are actually transmitted.
+You can't do what a lot of the proxies do currently, which is just kind of read the first few lines, determine where you're gonna route that thing to, then stop and just forward it on... Which is a super efficient way of doing it. You have to process the entire block of headers, then make the determination of whether you're gonna do anything with it or not. At that point, you basically have to terminate that connection and open another connection to your backend, so that proxies are actually having four state tables for compression, and a lot more stuff that they're having to do that that existing proxy middleware currently doesn't have to do.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I can see why you're against it.
+**James Snell:** Well, you know, it's...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They could have just gone the other way and just shrunk it, instead of the same thing back and forth, but just shrink it.
+**James Snell:** It added a lot of complexity.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What are the plus sides to this complexity? You're talking about the bad side, but what's the...?
+**James Snell:** \[23:47\] Performance. Using that socket much more efficiently. I was doing a peak load benchmark here the other day with just the development image of HTTP/2 in core. We're at a hundred thousand requests at a server, there was fifty concurrent clients going over eight threads... Just to throw a bunch of stuff at the server and see what happens, see how quickly it can respond. With HTTP/1 implementation in core currently I was able to get 21,000 requests/second doing that, but 15% of them just failed, where Node just didn't respond. A lot of that has to do with -- I was running tests on OSX, and there were some issues there with assigning threads, how quickly you can assign threads, and when we get an extreme high load it could run into some issues. With HTTP/2 I was able to get 18,000 requests/second, so fewer transaction rate, but 100% of them succeeded. It was using fewer sockets; I was keeping them open longer. The downside of that was it was using significantly more memory, but it has a better success rate, and it was using the bandwidth much more efficiently.
+The header compression, for example, we were able to save 96% of the header bytes, compared to HTTP/1. Actually, it's 96% fewer header bytes sent over the wire with a hundred thousand requests. That's massive savings.
+If we're looking at the platform as a service where people are paying for bandwidth, saving that much is significant.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A lot of money.
+**James Snell:** Right.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They'll spend that money in memory, though.
+**James Snell:** \[laughs\] Yeah, they'll make up for it in other ways. That increase in performance is significant, you can't discount it. With the fact that TLS is required, there is an improvement in security, but there are definite tradeoffs, and anyone looking to adopt HTTP/2 has to be aware of what those tradeoffs are. It's something that as we're going through in core trying to figure this thing out, there's also going to be tradeoffs in terms of API.
+One simple example is the fact that the status message in HTTP/1 - you know how you have the preamble on a response, HTTP/1.1 200 OK - that OK doesn't exist in HTTP/2. They've completely removed the status message. So no more "404 Not Found." It's just "404." No more "500 Server Error", there's no "Server Error."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Just the number?
+**James Snell:** Yeah. There's no standard way of conveying the status message. They just completely removed it from the protocol. Well, there are existing applications out there that use the status message, and actually put content there that the clients read. Now, it's not recommended, and HTTP/1 spec doesn't assign any reliable semantics that anyone should use to say, "Hey, that's a thing we should use." But as users do, they'll use whatever's available to them.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a bummer, because people will stop saying "200 OK" now, they'll just say "200."
+**James Snell:** They'll say "200", yeah. "404 Not Found", the whole jokes... Nobody will get it anymore. So if you look at Node's API, or things like Express, they have "Here's how you set the status message." Well, that's a breaking change in those APIs when you go to HTTP/2, so we have to make a decision of how closely does the HTTP/2 API have to match the HTTP/1 API and act the same way, when we know that there are distinct differences that mean it can't.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So it makes upgrading or changing to HTTP/2 a very deliberate choice.
+**James Snell:** \[27:55\] Yeah, it's gonna have to be very deliberate, and it's only gonna be in very simple scenarios, which probably aren't realistic that somebody would be able to say, "Okay, it works in both." It's gonna be a thing where you have to design your application specifically for HTTP/2 in order to take advantage of the...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's kind of putting a high barrier in front of it, too... I mean, you can't expect adoption of what is, as you said, a better performing protocol if you put a mountain in front of it.
+**James Snell:** Right, right.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No one's gonna wanna climb that. It's less enjoyable, or less likely, or whatever. People do it...
+**James Snell:** We have lots of people that say they really want this. They really want HTTP/2, and we have a lot of people that are talking about it not necessarily for user-facing - putting up webesites anyone can access - they wanna put it in their data center, and have server-to-server communication be much more efficient, which is a huge use case for HTTP/2, especially since that is within protected environments and you have more control over the client and the server.
+There's opportunities there where you don't have to necessarily worry about the TLS; you could do a plaintext connection and you'll get a far greater performance out of it. But again, it has to be a very deliberate choice.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So HTTP/2 is this something that you're solely working on, or do you have a team working on it with you?
+**James Snell:** Right now it's been primarily myself. I'm working on growing that team of contributors.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is it in IBM or is it open source contributors.
+**James Snell:** It's open source. I'm doing everything out in the open on the GitHub repo...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is it on your user then?
+**James Snell:** We're doing it under the Node organization. So if you got at github.com/nodejs/http2, all the works being done there.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I saw that repo there, but I saw Ryan Dahl in there, so this is not a new repo...?
+**James Snell:** No, it's a clone of the NodeCore.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, I understand.
+**James Snell:** Even though the decision hasn't been made to get it into Core yet...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're assuming it is...
+**James Snell:** We're assuming it is, and developing at this.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm following you... I was wondering -- I expected it to be a module, but then again...
+**James Snell:** \[laughs\] It's being implemented in such a way that we could easily extract it out as a native module if we needed to, if that decision was made.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** With all this change, wouldn't it make sense just to cut the chord and... You know, one thing Thomas and Sam were talking about was verbally and documentation-wise deprecated; don't do anything to the way it responds, or using anything within the Core. Why not just verbally deprecate it and then...?
+**James Snell:** It's way too early for us to do that. HTTP/2 is a very immature protocol. It still has to be proven, and the vast majority of the web is still driven by HTTP/1. Going out there and saying, "Okay, we're gonna deprecate this" when HTTP/2 has not yet been proven would be very premature.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So what do you do then - you just offer both?
+**James Snell:** Both, yeah. And just say that Node is gonna be a platform for HTTP development, 1 and 2. There will be a mechanism - it's built into the HTTP specification - that you can actually run HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 on the same port. You can have a server that will offer both, and the client negotiates which one they wanna use per socket. We're not quite there yet in terms of how we're gonna make that work in Node, but that's a key capability of HTTP/2. So if we are going to fully implement that spec, that means also implementing that upgrade path, which means we can't necessarily get rid of HTTP/1.
+The fact of the matter is we can't get rid of anything in Core. You see that in things like the recent buffer discussions whether we deprecate things... We can't get rid of things that are so critical to what the Node ecosystem is doing; even having a deprecation message in there is problematic.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That would ruin things, yeah.
+**James Snell:** \[31:59\] And something so fundamental as HTTP/1 - I don't think we would ever get to a point where we would fully deprecate it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I'll retract that deprecation statement and say it more like, instead... Because when we were having a discussion about the options of deprecating things, it was not to put it in where it was a response, but more so in documentation, where it was frowned upon; it wasn't forced.
