0:06

This is JS Party,

0:09

your weekly celebration of JavaScript

0:11

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as possible. Fly makes it easy.

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Learn how at fly.io. Okay,

0:34

it's party time y'all. What's

0:47

up friends and party people. I'm

0:49

here with my good friend over

0:52

at SpeakEasy founding engineer George Hadar.

0:54

SpeakEasy is the complete platform for

0:56

great API developer experience. They help

0:58

you produce SDKs, Terraform providers, docs,

1:01

and more. George take me on

1:03

a journey through this process. Help

1:05

me understand exactly what it takes

1:08

to generate an SDK for an

1:10

API at the quality level required

1:12

for good user experience, good dev

1:15

experience. The reality is the larger

1:17

your API becomes, the more you

1:19

want to support users that want

1:22

to use your API. To

1:24

do that, your instinct will be to ship

1:28

a library, a package, and what we've been

1:30

calling an SDK. There's a lot of effort

1:32

involved in taking an API that lives in

1:34

the world and creating a piece of software

1:36

that can talk to that API. Building

1:39

SDKs by hand is a significant investment

1:41

and a lot of large companies might

1:44

pour a lot of money into that

1:46

effort to create something that's

1:48

like approaches good developer

1:50

experience. Another group of

1:53

a more growing group of companies

1:56

will rely on tooling

1:58

by code generators. they're

2:00

very interested in like

2:02

once you make the decision to use a code

2:04

generator, you're kind of forfeiting some of your own

2:06

opinions and what you think a

2:08

good developer experiences because you're going to delegate

2:11

that to a code generator to give you

2:13

an SDK that you think

2:15

users will enjoy using. So

2:17

there's various open source tooling out there

2:19

that can do a version of what

2:22

you do. How much research have you all

2:24

put into doing it at a quality level

2:26

that is enterprise API ready? One

2:28

of the customers that we've spoken to didn't

2:31

have that experience. So they went to code

2:33

generators, they tried to point them at their

2:35

APIs and tell them give me an SDK

2:38

and the outcome wasn't great. Like it didn't

2:40

support some of the features in open API

2:42

or the code that it

2:45

was generating was not idiomatic type script.

2:47

We didn't boldly think we were going

2:50

to solve this better than everyone else.

2:52

The reality is that that's where we

2:55

came in. We surveyed all the things

2:57

that have happened in JavaScript over the

2:59

last few years, all the incredible projects

3:01

like for example and the web platform

3:03

APIs that are now like broadly supported

3:05

like the fetch API, the web streams

3:07

API. We kind of saw this and

3:10

said there's a great opportunity to mix

3:12

all these together and create the best

3:14

experience you can get out of a

3:16

code generator for users. Okay,

3:18

so paint a picture. What's a good

3:20

next step? What can people expect when

3:22

they go to speakeasyapi.dev? If

3:25

you're coming across SpeakEasy today and you want

3:27

to use it, you will go through the

3:29

onboarding flow and at some point, you're going

3:31

to give us an open API document. That's

3:34

your description of your API and we're going

3:36

to take that document and turn it into

3:38

an SDK of your choice. You're going to

3:41

get to pick which language is your first

3:43

language. That's the one you'll get for free.

3:45

And at that point, you can publish that

3:47

package to the world to use.

3:49

That's going to be yours. You

3:52

get to license that however you want and

3:54

then carry on from there. The way you

3:56

iterate now is you keep changing

3:58

your open API documents. So as

4:00

you develop your backend, you're going to

4:02

produce alongside that the open API document

4:04

with any updates over time and evolve

4:06

that. And as you're evolving that, we're

4:09

generating the SDKs and publishing them for

4:11

you. And that also

4:13

includes rich documentation that goes with them.

4:15

So we're asking you to put a

4:17

lot of effort just into describing your

4:19

API. And we're going to do a

4:22

lot of the heavy lifting that follows

4:24

from that. Okay, so as George mentioned,

4:26

go to speak easy API.dev. You

4:29

get your first SDK for free. So

4:32

cool. Once again, speak easy

4:34

API.dev. Hello, party people. Hello,

4:45

party people. I'm Jared,

4:49

your internet

4:54

friend.