+You're obviously so much more closer; I'm just outside, looking in, but I'm thinking, if it's so deliberate to choose it, wouldn't it make sense (or potentially make sense, and this will be a decision you all eventually make) to offer it as a module instead. That way, you can have a clean break when it is time to move over. I'm just thinking if it's that deliberate, why not make it that deliberate where it's actually required.
+**James Snell:** It's a legitimate question. That's actually one of the decisions the CTC has to make. I have an opinion on it, but unfortunately it's not all up to me. We have to listen to the folks, to Sam and Thomas, and the ecosystem, and figure out what is the right approach to take. We're not close enough yet to reaching that decision. I'm being very deliberate in how I write this code to ensure that if we need to pull it out, if that ends up being the right thing to do, we can. It's not making breaking changes to any existing part of Node. It is a very distinct, separate code path from the existing HTTP/1 stuff.
+It would be a native module, and all the things that come along with native modules. There would be some considerations there, but if we needed to, we could. Like I said, I have my opinion on what it ultimately should do, but it's up to the community, it's up to the Core team to make that decision, for whatever reasons they wanna make that decision.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Cool. Let's close with any closing thoughts you might have on this subject. Anything I might not have asked you that you're like, "I gotta put this out there before we close down."
+**James Snell:** We've really covered a lot of it. The big thing, I would say, is the folks are really passionate about this. We need to hear from users, we need to hear from folks that have ideas on how to implement it, or how to test, or what kind of applications they wanna build with this thing. I've had a lot of conversations so far, but it's a big ecosystem, there's a lot of people out there. We can't have enough input on that direction. That information, that input is what's gonna help drive that decision of what's going to happen with this code.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[34:56\] What's the best way for people to reach out to you then? If it's feedback you want -- is it you, personally? Should they go to the repo, submit an issue?
+**James Snell:** Go to the repo, open issues... For the folks that really want to get it in there, pull requests are great. There's been a lot of churn in the code. I've been getting in there and just hammering away for the past two weeks...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** With a machete?
+**James Snell:** Yeah, pretty much. People have been asking... It's like, "Well, where are the two dudes, so we know where to jump in?" I was like, "I don't even know what the heck I'm gonna do tomorrow, let alone what to recommend you jumping on." But it's certain to stabilize more, and there are very distinct areas that I know for sure - tests, performance benchmarks, those kinds of things - that we absolutely could use some help on. So anyone that wants to jump in, just go to that repo, take a look at what's happening...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Testing performance, things like that.
+**James Snell:** Right.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, we'll link up the repo in the show notes for this. James, thanks so much for... We're literally closing down Node Interactive, so thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. It is important that we have this conversation, so I know that the Node community is gonna appreciate what you have to say.
+**James Snell:** Right, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thanks, man.
+**James Snell:** Thanks!

The State of HTTP⧸2 in Node_transcript.txt ADDED Viewed

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+[0.52 --> 5.72]  Bandwidth for ChangeLog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com.
+[7.18 --> 11.14]  You're listening to Spotlight, a show that takes place around big announcements,
+[11.68 --> 15.12]  at conferences, in the hallways, and behind the scenes.
+[15.50 --> 19.68]  It's about getting out and having meaningful conversations with real people in the community.
+[20.26 --> 23.30]  It's ChangeLog in the trenches, shining our spotlight.
+[30.00 --> 36.60]  Welcome to our Spotlight series titled The Future of Node, recorded at Node Interactive 2016 in Austin, Texas.
+[36.92 --> 43.82]  We produce this in partnership with the Linux Foundation, the Node.js Foundation, and it's sponsored by IBM and StrongLoop.
+[44.12 --> 49.96]  Check out IBM API Connect, a comprehensive solution to manage your entire API lifecycle from creation to management,
+[50.32 --> 53.08]  at developer.ibm.com slash apiconnect.
+[53.20 --> 58.38]  Also, check out Loopback from StrongLoop, a highly extensible, open-source Node.js framework
+[58.38 --> 64.14]  that enables you to create dynamic, end-to-end REST APIs with little-to-no coding at loopback.io.
+[64.40 --> 66.84]  In this episode, I talk with James Snell.
+[67.20 --> 73.56]  James is a technical lead for Node at IBM and a member of Node's TSC and CTC.
+[74.14 --> 79.30]  We talked about the work he's doing on Node's implementation of H2, the state of H2 in Node,
+[79.60 --> 83.98]  what this new spec has to offer, and what the Node community can expect from this new protocol.
+[84.36 --> 84.86]  Let's take a listen.
+[84.86 --> 88.58]  So what's the state of H2 in Node?
+[88.62 --> 90.04]  I know you're working on it now.
+[90.20 --> 93.90]  You've recently tweeted about a prototype server.
+[93.90 --> 99.32]  So the current state is just trying to figure out how it would work in Node.
+[101.24 --> 104.96]  There's a lot of new things within H2.
+[105.26 --> 110.12]  It's a brand-new protocol, even though it's got the HTTP semantics with the crest response headers
+[110.12 --> 110.80]  and that kind of thing.
+[110.80 --> 113.64]  On the wire, it's very, very different.
+[113.92 --> 116.56]  So it requires a completely new implementation.
+[117.16 --> 121.02]  So kind of teasing the edges of what that implementation would need to look like, how it would work,
+[121.08 --> 127.56]  what the issues are, what the additional state management, what impact that's going to have on Node.
+[128.06 --> 133.14]  It's trying to figure out what that impact is going to be.
+[133.14 --> 137.44]  And then if we were going to put it in core, if it's something that was going to land there,
+[137.60 --> 144.32]  what would that look like in terms of APIs and in terms of just kind of the performance profile and that kind of thing?
+[144.44 --> 145.32]  So that's where we're at.
+[145.86 --> 149.08]  We had a discussion earlier, Thomas Watson and Sam.
+[149.18 --> 150.54]  I forget his last name from IBM.
+[150.90 --> 151.18]  Roberts.
+[151.40 --> 151.86]  Sam Roberts.
+[151.98 --> 152.12]  Okay.
+[152.16 --> 153.20]  Thank you for jogging my memory.
+[153.20 --> 155.80]  And he wanted to talk.
+[155.86 --> 158.72]  Sam was really passionate about talking about keeping Node small.
+[158.96 --> 159.08]  Yeah.
+[159.30 --> 163.74]  And Thomas actually coined, I don't know if it's him or not, but he coined the term small core.
+[164.00 --> 164.28]  Right.
+[164.68 --> 171.16]  And so one of the discussions we had in that conversation was what should or should not be in Node core.
+[171.54 --> 176.60]  And so as you're developing H2, you've got to be thinking about H1 being there, whether it should stay there,
+[176.60 --> 178.24]  if you did deprecate it, how you would do that.
+[178.56 --> 183.04]  So end that argument between them because they didn't really come to a conclusion of what should happen.
+[183.04 --> 186.10]  And do you think H2 should be in Node core or should it be a module?
+[187.18 --> 188.84]  Personally, I think it should be in core.
+[189.54 --> 194.30]  And the reason for that, Node has always been a platform for web development, right?
+[194.46 --> 197.04]  You know, there's always been that web server.
+[197.20 --> 199.84]  And that is, you know, it's a primary use case.
+[199.96 --> 203.88]  Even though there's so many different places Node is being used and in different use cases,
+[204.54 --> 206.80]  a lot of it always goes back to having Node.
+[206.86 --> 208.92]  And if you look, there is no standard library in Node.
+[209.42 --> 210.52]  But there's HTTP, right?
+[210.58 --> 211.50]  There's URL parsing.
+[211.50 --> 215.38]  There's support for these fundamental web protocols that are built in.
+[215.48 --> 217.38]  And that's the only thing that's built in, right?
+[217.64 --> 223.32]  Now, if HP1 wasn't already there, I wouldn't be thinking that we should add HP2, right?
+[223.40 --> 224.12]  There's other...
+[224.12 --> 224.78]  You'd be a module at that point.
+[224.90 --> 225.42]  Right, right.
+[225.44 --> 225.62]  Okay.
+[225.84 --> 229.10]  There are other protocols that are becoming increasingly more important to the web.
+[229.18 --> 230.64]  Web sockets, for instance, right?
+[230.68 --> 232.08]  We don't have Web sockets support in there.
+[232.12 --> 234.44]  And we shouldn't have it because it's not already there.
+[235.20 --> 236.10]  Quick is another one.
+[236.10 --> 241.72]  You know, it's a protocol that's, you know, starting to gain a lot of traction, you know, relative to TCP IP.
+[241.98 --> 244.76]  It's got a long ways to go, but it's a very good protocol.
+[245.34 --> 253.60]  But, you know, I wouldn't support any effort to actually get it into core unless it became much more fundamental to the web architecture, right?
+[253.60 --> 258.78]  So, with HP2, the decision basically just comes to, we already have HP1, right?
+[259.08 --> 262.44]  We know HP2 is going to continue in relevance, you know, grow in relevance.
+[262.58 --> 266.38]  It is going to be, you know, we have a lot of people asking for it.
+[267.08 --> 271.86]  It just makes a lot of sense to have it in core and have it available.
+[271.86 --> 276.12]  We also talked about, and maybe you can even end this argument, too.
+[276.18 --> 279.98]  We talked about how you define what should or shouldn't be in core.
+[280.06 --> 286.26]  And it sounded like you said, maybe I'll answer this for you and you can agree or disagree, but it sounded like you said around web fundamentals.
+[286.40 --> 289.56]  Like, if it's fundamental to doing web stuff, it makes sense to put in core.
+[289.68 --> 295.98]  But what do you think about, you know, keeping node core small or what should, how to define what should or shouldn't be in node core?
+[296.34 --> 299.98]  If it's not already there, then it shouldn't be there.
+[300.08 --> 301.34]  It shouldn't be added, right?
+[301.86 --> 305.76]  So, another example of this was URL parsing, right?
+[305.86 --> 310.92]  You know, we have URL parse, but it's fundamentally broken in a number of important ways.
+[311.10 --> 312.04]  You know, it's there.
+[312.40 --> 314.46]  You know, it fundamentally works.
+[315.08 --> 320.42]  But there's quite a few use cases where URL parse just doesn't function correctly.
+[320.50 --> 323.14]  So, we added a new whatwg URL parser.
+[323.42 --> 328.88]  You know, it's the same parsing API that you use in the browser for, you know, new URL and that kind of thing.
+[328.88 --> 331.52]  So, now we have two URL parsers in core, right?
+[331.52 --> 336.02]  And there was a big debate whether that should just go out as a separate module or, you know, does it belong in core?
+[336.18 --> 338.48]  And that question's still not completely settled.
+[338.78 --> 343.76]  The only reason that would be added to core is because URL parsing is already in core.
+[343.96 --> 344.12]  Right.
+[344.34 --> 344.58]  Right.
+[344.58 --> 354.86]  And I think that is the key distinction that, you know, we're not adding something that's brand new that doesn't already exist as part of the platform.
+[355.00 --> 357.30]  We're just evolving what's already there.
+[357.84 --> 358.28]  Right.
+[358.36 --> 360.90]  So, that's where I think we draw the line.
+[360.90 --> 369.68]  So, for those who may not be as familiar as you might be with Node Core, what exactly makes up Node Core to make you say don't add more to it, just keep things in modules?
+[369.68 --> 379.12]  So, the basic protocol supports, you have DNS, you have UDP, TCP, TLS, HP, right?
+[379.46 --> 383.92]  These fundamentals of just basic web application programming, right?
+[384.48 --> 386.12]  That is what core is to me.
+[386.18 --> 387.88]  Now, there are things that are in support of that.
+[388.02 --> 391.58]  You know, obviously, we have to have, you know, a file system I.O., right?
+[391.58 --> 397.34]  We have to have an inventing system, buffer, right, for just basic data management.
+[397.80 --> 405.82]  I view those as being more kind of utility capabilities, right, in support of the web platform capabilities that are there.
+[406.72 --> 410.04]  To me, that is a large part of what Node is.
+[410.16 --> 417.64]  And if you look at all the different use cases where Node is being used, those are still the fundamental things that are being used the most, right?
+[417.64 --> 425.70]  You know, even if you look at Electron, you know, those are basically web applications, right, that are bundled into a native app, right?
+[425.92 --> 426.00]  Right.
+[427.30 --> 427.74]  Yeah.
+[428.14 --> 433.72]  You cannot get away from those fundamental pieces of that basic protocol support.
+[434.18 --> 436.26]  And that, to me, is what defines Node.
+[436.78 --> 437.94]  It's almost what you said.
+[438.26 --> 439.72]  I said you said, but you said it.
+[439.82 --> 439.96]  Yeah.
+[439.98 --> 440.52]  Web fundamentals.
+[440.84 --> 441.44]  Web fundamentals, right.
+[441.46 --> 443.28]  If it's around that, it belongs in core.
+[443.54 --> 443.86]  Otherwise.
+[444.36 --> 444.60]  Right.
+[444.98 --> 446.68]  Otherwise, you know, put it out to the ecosystem, yeah.
+[446.68 --> 449.06]  So, you're working on H2.
+[450.18 --> 452.30]  What's interesting about H2 for the Node community?
+[453.54 --> 456.80]  That it's actually a very different protocol than H1.
+[457.58 --> 458.02]  Yeah.
+[458.02 --> 464.08]  You know, it has the same name, but that, too, is really, really important.
+[464.66 --> 469.68]  The fact that it uses a binary framing instead of a text framing, right, you know, and just line delimination.
+[469.68 --> 485.56]  Stateful header compression is, you know, adds an interesting dimension of there's a whole lot more state management that has to occur over long-lived sockets that just doesn't exist currently in Node.
+[485.56 --> 489.16]  And when you're dealing with, you know, with H1.
+[489.16 --> 498.22]  You know, with the header compression and the multiplexing and stuff that the protocol enables, you can get much more efficient use of your connections.
+[498.22 --> 513.34]  And when we start getting into the real-world benchmarks of, you know, like real applications rather than the peak load type benchmarks that I've been doing currently, I think we'll see much more efficient use of Node and of the connection there.
+[513.34 --> 523.08]  But it does require a different way of thinking about your web applications, your web APIs, because you're not just pipelining individual requests one at a time.
+[523.64 --> 531.44]  You can have, you know, the protocol provides no limits to the number of in-flight requests and responses you can have simultaneously over a single connection.
+[532.14 --> 534.88]  And then you add things like push streams on top of that.
+[534.88 --> 548.72]  It adds a significant new thing that you just have to consider of how you're building your applications and, you know, what the interaction is going to be with your, you know, in terms of performance and concurrency and all these things that you just don't currently have to deal with.