5:00

And today, I hope not to bore you.

5:03

We will be talking about the

5:05

boring JavaScript stack

5:07

with Kelvin. Omar

5:09

Ashone, maybe

5:12

not a nine out of 10, like I just did

5:14

in pre-production, but maybe an eight out of 10 Kelvin.

5:17

Welcome to JS party. Thank you,

5:19

Jared. I'm really happy to be here.

5:21

I'm a big fan of the show.

5:23

So yeah, thank you for having me. You

5:25

bet. And for go ahead and

5:27

land a 10 out of 10 on that last

5:29

name, so everybody knows how you actually say it.

5:31

Yeah, for sure. So my name is Kelvin, Omar

5:33

Ashone. It's really African. So

5:36

I don't fault anyone for knowing how to

5:38

pronounce it. So that's why I go by

5:40

the initials KOO online because my last two

5:42

names, it's a nightmare to pronounce.

5:46

KOO, I like it. I

5:49

like it. And you have a big banner

5:51

on your Twitter slash

5:53

X profiles. Ship less

5:56

JavaScript, the boring

5:58

JS stack. You want to tell

6:01

us about this project and what

6:03

you're up to and why you think it's interesting. Yeah,

6:05

for sure. Thank you so much. First

6:07

of all, I started

6:09

building the boring stack way

6:12

before people now know it

6:15

as a boring stack. So I started working on it as

6:17

my answer to the very

6:20

shiny but not so

6:22

productive world of modern JavaScript full

6:24

stack web development. So at

6:26

the time I was building a platform called

6:29

salescales.com. I still work on the platform. It's

6:31

a place where I educate JavaScript developers that's

6:33

beautiful stack apps using the sales

6:35

framework or whatnot. So at the time

6:38

I was building the app with

6:40

like a sales API and a

6:42

Noxed SPA, which is like

6:44

a view meta framework. So the

6:46

promise I had from Node.js was

6:49

like using JavaScript across the stack,

6:51

more language, it makes everything really

6:53

faster. But having to have

6:55

the separation of concern with two repos,

6:58

that's two code bases, double routing

7:00

because I have to route in

7:02

view router, then I route in

7:04

my API. Don't get me started

7:06

with authentication nightmare because how

7:09

many people really invalidate

7:11

their JWT really well. So

7:14

I was doubting the whole promise

7:16

of SP. I was like, okay, yeah, this is good. And

7:19

especially when they are loading spinners where when

7:21

there is a page, for example, on

7:24

salescales.com is a cross-expage. The

7:26

page is useless without the courses

7:28

list. But with the

7:30

current status quo, I will have to have like

7:32

a loading spinner. Why do I

7:34

need a loading spinner? Why can't the page

7:36

just load with the courses because without the

7:39

courses, there is no courses page. But

7:41

that's the status quo of modern

7:43

SPAs, right? So I got dissatisfied

7:46

as I'm looking for alternative. I

7:48

found InertiaJS, which is this thing that

7:50

came out from the level of the world because of course, they

7:53

wanted to make out

7:55

the tool. John at Arrhenic had the same problem I have,

7:58

which is like I want to build a better. modern

8:00

SPS, but I don't want to sit with

8:02

API. Can't my backend drive

8:04

the SPA experience? And

8:07

that's what the Boring Stack is all about. It's where you

8:09

have this solid MVC

8:12

stable, predictable web framework,

8:14

and then you can bring in

8:16

your React, your Vue as well

8:18

as your pages. So you

8:20

get the SPA experience, your routing is on the

8:22

server, the data the page

8:25

needs come with the page. Each

8:27

time the users request the page,

8:29

so there's no loading spinners at

8:31

all. So in a nutshell,

8:33

that's what it is. There's other things that goes into it, but

8:35

that's just what it is. That's what it is. Cool,

8:39

so you mentioned Sales Casts

8:41

is your site, and Sales

8:43

JS is the node

8:45

framework. This goes way back. I remember sales