+[549.60 --> 559.16]  So I think there's going to be a lot of just kind of coming to terms with the protocol and getting experience with the protocol and kind of figuring out what those best practices are.
+[559.16 --> 565.06]  Because it's still a very young protocol, you know, and there's not a lot of industry best practice to draw from.
+[565.70 --> 573.62]  So, you know, it's just kind of let's get it out there and get it in the hands of people to use and, you know, see how it evolves from there.
+[574.34 --> 579.40]  I talked to Michael Rogers earlier about kind of the state of the union, so to speak, for Node.js.
+[579.40 --> 587.40]  And he was coming at it from a direction and governance side, less of a code side.
+[587.44 --> 592.30]  But one thing he said was a really important factor in this next year is security.
+[592.90 --> 599.94]  And so how does H2 play into or the work you're doing on H2 support the overall mission of being more secure?
+[600.28 --> 600.42]  Right.
+[600.72 --> 602.82]  So there's two things there.
+[602.82 --> 613.30]  With H1 in core right now, a number of design decisions were made early on to favor performance over spec compliance, right?
+[614.92 --> 624.28]  It turns out that there are a number of compliance things in the spec that says, you know, don't allow white space in headers, right?
+[624.28 --> 630.86]  And there's very good reasons for that because you get into, you know, requests smuggling and, you know, response splitting.
+[631.08 --> 638.38]  And there's a lot of real specific security issues that come if you allow invalid characters into an H1 request.
+[639.06 --> 641.96]  Node was like, yeah, you know, we want things to go fast.
+[642.10 --> 643.28]  So we're not going to check this.
+[643.36 --> 644.20]  We're not going to check that.
+[644.20 --> 653.80]  And it was a very deliberate decision not to fully support the H1 spec.
+[654.28 --> 662.36]  And what we found is that that caused a number of security issues that we've been dealing with, you know, over the past year or two years and stuff like that.
+[664.44 --> 671.96]  With H2, we're going to be taking an approach where we're going to be very spec compliant, right?
+[672.04 --> 674.40]  And we're not favoring performance over that.
+[674.46 --> 676.22]  We're not sacrificing one or the other.
+[677.06 --> 682.76]  It is going to be absolutely compliant to the specification without taking those kind of performance shortcuts.
+[682.76 --> 697.62]  And that is something that I am emphasizing, you know, in my own development as I'm going through this, that making sure that we can, that we're hitting all of those, you know, you must do this or you must not do this that are fine in that specification.
+[697.62 --> 707.62]  And I think by adhering to the spec as closely as we possibly can, we mitigate a lot of those potential security issues.
+[707.62 --> 717.90]  The other important thing is that even though H2 does not require TLS, you know, per the spec, you can do plain text if you want.
+[718.50 --> 733.84]  The browser implementations, the primary clients of H2 right now, you know, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and some of the others, they require that they will only talk to H2 server over TLS, right?
+[733.84 --> 734.64]  It's just mandated.
+[734.80 --> 736.32]  They won't even connect to a plain text server.
+[736.44 --> 742.26]  So automatically out of the gate, you're using, you know, secured connections.
+[742.90 --> 746.16]  And that alone is going to be a significant improvement to security.
+[746.94 --> 754.90]  The one kind of limiting factor there is Node hasn't really had a great reputation as a TLS terminator.
+[755.84 --> 759.36]  A lot of people, it's just the best practice, put a proxy in front of it, right?
+[759.36 --> 765.52]  And then they'll reverse proxy back over a plain text connection back to Node and just to ensure the performance.
+[765.88 --> 770.94]  A lot of that has to do with the way the crypto works with the event loop and OpenSSL and that kind of thing.
+[771.38 --> 774.90]  So I think a lot of work is going to need to go in to try to improve that.
+[775.18 --> 781.82]  If we want to improve the performance of Node as a TLS endpoint and make that, you know, improve on that story.
+[781.82 --> 788.62]  So what gets you most excited about H2 being available?
+[789.14 --> 794.70]  I know you're working on things like you talked about the state of things, but what's the most exciting to you that's going to change things for it?
+[795.42 --> 801.54]  Just seeing the getting into the hands of developers and seeing what they do with it, right?
+[802.52 --> 804.76]  It is a very young protocol, right?
+[804.76 --> 807.00]  It is brand new and I have my issues with it.
+[807.00 --> 813.08]  I was actually involved with, you know, the working group for a while that was actually creating it and I was one of the co-editors on the draft.
+[813.20 --> 817.46]  So it was early on, you know, you know, had, you know, some interest in where it could go.
+[818.26 --> 819.74]  Then I got out of it for a little while.
+[819.84 --> 824.52]  I had some issues with how it was designed and I'm not completely happy with the protocol by any stretch.
+[824.62 --> 826.26]  I do have my issues with it.
+[827.22 --> 829.56]  But I want to see what developers do with it, right?
+[829.56 --> 837.58]  And I love seeing all the different ways that people are using Node today in ways we didn't even imagine that, you know, that they could or would or anything else.
+[838.28 --> 851.96]  And I want to see that also with the protocol, just the experimentation and just the all the different new types of applications that could be, you know, that could be developed or all the different ways that it could be innovated on and built on.
+[851.96 --> 856.16]  Any ideas, any pontification you could do on what could be built?
+[856.38 --> 861.94]  There are all kinds of opportunities for more interesting RESTful APIs.
+[862.22 --> 869.48]  You know, push streams are something that are really interesting.
+[869.62 --> 874.00]  And so far they've only really been looked at as a way of pre-populating a request cache, right?
+[874.10 --> 876.94]  You know, I'm going to push it out so you don't have to do it.
+[876.94 --> 892.62]  But I think with REST APIs, push streams offer some really interesting opportunities for new kinds of APIs that are providing, you know, event notifications or, you know, the servers more proactively pushing data to the client.
+[892.62 --> 909.00]  One person I was talking to and one of the ways that they were kind of prototyping stuff and, you know, using H2 is they have they would create a tunnel using over an H2 connection where they would, you know, open the connection with their client.
+[909.00 --> 919.60]  But then once the connection was established, they would switch roles, right, and allow the server to act as the client, you know, to the server, you know, and the client was acting as the server.
+[919.72 --> 925.78]  And they were doing this as a way of doing testing over their network environment.
+[925.78 --> 930.50]  That kind of thing, you can't do that with H1, right?
+[930.60 --> 940.54]  But because of the, you know, the multiplexing and, you know, the communication model that exists in H2, that kind of stuff is allowed, right?
+[940.56 --> 941.38]  It's something you can do.
+[942.60 --> 952.64]  H2 is going to enable new extensibility models, kind of new possibilities for new kinds of protocols that kind of coexist with H2P semantics.
+[952.64 --> 955.68]  And we already see some of that work already happening within the working group.
+[955.84 --> 960.54]  There's proposals for other kinds of protocols that are layered into the mix.
+[962.44 --> 965.16]  And, you know, you kind of wonder, well, you know, who would do that kind of thing?
+[965.22 --> 966.52]  Well, look at WebSockets, right?
+[966.80 --> 975.90]  Look how WebSockets emerged and, you know, its relationship with H1 and kind of the difficulties that existed trying to get those two things to work together, right?