8:47

came out, was it 2011, 2012? I

8:50

mean, this has been around for a long

8:52

time. Yeah, very boring and stable. What's the

8:54

history of that project? Who

8:57

made it and how's it maintained? Tell

8:59

us more about sales, because I haven't heard

9:02

about it much lately. Yeah, and you're going

9:04

to be hearing more about it because of

9:06

yours truly. So

9:10

I came from a lot of PHP backgrounds.

9:13

So I can remember vividly one semester when

9:15

I was in uni. So we

9:17

had this break and I was like, you know what? I'm going to

9:19

learn to start web development with a

9:21

lot of PHP. It was

9:23

like my project for the break.

9:26

So I learned PHP, I learned Lava, I

9:28

really loved it. But over

9:30

time, I discovered that I liked JavaScript more. And

9:32

with Node.js, there was no need to use any

9:34

other language. I could just learn one language and

9:36

use it across the stack. So

9:39

at the time, Express was everyone's

9:41

favorite. It still is in terms

9:43

of low-level API stuff. But I

9:46

wanted the same Lava experience. I

9:48

looked around in the Node.js world, I found

9:51

a couple, I tried a couple, I found

9:53

Nest, not next, Nest. I found

9:55

Adonis. Then I found this

9:57

little obscure thing everybody deemed outdated. thing

10:00

called sales and I kind of

10:02

liked it because it was just

10:04

JavaScript. There was no magic. Everything

10:06

was just JavaScript. It spoke to me

10:09

and I was like, you know what?

10:11

I think I like this. I'll go with it.

10:13

So at the time I was a consultant on

10:15

a project to build their web service and I

10:17

picked sales for that project and I was so

10:19

fast in delivering everything.

10:22

So because of that, I formed a great love

10:24

for the project and then I started looking online

10:27

and no one was talking about it. I was like,

10:29

why is no one talking about it? And I saw

10:31

like, okay, people think it's outdated. It's still at one

10:33

point X and I was like,

10:36

okay, okay. Not if I can help

10:38

it. So I started writing about it. I created

10:40

Salesforce to come to teach it. I created

10:42

a community, Salesforce community on Discord

10:44

to help people with the problems and

10:46

all that. So I was doing this on

10:48

my own. Then Mike McNeil,

10:50

who is the creator of Sales, noticed

10:53

the work I was doing and

10:55

over the years we started talking. And

10:58

fun fact, he actually pushed a

11:00

gig one time my way, which

11:03

was very lucrative in terms of money because

11:05

these folks wanted to build like a sales

11:08

powered web app

11:10

because he didn't have the time and everything pushed it my

11:12

way because of the work I've been doing. Then

11:14

I also organized Salesforce. I've done it for three years.

11:16

This will be the fourth year. This will be the first

11:19

ever physical one, which I'm excited about. And

11:21

last year Salesforce, Mike McNeil announced

11:23

me as the lead maintainer. So I'm calling it the

11:25

lead maintainer of the project. People

11:28

could have more trust because the

11:30

project powered the boring stack and it powers

11:33

two of my products already, salesforce.com and Hackfish,

11:35

which is one I just launched. And

11:38

it may or may not have something to do with

11:40

another secret project I'm working on, which I couldn't name

11:42

Project 50. So

11:44

yeah, it's very, very much alive. People use it.

11:47

Fun fact, Postman uses it. Paystack, which

11:49

is like the stripe of Africa, uses

11:51

it as well. And

11:53

I know a lot of companies who have

11:55

taken it off, who have been using it

11:57

for decades, even in Europe and elsewhere, even

11:59

banks. an airline, it's just

12:01

being used and it's calm and it's boring.

12:04

So people don't talk about it much, but my job

12:06

is to make sure that people talk about it much.

12:11

Okay. I like it.

12:13

I like it. So you found it, you liked

12:15

it, it spoke to you. It was

12:17

a small community. It was a long

12:20

standing, boring project. As you said that

12:23

it didn't have much magic, but all the

12:25

things that you need to build your projects

12:27

and you slowly started contributing and eventually now

12:29

you are lead maintainer of

12:31

SalesJS from which you

12:33

build on top of for the boring stack and

12:35

you're building products on top of this. You mentioned

12:38

Hagfish, real quickly

12:40

mentioned what that is and what

12:42

you're up to with that. So hagfish.io is

12:44

because, you know, right now I work full time

12:47

for myself. I don't have a nine to five

12:49

job. I'm a full time indie hacker entrepreneur. And

12:52

before now I've always, I

12:54

do a show called TQIT. So I have a lot

12:56

of ways where I need invoices. And

12:58

I also have a lot of ways where people send me

13:00

invoices because I hire contractors from all over the place. So

13:03

I always wanted a way to manage it. So

13:05

Hagfish is my, I know there are other platforms

13:07

out there, but it's the way

13:09

I want to work in terms of like, you know, if

13:12

I have to send invoices before, okay, I go to Google

13:14

docs, create the invoice in your doc, as

13:16

well as PDF, go to my email clients,

13:18

send emails, and then I don't know where

13:20

the invoice is anymore. But with

13:22

Hagfish, I get to see this one place

13:24

where I get to send my invoices and manage

13:27

them. And I automate the email and you

13:29

can send emails, your invoices as emails. You're

13:31

going to attach the PDF as well, which is

13:33

very important. And I have so much plans for

13:35

it, but for right now it's just an invoice

13:37

platform. And yeah, I've been

13:40

using it. I use it a lot. People also

13:42

send me invoices through the platform as well. And

13:44

it's all built with the Boring Stack. So it's

13:46

fun. That's cool. So what's

13:48

your primary income there? So you're,

13:50

you live in Nigeria, you are

13:52

full time indie hacker, making products,

13:55

invoicing people, how do you make your living? Yeah.

13:58

So a couple of ways. Currently

14:00

the most lucrative way is the partnership

14:02

I've had for Project 50. So

14:05

online I announced that I partnered

14:07

with Century and also Render

14:10

for the project. So their partners in

14:12

terms of like Century is the APM

14:14

partner Render is a company I've used

14:17

for years for deployment. So all my

14:19

products are deployed on Render. So

14:21

it's a really good for them to come on board for

14:23

Project 50. They know what the project is, but the rest of

14:25

the world don't until July 3rd. It's going to kind of make

14:28

it secret. So that

14:30

has been very, very good in terms of

14:32

like, you know, income. And the

14:34

idea is because salesguys.com, I sell courses

14:36

there. So the idea is to grow

14:39

that as well and also see how

14:41

Project 50 is a good bet. I

14:44

think, and of course, Century and

14:46

Render also think so that's why they are partners.

14:48

It's going to really turn out really, really well.

14:50

And apart from that, I have TKYT sponsorship. TKYT

14:53

is my show, Teach, Go, Win, Your Thing on

14:55

YouTube, where I get people to come teach me

14:57

what they built or they're working on for like

14:59

an hour. That also gets sponsorship. In fact, when

15:01

I decided not to do 9 to 5, that

15:04

kept the light on for like

15:06

months before Project 50 kicked in.

15:09

So it's more of like subscription

15:11

to my products, TKYT sponsorships and

15:14

whatever way for your 50 is

15:16

going to bring in constraints. Yeah. That's cool.

15:37

What's up friends and party

15:39

people? I'm talking to you

15:41

today about our friends over

15:43

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15:45

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15:47

on most comprehensive user management

15:50

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15:52

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15:56

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15:58

dashboards to authenticate. and

16:00

manage your users. And I'm here with

16:02

Clerk CEO, Colin S and

16:54

it's great. Right? Like, and we

16:56

had a question of like, why, like, why

16:59

didn't that exist for Auth really? And so

17:01

for Clerk, you drop in our components and

17:03

it's really just a complete like end-to-end experience

17:05

right out of the box with that

17:07

high degree of polish, high degree of professionalism

17:10

that I think users have really come

17:12

to expect these days. Okay. So

17:14

easy to drop in components. Really

17:16

beautiful UI, by the way. I love it.