+[975.90 --> 988.72]  With this, the framing model is going to allow you to more naturally experiment with those kinds of new protocols without the pain that we had with, you know, trying to introduce WebSockets into it.
+[988.80 --> 993.92]  So there's a lot of new types of innovations, I think, that could come out of it.
+[993.96 --> 999.40]  But we need to build a kind of a collective experience working with it in order to be able to tease those things out.
+[999.40 --> 1003.54]  You mentioned some things you're not happy with with the H2P protocol.
+[1003.64 --> 1006.12]  I couldn't let you not tell me what those are.
+[1006.42 --> 1008.52]  So what are the gotchas?
+[1008.62 --> 1010.74]  What are the things that are just bugging you about this protocol?
+[1013.00 --> 1014.06]  Staple header compression.
+[1016.02 --> 1017.74]  It's very effective, right?
+[1017.88 --> 1023.90]  You get some, you know, in terms of headers in H2P are very repetitive.
+[1023.90 --> 1032.22]  You know, you're sending the same data over and over and over again, you know, cookies or, you know, user agent strings, you know, all these kinds of things.
+[1032.32 --> 1037.98]  And when it comes to actually what's transmitted over the wire, it's a lot of waste, like a date, right?
+[1038.24 --> 1041.92]  And each one is 29 bytes because it's encoded as a string.
+[1042.62 --> 1050.46]  You know, that can be, like, more compactly encoded as just a couple of bytes if you're using a more efficient encoding, right?
+[1050.46 --> 1053.52]  So it's very, very wasteful as it exists today.
+[1054.94 --> 1061.92]  HPAC, which is the stateful header compression protocol in H2, uses this state table that's maintained at both ends.
+[1062.34 --> 1064.02]  There is actually two in each direction.
+[1064.20 --> 1066.80]  So the sender has two, the receiver has two.
+[1067.94 --> 1072.38]  And it, you know, the receiver gets to say how much state is actually stored.
+[1072.52 --> 1075.82]  The sender gets to say what's actually stored in that table.
+[1075.82 --> 1083.36]  But for the entire life of the connection of that socket, however long that socket is kept open, you have to maintain the state, right?
+[1083.76 --> 1085.86]  And that doesn't exist in H1 today.
+[1085.96 --> 1088.10]  H1 is a completely stateless protocol.
+[1089.06 --> 1093.08]  So H2 switches that and makes it where you have to maintain state.
+[1093.32 --> 1098.26]  You have to maintain this server affinity, right, over a long-lived connection.
+[1098.26 --> 1112.74]  And even though you're multiplexing multiple requests in flight at the same time, you have to process those headers sequentially and serialize the access to those things.
+[1113.56 --> 1117.60]  Because if that state table gets out of sync at any point, you just tear down the connection.
+[1117.78 --> 1119.94]  You can't do anything else on it.
+[1119.94 --> 1128.20]  And even over multiplex requests, you know, all of those requests and responses share the same state tables.
+[1128.86 --> 1133.86]  So it adds an additional layer of complexity that just didn't exist previously.
+[1133.86 --> 1134.06]  Wasn't there before.
+[1135.18 --> 1138.86]  And personally, I don't think it was needed, right?
+[1138.90 --> 1140.12]  I think that there were other ways.
+[1140.12 --> 1140.32]  You could have done differently.
+[1140.32 --> 1144.90]  I actually, you know, like I said, I worked on the spec.
+[1145.08 --> 1145.24]  Right.
+[1145.24 --> 1145.92]  I was one of the co-authors.
+[1146.10 --> 1154.94]  And I had a proposal for just using a more efficient binary encoding, you know, of certain headers like dates, right?
+[1155.00 --> 1160.82]  Or instead of, you know, representing numbers as text, representing them, you know, is binary, right?
+[1160.82 --> 1160.86]  Right.
+[1162.98 --> 1172.24]  The compression ratios weren't as good, but you could transmit that data without incurring the cost of managing the state, right?
+[1172.26 --> 1178.76]  So it would be just like what H1 has today where you're still sending it every time, but you're sending less every time.
+[1179.96 --> 1181.60]  Makes sense to shrink it rather than...
+[1181.60 --> 1181.82]  Right.
+[1181.94 --> 1182.76]  Shrink it, yeah.
+[1183.06 --> 1183.80]  Rather than adding the state.
+[1183.80 --> 1188.56]  I kind of agree with you on the state because it seems like it's adding this extra layer of like...
+[1188.56 --> 1188.74]  Right.
+[1189.10 --> 1191.72]  It's almost like somebody shakes your hand and doesn't let it go.
+[1192.04 --> 1192.56]  Well, yeah.
+[1192.66 --> 1194.44]  And in a lot of ways, that's exactly what it is.
+[1194.96 --> 1199.74]  Now, Google has a ton of experience with Speedy, right?
+[1199.74 --> 1205.20]  And, you know, a lot of what's in HP2 came out of the experience, you know, came out of the work that Google did on Speedy.
+[1205.38 --> 1209.28]  And I have a huge amount of respect for everything that they did and provided.
+[1210.12 --> 1211.86]  HPAC also came out of Google.
+[1211.86 --> 1217.22]  So they did a ton of research in terms of what would work, right?
+[1217.32 --> 1224.00]  And they had concluded that state-bore hydrocompression was the only way to get the, you know, like real benefits out of H2.
+[1225.04 --> 1227.30]  You know, I disagreed with some of those conclusions.
+[1227.56 --> 1231.06]  But, you know, the working group decided, you know what, this is what we're going to move forward with.
+[1231.10 --> 1232.40]  And that's what they did.
+[1232.54 --> 1234.76]  And at this point, it's like, I don't like it.
+[1235.36 --> 1237.52]  But, you know, that's what it is.
+[1237.78 --> 1240.12]  And, you know, that's what we're moving forward on.
+[1240.12 --> 1250.58]  So some of the other things there, in terms of, like, additional complexity, is H2 has its own flow control, has its own prioritization.
+[1250.80 --> 1253.04]  You can have streams depend on other streams.
+[1253.14 --> 1257.30]  And when you set the priority on one, it, you know, sets the priority for the entire graph.
+[1257.30 --> 1263.96]  You know, it's, you know, there's just a lot there that just doesn't exist in H1, right?
+[1264.10 --> 1268.24]  That, you know, how much of that do we expose to developers, right?
+[1268.34 --> 1269.30]  Like, you know, in Node.
+[1269.48 --> 1271.22]  We have to provide an API for all this stuff.
+[1271.66 --> 1273.30]  Do we provide an API for flow control?
+[1273.90 --> 1275.74]  That doesn't exist in Node currently, right?
+[1275.88 --> 1277.96]  I mean, how would we even do that in a way that's efficient?
+[1278.82 --> 1282.06]  About prioritization, how do we, you know, what kind of APIs do we do there?
+[1282.06 --> 1293.28]  This additional complexity is something that, as Node core looking at this, we have to decide how much of that do we pass on to the user versus how much of that do we do ourselves.
+[1293.66 --> 1301.18]  If we do it all ourselves, we're providing fewer knobs for, you know, the users to turn, to tune things.
+[1301.56 --> 1305.68]  And we're making it less interesting for them because we're hiding some of those features.
+[1305.88 --> 1306.92]  We're hiding those capabilities.
+[1306.92 --> 1310.16]  And is that the right thing to do, right?
+[1310.30 --> 1316.34]  So the additional complexity kind of, you know, it's not something we can easily deal with.
+[1316.42 --> 1317.92]  It's something we have to kind of.
+[1318.54 --> 1319.34]  It's right there in your face.
+[1319.34 --> 1320.28]  Right there in your face.
+[1320.44 --> 1321.42]  You have to do something about it.
+[1321.98 --> 1326.20]  So stateless compression, that's one thing.
+[1328.10 --> 1329.58]  Maybe give me the flip side of that.
+[1329.58 --> 1336.46]  Like what's, I guess you've already kind of described it to a bit with the complexity, but what's the worst that could happen?
+[1336.46 --> 1341.00]  The server affinity issue is actually the biggest issue here.
+[1342.00 --> 1349.70]  A lot of the proxy software vendors had some real significant problems with H2 as it was being defined.
+[1350.08 --> 1353.88]  And you had a lot of criticism being put forth.
+[1354.22 --> 1359.44]  I can't remember his name, but the author of, I believe it's the Varnish Proxy is very public.
+[1359.44 --> 1359.66]  Yeah.
+[1360.30 --> 1362.78]  And his discontent with the protocol.
+[1363.82 --> 1370.28]  Because of the binary framing and the way the headers are actually, you know, transmitted, right?
+[1370.28 --> 1381.14]  You can't do what a lot of the proxies do currently, which is just kind of read the first few lines, determine, you know, where you're going to route that thing to, then stop and just forward it on.
+[1381.34 --> 1381.60]  Right?
+[1382.22 --> 1385.28]  Which is a super efficient way of doing it.
+[1385.28 --> 1388.96]  You have to process the entire block of headers, right?
+[1389.04 --> 1392.10]  Then make the determination of whether you're going to do anything with it or not.
+[1392.20 --> 1398.52]  At that point, you basically have to terminate that connection and open another connection, you know, to your backend.
+[1398.86 --> 1403.72]  And you have, so that proxy is actually having four state tables for compression.
+[1403.72 --> 1411.98]  And then a lot more stuff that they're having to do that that existing proxy middleware currently doesn't have to do, right?
+[1412.32 --> 1413.86]  So, you know.
+[1414.12 --> 1415.16]  I can see why you're against it.
+[1415.54 --> 1416.70]  Well, you know, it's.
+[1417.26 --> 1418.00]  It could have just gone the other way.
+[1418.10 --> 1419.96]  It would just shrunk it instead of.
+[1420.50 --> 1422.52]  It's not the same thing back and forth, but just shrink it.
+[1422.86 --> 1425.68]  It added, you know, it added a lot of complexity.
+[1426.40 --> 1427.92]  What are the plus sides of this complexity?
+[1428.08 --> 1430.68]  Like, you're talking about the bad side, but what's the performance?
+[1431.24 --> 1431.60]  Performance.
+[1431.60 --> 1435.02]  It's using that socket much more efficiently.
+[1436.10 --> 1443.40]  You know, I was doing a peak load benchmark here the other day with, you know, just a development image of H2 in core.
+[1444.18 --> 1446.92]  I was serving 100,000 requests at the server.
+[1447.48 --> 1451.88]  There was 50 concurrent clients going over eight threads, right?
+[1451.96 --> 1456.20]  So just as much, just throw a bunch of stuff at the server and see what happens, right?
+[1456.22 --> 1457.46]  See how quickly it can respond.
+[1457.46 --> 1465.16]  With the H1 implementation in core currently, I was able to get 21,000 requests per second doing that.
+[1465.44 --> 1468.18]  But 15% of them just failed, right?
+[1468.28 --> 1470.88]  Where Node just didn't respond, right?
+[1470.88 --> 1474.58]  And a lot of that has to do with, I was running a test on OSX.
+[1474.68 --> 1479.22]  There's some issues there with assigning threads, you know, how quickly can assign threads.
+[1479.52 --> 1484.48]  And, you know, when we get an extreme high load, you can run into some issues.
+[1485.30 --> 1488.90]  With H2, I was able to get 18,000 requests per second.
+[1488.90 --> 1492.94]  And so fewer transaction rate, but 100% of them succeeded, right?
+[1493.40 --> 1496.18]  And it was using fewer sockets.
+[1496.36 --> 1497.46]  Now, it was keeping them open longer.
+[1498.16 --> 1502.08]  The downside of that was it was using significantly more memory, right?
+[1502.34 --> 1506.46]  But it had a better success rate, right?
+[1506.48 --> 1511.24]  And it was using the bandwidth much more efficiently.
+[1511.24 --> 1520.60]  And the header compression, for example, we were able to save 96% of the header bytes, you know, compared to H1, right?
+[1520.78 --> 1528.92]  So, you know, actually it's 96% fewer header bytes sent over the wire with 100,000 requests.
+[1529.38 --> 1531.20]  That's a massive savings, right?
+[1531.38 --> 1540.40]  And if you're looking at the platform as a service where people are paying for bandwidth, you know, paying for this stuff, saving that much is significant.
+[1540.40 --> 1540.90]  A lot of money.
+[1541.06 --> 1541.26]  Right.
+[1541.82 --> 1542.96]  They'll spend that money in memory, though.
+[1543.20 --> 1543.94]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
+[1544.68 --> 1546.28]  They'll make up for it in other ways.
+[1547.26 --> 1552.12]  And, you know, that increase in performance is significant.
+[1552.24 --> 1553.20]  You can't discount it.
+[1553.56 --> 1558.76]  There is, with the fact that TLS is there, it's required, there is an improvement in security.
+[1559.24 --> 1561.00]  But there are definite trade-offs.
+[1561.30 --> 1566.86]  And anyone looking to adopt H2 has to be aware of what those trade-offs are.
+[1566.86 --> 1576.14]  And it's something that, as we're going through in core, trying to figure this thing out, there's also going to be trade-offs in terms of API, right?
+[1577.56 --> 1589.84]  And one, like, simple example is the fact that the status message in H1, you know, how you have, like, the preamble on a response, HP, you know, 1.1, 200, OK.
+[1589.84 --> 1594.00]  That OK doesn't exist in H2.
+[1594.74 --> 1597.58]  They completely remove the status message, right?
+[1597.66 --> 1600.02]  So no more 404 not found.
+[1600.16 --> 1602.08]  It's just 404, right?
+[1602.28 --> 1604.04]  No more 500 server error.
+[1604.38 --> 1605.72]  There's no server error, right?
+[1606.04 --> 1607.62]  There is no standard way.
+[1607.70 --> 1608.18]  Just the number.
+[1608.42 --> 1608.54]  Yeah.
+[1608.78 --> 1611.20]  There's no standard way of conveying the status message.
+[1611.64 --> 1613.36]  They just completely removed it from the protocol.
+[1613.36 --> 1621.92]  Well, there are existing applications out there that use the status message, right, and actually put content there that the clients read.
+[1622.26 --> 1624.18]  Now, it's not recommended, right?
+[1624.30 --> 1634.30]  And H1 spec, you know, doesn't assign any semantics, reliable semantics, that anyone should use to, like, say, hey, that's a thing we should use.
+[1634.74 --> 1638.40]  But as users do, they'll use whatever's available to them, right?
+[1638.40 --> 1641.66]  That's a bummer because people will stop saying 200, OK, now they'll just say 200.