17:19

Very nice. Clerk must be the most welcomed

17:21

easy button when it comes to authentication, good

17:23

UI, and all that, right? One of the

17:25

most striking things is still to this day,

17:27

I think Clerk might be the only Auth

17:30

solution that comes with a user profile screen.

17:32

And it's so insane to think about because

17:34

you need the user profile screen because that's

17:36

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17:39

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17:41

it ties back into the sign-in. And so

17:43

it's like we had to do that to

17:45

be able to offer that experience. But it's

17:48

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17:50

on the user profile yet most Auth solutions

17:52

don't include it. And it's just this weird

17:54

bizarre thing that never made sense to us.

17:56

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18:01

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19:01

So Project 50, you've been working on it, but

19:03

it's not out yet. You said it comes out in

19:05

July, so you're not gonna talk about what it is. But

19:07

it's in partnership with Sentry and Render, is that what

19:09

you said? Yes. How did that come together? That seems

19:11

like a motley crew of people. Yeah,

19:14

so I got the idea for the project, and

19:18

first of all, I use Render, right? So that means

19:20

I have like, you know, the Render API,

19:22

and I use Render. And then I use Sentry,

19:24

and I use Render. So when I got the

19:27

idea for Project 50, I found a way for

19:29

them to partner. I reached out to

19:31

them, made an offer, and the same thing

19:33

I did for Sentry. I even have another partner on board

19:35

base. I don't know if you know them. They are like

19:37

security infrastructure, or like making sure all

19:39

your secrets are secure and all what not. So

19:42

they are the third partners, right? They

19:44

may or may not be two other partners, which I will

19:46

announce, may or may not announce later on. But I will

19:48

just say that I told them the vision of the project,

19:50

what is going to happen, and then I told them, I'm

19:52

gonna make a new project, and then I'm gonna make a

19:54

new partner. So I told them the vision of the project,

19:56

what it's gonna be about. partners

20:00

are subsidizing what I was supposed to charge for

20:02

the projects. Cool. Yeah.

20:06

How do you pitch that to them? Like, hey, I got an

20:08

idea. It's going to make money. It's going to be awesome. You

20:10

should sponsor me to build this. I mean, I think a lot

20:12

of people would love to have that set up, but you've got

20:14

it. How'd you get it? Yeah, I

20:17

don't. So it's so let's just

20:19

say, first of all, I never

20:21

knew they would go for it. Okay. I

20:24

wanted them to go for it, but it was so novel. There was nothing to

20:26

eat though. It's the premium vaporware

20:28

because there's nothing to paint for.

20:31

But I have a sizable

20:34

reputation online. So

20:37

I have a, I think my work already

20:39

kind of spoke for me in terms

20:42

of, okay, you could trust this person. Right.

20:45

And then I was like, so I was banking on that.

20:48

And of course I want Project 50 to be successful

20:50

because it's going to be one of

20:52

my biggest income stream if it works. So I

20:54

gave them the pitch. The offer was, I

20:57

think for them to go for it, it was too

20:59

good. They couldn't say no, because

21:01

they don't have any, probably don't have too much

21:03

of a downside because it's going to be like

21:05

more marketing for them. And the way I'm going

21:08

to, you know, do any partnership works, but

21:10

partially it's a good marketing spend. All

21:13

right. So that was just it. I just,

21:16

I just threw a hole in me, I

21:18

guess. And the universe

21:20

caught it. Yeah.

21:24

Well, there's an old saying that says you have

21:26

not because you ask not. And it sounds like

21:28

you have because you ask. Oh yeah. And

21:31

I'm excited. I mean, you got me intrigued. I

21:33

want to know what Project 50 is. I

21:35

want you to come back in July and

21:37

let me know because this is

21:39

very, very interesting. But this is too exciting.