+[1641.66 --> 1642.92]  They'll say 200, right, right.
+[1642.92 --> 1645.24]  The 404 not found, the whole jokes, you know.
+[1645.44 --> 1645.62]  Right, right.
+[1645.70 --> 1646.60]  Nobody will get it anymore.
+[1647.84 --> 1655.52]  So if you look at nodes API or things like Express, you know, they have, like, you know, here's how you set the status message.
+[1656.22 --> 1660.26]  Well, that's a breaking change in those APIs when you go to H2.
+[1660.26 --> 1673.82]  So we have to make a decision of how closely does the H2 API have to match the H1 API and act the same way when we know that there are distinct differences that mean it can't.
+[1673.82 --> 1678.32]  So it makes upgrading or changing to H2 a very deliberate choice.
+[1678.50 --> 1678.56]  Yeah.
+[1679.20 --> 1680.58]  It's going to have to be very deliberate.
+[1680.92 --> 1687.80]  And it's only going to be in very simple, simple scenarios, which probably aren't realistic, that somebody would be able to say, OK, it works in both.
+[1688.24 --> 1688.50]  Right.
+[1688.50 --> 1696.88]  It's going to be a thing where you have to design your application specifically for H2 in order to take advantage of the capabilities of the event.
+[1696.88 --> 1698.28]  It's kind of putting a high barrier in front of it, too.
+[1698.36 --> 1707.46]  I mean, you can't expect adoption of what is, as you said, a better performing protocol if you put a mountain in front of it.
+[1707.56 --> 1707.76]  Right.
+[1708.08 --> 1708.24]  Right.
+[1708.24 --> 1710.26]  No one's going to want to climb that.
+[1710.64 --> 1715.48]  Or it's less enjoyable or less likely or whatever.
+[1715.62 --> 1716.46]  People do it.
+[1716.66 --> 1719.04]  We have lots of people that say they really want this.
+[1719.20 --> 1720.34]  They really want H2.
+[1720.52 --> 1726.38]  And we have a lot of people that are talking about it not necessarily for user-facing, right?
+[1726.58 --> 1729.42]  Setting up websites that anyone on the Internet can access.
+[1729.42 --> 1738.98]  They want to put it in their data center and have server-to-server communication be much more efficient, which is a huge use case for H2.
+[1739.46 --> 1750.54]  Especially since that is within protected environments and you have more control over what the client and a server, there's opportunities there where you don't have to necessarily worry about TLS.
+[1750.76 --> 1755.20]  You can do a plain text connection and you'll get far greater performance out of it.
+[1755.68 --> 1757.56]  But, again, it has to be a very deliberate choice.
+[1757.56 --> 1758.28]  Right.
+[1758.68 --> 1763.02]  So H2, is this something that you're solely working on or do you have a team working on it with you?
+[1764.14 --> 1766.04]  Right now, it's been primarily myself.
+[1766.18 --> 1768.56]  I'm working on kind of growing that team of contributors.
+[1769.34 --> 1771.40]  Is it in IBM or is it open source contributors?
+[1771.46 --> 1772.32]  It's open source.
+[1772.48 --> 1775.42]  I'm doing everything out in the open out on the GitHub repo.
+[1775.42 --> 1776.32]  Is it on your user then?
+[1777.00 --> 1779.04]  We're doing it under the Node organization.
+[1779.36 --> 1786.50]  So if you go github.com, node.js, slash HTTP2, all the work's being done there.
+[1786.50 --> 1789.46]  I saw that repo there, but I saw Ryan Dahl in there.
+[1789.60 --> 1790.66]  So this is not a new repo?
+[1791.16 --> 1794.42]  So it's a clone of the Node core.
+[1794.66 --> 1794.84]  Okay.
+[1794.84 --> 1794.98]  Right?
+[1795.12 --> 1799.92]  So even though the decision hasn't been made to get it into core yet.
+[1799.98 --> 1800.24]  Right.
+[1800.34 --> 1801.36]  You're assuming it is.
+[1801.36 --> 1802.80]  Assuming it is and developing it this.
+[1803.04 --> 1803.46]  I'm falling.
+[1803.46 --> 1804.38]  I was wondering why.
+[1804.48 --> 1806.14]  I was like, I expected it to be a module.
+[1806.86 --> 1807.84]  But then again.
+[1807.94 --> 1815.28]  Well, it's being implemented in such a way that we could easily extract it out as a native module if we needed to, if that decision was made.
+[1815.62 --> 1815.72]  Right.
+[1816.12 --> 1818.62]  It doesn't, I think, I can't say it doesn't use any.
+[1818.62 --> 1820.96]  With all this change, wouldn't it make sense just to cut the cord?
+[1820.96 --> 1827.56]  And, you know, one thing Thomas and Sam were talking about was verbally and documentation-wise deprecate it.
+[1827.62 --> 1833.12]  Don't do anything to the way it responds or, you know, using anything within Node core.
+[1833.40 --> 1835.42]  Why not just verbally deprecate it and then?
+[1835.60 --> 1838.20]  It's way too early for us to do that.
+[1839.08 --> 1842.24]  AH2 is a very immature protocol.
+[1842.24 --> 1842.76]  Right.
+[1843.48 --> 1845.50]  It still has to be proven.
+[1845.86 --> 1849.26]  And the vast majority of the web is still driven by H1.
+[1851.38 --> 1856.68]  Going out there and saying that, okay, we're going to deprecate this when H2 has not yet been proven.
+[1857.00 --> 1857.30]  Right.
+[1857.48 --> 1859.94]  Would be, you know, very premature.
+[1860.14 --> 1860.98]  So what do you do then?
+[1861.00 --> 1862.24]  You just offer both?
+[1862.42 --> 1862.78]  Both.
+[1862.94 --> 1863.10]  Yeah.
+[1863.42 --> 1863.62]  Yeah.
+[1863.68 --> 1868.58]  And just say that, you know, Node is going to be a platform for HTTP development.
+[1868.92 --> 1869.10]  Right.
+[1869.20 --> 1869.72]  One and two.
+[1870.16 --> 1870.40]  Right.
+[1870.40 --> 1877.76]  And there will be mechanism that's built into the H2 specification that you can actually run H1 and H2 on the same port.
+[1878.46 --> 1880.40]  You know, you can have a server that will offer both.
+[1880.58 --> 1883.34]  And the client negotiates which one they want to use per socket.
+[1884.28 --> 1888.12]  We're not quite there yet in terms of how we're going to figure out how to make that work in Node.
+[1888.22 --> 1893.04]  But, you know, that's a key capability of H2.
+[1893.04 --> 1902.16]  So if we are going to fully implement that spec, that means also implementing that upgrade path, which means we can't necessarily get rid of H1.
+[1902.40 --> 1902.56]  Yeah.
+[1902.56 --> 1905.76]  And the fact of the matter is we can't get rid of anything in core.
+[1906.16 --> 1906.32]  Right.
+[1906.44 --> 1911.88]  I mean, you see that, you know, in things like the recent buffer discussions, whether we deprecate, you know, things.
+[1911.88 --> 1923.04]  We just we can't get rid of things that are that are so critical to what the Node ecosystem is doing that even having a deprecation message in there is problematic.
+[1923.04 --> 1923.48]  Yeah.
+[1924.00 --> 1930.28]  And something so fundamental as H1, I don't think we would ever get to a point where we would fully deprecate.
+[1930.82 --> 1947.34]  I'll retract that deprecation statement and say it more like instead, because when we were having that discussion about the options of deprecating things was not to put it in where it was a response, but more so in like documentation where it was frowned upon.
+[1947.66 --> 1949.46]  You know, it wasn't forced.
+[1949.46 --> 1952.90]  And then you're obviously so much more closer.
+[1952.98 --> 1954.60]  So I'm just outside of looking in.
+[1954.70 --> 1960.38]  But I'm thinking, like, if it's so deliberate to choose it, wouldn't it make sense or potentially make sense?
+[1960.44 --> 1964.90]  And this would be a decision you will eventually make to offer it as a module instead.
+[1965.16 --> 1968.64]  That way you can have a clean break when it is time to move over.
+[1968.78 --> 1972.58]  I'm just thinking if it's that deliberate, why not make it that deliberate where it's actually a require?
+[1972.58 --> 1976.74]  Well, I mean, it's a legitimate, you know, it's a legitimate question.
+[1976.74 --> 1980.72]  And that's actually one of the decisions the CTC has to make.
+[1980.86 --> 1983.52]  You know, I have an opinion on it.
+[1983.90 --> 1988.96]  But, you know, unfortunately, it's not just all up to me.
+[1989.60 --> 1990.02]  Right.
+[1990.10 --> 1997.22]  We have to listen to, you know, folks like Sam and Thomas and the ecosystem and figure out what is the right approach to take.
+[1997.22 --> 2002.70]  And we're not close enough yet to reaching that decision.
+[2003.08 --> 2003.28]  Right.
+[2003.34 --> 2014.32]  So I'm being very deliberate in how I write this code to ensure that if we need to pull it out, if that ends up being the right thing to do, we can.
+[2015.44 --> 2018.92]  You know, it's not making breaking changes to any existing part of node.
+[2018.92 --> 2024.58]  It is a very distinct separate code path from the existing H1 stuff.
+[2026.04 --> 2032.66]  You know, it would be a native module, you know, and all the things that come along with native modules, you know, so we'd have, you know, there would be some considerations there.
+[2032.88 --> 2033.06]  Right.
+[2033.24 --> 2035.54]  But if we needed to, we could.
+[2035.54 --> 2042.16]  And, you know, like I said, I have my opinion on what it ultimately should do, but it's up to the community.
+[2042.34 --> 2048.94]  It's up to, you know, the core team to make that decision for whatever reasons they want to make that decision.
+[2050.36 --> 2050.76]  Cool.
+[2050.84 --> 2055.02]  Let's close with any closing thoughts you might have on this subject.
+[2055.12 --> 2059.34]  Anything I might not have asked you that you're like, I got to put this out there before we close down.
+[2059.50 --> 2062.54]  Oh, you know, we've really covered, you know, a lot of it.
+[2062.54 --> 2070.94]  I mean, kind of the big thing I would say is, you know, if the folks are really passionate about this, we need to hear from users.
+[2071.08 --> 2080.02]  We need to hear from folks that, you know, that, you know, have ideas on how to implement it, right, or how to test or what kind of applications they want to build with this thing.
+[2080.48 --> 2084.78]  I've had a lot of conversations so far, but, you know, it's a big ecosystem.
+[2085.00 --> 2086.30]  There's a lot of people out there.
+[2086.30 --> 2086.60]  Right.
+[2086.60 --> 2092.72]  You know, so, you know, we can't have enough input on that direction.
+[2093.28 --> 2101.92]  That information, that input is what's going to help drive that decision of what's going to happen with this code, right?
+[2102.52 --> 2104.22]  What's the best way for people to reach out to you then?
+[2104.32 --> 2106.34]  Like, if it's feedback you want, is it you personally?
+[2106.52 --> 2107.82]  Is it, should they go to the repo?
+[2107.82 --> 2109.04]  Go to the repo.
+[2109.14 --> 2109.66]  Go to the repo.
+[2109.80 --> 2113.94]  Open issues, you know, for the folks that really want to, like, you know, get in there.
+[2114.06 --> 2115.42]  You know, pull requests are great.
+[2116.16 --> 2118.52]  I've been making, there's been a lot of churn in the code.
+[2118.62 --> 2121.84]  I've been getting in there and just, like, you know, hammering away at it for the past few weeks.
+[2121.96 --> 2122.42]  With the machete?
+[2122.84 --> 2123.54]  Yeah, pretty much.
+[2124.00 --> 2127.36]  People have been asking, you know, it's like, well, where are the two do so we know where to jump in?
+[2127.40 --> 2132.74]  It's like, well, I don't even know what the heck I'm going to do tomorrow, let alone what they recommend you jump in on.
+[2133.20 --> 2136.06]  But, you know, it's starting to stabilize more.
+[2136.06 --> 2143.02]  And there are very distinct areas that I know for sure, you know, tests, performance benchmarks, you know, those kinds of things.
+[2143.16 --> 2143.34]  Right.
+[2143.48 --> 2147.20]  That, you know, absolutely could use some help on.
+[2147.94 --> 2151.04]  So anyone that wants to jump in, just go to that repo.
+[2151.26 --> 2152.16]  Take a look at what's happening.
+[2152.16 --> 2153.06]  Testing performance, things like that.
+[2153.12 --> 2153.36]  Right.
+[2153.52 --> 2153.76]  Okay.
+[2153.76 --> 2157.56]  Well, we'll link up the repo in the show notes for this.
+[2157.86 --> 2163.38]  And, James, thanks so much for, we're closing down, literally closing down Node Interactive.
+[2163.66 --> 2163.76]  Oh, yeah.
+[2164.26 --> 2166.48]  So thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.
+[2166.86 --> 2167.16]  Oh, yeah.
+[2167.16 --> 2168.46]  It's important that we have this conversation.
+[2168.62 --> 2171.94]  So I know that the Node community is going to appreciate what you have to say.
+[2172.12 --> 2172.44]  Right on.
+[2172.60 --> 2172.82]  Right on.
+[2172.88 --> 2173.28]  Thanks, man.
+[2173.44 --> 2173.66]  Thanks.
+[2176.16 --> 2181.90]  Thanks again to our friends at the Linux Foundation and the Node Foundation for working with us on this project,
+[2181.90 --> 2185.94]  as well as our friends at IBM and Strongloop for sponsoring this podcast series.
+[2186.26 --> 2187.44]  It was a blast being there.
+[2187.70 --> 2188.88]  We'll be there again next year.
+[2188.94 --> 2192.16]  So look out for us in 2017 at Node Interactive.
+[2192.54 --> 2196.94]  If you want to hear more JavaScript-focused podcasts from Changelog, check out JS Party,
+[2197.18 --> 2202.54]  our new live weekly show with Michael Rogers, Alex Sexton, and Rachel White.
+[2202.94 --> 2205.38]  Head to changelog.com slash JS Party.
+[2205.78 --> 2206.40]  Click subscribe.
+[2206.96 --> 2207.78]  Don't miss the show.
+[2208.38 --> 2209.20]  And thanks for listening.
+[2211.90 --> 2211.96]  And thanks.
+[2215.22 --> 2220.42] 問 you.
+[2220.82 --> 2221.04]  We'll see you next time in the就 intangable episode.
+[2221.06 --> 2221.56]  Bye.
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