21:41

We need to get more boring. Let's go back

21:44

to boring JavaScript stack.

21:47

Okay. Give people the

21:49

sales pitch for Sales JS

21:51

because you're all in on this and you love

21:53

it. I heard the very little magic

21:55

part, but why would somebody else maybe

21:58

consider using sales as a basis

22:00

for their web app? Yeah, for

22:03

sure. So primarily, good software, good

22:05

technology stay in the background and

22:07

just let you be awesome. So

22:11

what sales have been able to do for me is

22:13

to stay in the background and let

22:15

me just focus on my business logic.

22:17

With technologies today, with the other competitors

22:19

out there, I know it's a lot

22:21

of pain because I've seen people move from

22:23

the other way to the boring

22:26

stack. You know, like just the other

22:28

day I was embodying someone from like next

22:30

to the boring stack because it just, it

22:32

works. Like what I've been yelling for anyone

22:34

who uses it is that it's predictable. And

22:37

that's what good software is to me because

22:39

our life's already hard when we have to

22:41

solve these different problems in our business domain.

22:44

You don't want to be solving frameworks problems because

22:46

the framework is supposed to make your life easy.

22:48

So when you have to find the framework and

22:50

the mental model don't work for you, you have

22:52

to always guess if it's going to work. That

22:54

don't work for me. So sales is just boring.

22:57

Like anytime I'm writing sales, I'm writing JavaScript

22:59

and it's just behind. I know the whole

23:01

thing, which part is sales, which part is

23:03

not sales? It's all JavaScript. So for the

23:06

longest time I've worked with sales, it has

23:08

made me a better JavaScript developer. All

23:10

right, so if you want a robust

23:13

MVC framework that will let you build

23:15

full stack apps, you definitely

23:17

have to use sales for your

23:19

back end. Right? And

23:22

with the way the boring stack is set up, if you want

23:24

to build full stack application, it's a no brainer because with

23:26

the boring stack, you are 90%

23:28

of the time in Vue React or Velt, which is where most

23:30

people want to be like your UI, then

23:32

for your back end, all you are doing

23:35

is sending queries, doing back end business logic,

23:37

you're also taking care of your authorization and

23:39

authentication or in the back end. It's just

23:42

that, except you are being paid

23:44

by the hour, you

23:46

don't have any reason to not use

23:49

sales because it just gonna let you

23:51

not spend the whole time you spend

23:53

debugging framework stuff. It's just

23:55

stable. Love it, love it. Unless

23:57

you get paid by the hour, in

23:59

which case maybe. you wanna go slow. If

24:01

you wanna go fast, go boring. Go

24:03

sales. I think that's a

24:05

very good sales pitch. I'll stop now with

24:08

my puns. But let's break down the boring

24:10

stack again. You mentioned at the top, let's

24:12

go piece by piece. So you start with

24:14

sales and then you add inertia, which you

24:16

mentioned a little bit. Then there's tail wind

24:18

and then you kinda pick your front end

24:21

framework or view library, view, react, spelt, et

24:23

cetera. Can you talk through each component? We've

24:25

covered sales but inertia, how it works, what

24:27

part does it bring to the stack and

24:29

why do you think it's boring enough for

24:31

your boring stack? Yeah, for sure. So

24:33

inertia is more like a protocol. In fact, you

24:35

won't even notice it there. So

24:38

it's like swapping your routing, your

24:40

react router, your view router with

24:42

inertia. All right, so

24:44

it uses HTTP with a lot of

24:46

headers. In fact, you can really

24:49

implement an adapter for both the back end and the

24:51

front end, but there's already adapters for the front

24:53

ends, right? So I hired to build an adapter

24:55

for sales, which work really, really

24:57

well. So it's a tiny layer that lets

24:59

you, so when you click a link, like

25:02

an initial link, right? Normally it's supposed to

25:04

be a full page request and refresh

25:07

and stuff. So when you click the

25:09

link, inertia will hijack that click, for example, and

25:12

make an Ajax request to the back end.

25:14

The back end already understand how to interpret

25:16

this. So when it says that, okay, whoa,

25:18

this is an initial request, it's going to

25:20

send the name of the component, which

25:23

is the page you're navigating

25:25

to, right? So it's that

25:27

layer that glues the back end on the

25:29

front end in one code base that makes

25:32

it redundant to have like a separate client

25:34

side routing and a separate server side routing.

25:37

Yeah, it is just mind blowing. It's a

25:39

simple tech. It is so boring because in a

25:41

lot of other world, there's this talk of, okay,

25:43

should we use inertia or live wire? It's

25:46

not an approach to approach comparison because

25:48

inertia is just boring. It

25:50

is, anyone could write the

25:52

back end adapter. It's that simple, right?

25:55

But all it asks is this glue.

25:57

That's okay. Let me have my SP

25:59

experience. but let my server side controls all

26:01

the business logic. So when

26:04

you need a page, it's going to

26:06

send the name of the component

26:08

of the page and also the data the page

26:10

need as props, which is brilliant use of the

26:12

prop interface. So anytime the page

26:15

loads, it loads with the data. So

26:17

no more loading spinners as

26:19

all gone. No more flash

26:21

of on style or authenticated content

26:23

because like I've always said in

26:26

examples, you visit this website where

26:28

you logged in, right? Because everything

26:30

is done client side, you set the sign

26:32

in and login or sign up button.

26:35

Even though you're logging in for like two seconds

26:37

before the JavaScript kicks in, you

26:39

then see that, oh, this is my

26:41

avatar, right? But with Inertia, you don't

26:43

see that because the page is authenticated in

26:46

the server side. So it's always going to call me

26:48

in the state as it's supposed to be. It's just

26:51

mind blowing and simple. That's

26:53

very cool. I had not heard

26:55

of Inertia JS. So this is

26:57

built for Laravel in the

26:59

PHP world, but it's generic. And so you can

27:01

basically adapt it to sales, which is what you

27:03

have done for your boring stack, right? That's

27:06

what I've done. Love it. Love it. OK,

27:08

you picked Tailwind as well. We talk about

27:10

Tailwind a lot. So

27:13

not so much that's new there, probably for me

27:15

and for the listener. But maybe why

27:17

did you pick Tailwind? And is this the

27:20

kind of thing that you could maybe ignore

27:22

or swap out if you don't want that

27:24

particular aspect of the stack? Yeah,

27:26

for sure. Definitely. So if

27:29

you really want to build a

27:31

stable web application, you don't

27:33

want the gymnastics of maintaining CSS.

27:36

Because when I started using Tailwind,

27:39

I was like, where has this been all my

27:41

life? First of all, I hated it because what

27:43

is this monstrosity with all the claimed classes? But

27:46

when you get in the flow and the groove, you'll be

27:48

like, this should be the way we build

27:50

websites, like styling, right? So

27:52

I picked it because it was

27:54

just stable. So

27:57

the stack comes with the Win already set up. Just.

28:00

go put them classes in there. And you all

28:02

go in, so you don't have to maintain it.css

28:04

file or do less or size or whatever you

28:06

want to do or CSS in JS. But the

28:08

cool thing is, if you don't want that, everything

28:11

in the stack, except for sales,

28:13

is swappable. So if you don't want to view, use

28:16

React as well. If you don't want to tell, you

28:18

do whatever you want for your styling. But

28:20

by default, we have opinion. I

28:22

have opinion on how you style CSS, because,

28:24

like I said, just have you being paid

28:27

by the hour. Why wouldn't you

28:29

use Tailwind? I just move fast, because it's

28:31

just literally classes. And most

28:34

people like it. So most people that are like

28:36

me, that like Tailwind, would definitely feel right at

28:38

home with the stack out of the box. But

28:40

you can swap it if you want, because the

28:42

code is all yours, anyway. Are

28:44

there any open source, boring

28:46

stack, web apps that people

28:48

can go read through and see exactly how

28:51

one works? For sure. So

28:53

the way the boring stack works

28:55

is that I provide templates. So

28:57

for now, we have the MeLu template. So because unlike

29:00

most frameworks, I don't

29:03

feel that when someone scaffolds a

29:05

project in JavaScript land, we

29:07

see a counter. I don't think that's

29:09

very good use of our

29:11

time. Because in other ecosystems, you get

29:13

like a full blown authentication, like authenticated

29:16

app. You have models in there

29:19

and everything. So we have templates

29:22

in the boring stack. So when you want MPS create

29:24

sales, the project name, dash, dash,

29:26

dash, view, you will see, you

29:28

will get a full template. So

29:31

if you choose view for today, the

29:33

view template is more up to date

29:35

react. I'm still here to get to

29:37

like, you know, but you get like

29:39

a react based boring stack app, but

29:41

you won't get the auth yet until

29:43

I work on it. So let's assume

29:45

you're using view, you get authentication, authorization,

29:47

and also auth with Google. So

29:50

if you want to look at the app right now, you

29:52

just look at the MeLu view template, which

29:54

is on the boring stack repository. That would be

29:57

get other cons slash sales cache, HQ slash boring

29:59

stack. Then. templates that you see all the

30:01

templates. They're all real code that you could read.

30:03

I will understand how the stack works. What

30:06

about deploying a boring stack app? What

30:08

does that look like? Oh, it is.

30:10

Anywhere you could run node app.js, literally,

30:12

you could deploy there. So I have

30:15

people deploying of EPSs. I

30:17

personally deploy render, so the docs you see,

30:19

render, deploy. So I want to work on

30:21

more. So anywhere you

30:23

could run node app.js, literally, I'm not

30:25

even kidding. You could deploy the

30:27

boring stack app. So I'm thinking that's

30:29

almost like every hosting provider out there

30:31

that supports node.js. So wherever you want

30:33

to deploy is so simple. Because

30:36

sales is that simple, there's no

30:38

much orchestration needed. Just node app.js,

30:40

your app is live in

30:43

wherever you're deploying. What about Mac

30:45

and database connections, etc? Yeah, thank

30:47

you. I love that. So in

30:49

the boring stack, we use sales,

30:51

of course. And sales has

30:55

an ORM waterline, which is superb. I don't

30:57

know why we don't talk about it enough.

31:00

So it's a first party ORM in

31:02

sales, which lets you connect to any

31:04

database. You want MongoDB, Postgres, MySQL. I'm

31:06

working on a SQLite adapter, which I'm

31:08

going to reveal at your sconf anyways

31:11

next month. So for

31:14

database, in fact, one cool

31:16

thing is if you scaffold a new

31:18

boring stack app, sales

31:20

is very pragmatic, because we

31:23

don't have an opinion on what database issues.

31:25

I think database are too personal to be

31:27

like, okay, in this stack, we use SQLite

31:29

or in that stack, we use Postgres. No,

31:31

no, no, no, you don't have, you cannot

31:33

decide the data, the data need of a

31:35

project. So because of the

31:37

way waterline is, you could easily start

31:39

a boring stack app. And don't worry

31:41

about the database until you have to.

31:43

So we ship with something called sales

31:46

disk, which will act

31:48

like this development only

31:50

database layer, you use your

31:52

waterline query as default.

31:55

So you could use user dot find or

31:57

user dot create or whatever. When

32:00

it comes time for you to have real production

32:02

data, you just have to change one config, give

32:04

it the database adapter and the URL of

32:07

your database, and all your queries still the

32:09

same, and buffs your on code, you

32:11

just go. And one cool thing

32:13

I like is you could have

32:15

different models use different database in one sales.

32:18

I haven't had to do that, I had to do that just once

32:20

in a client's project, but if that's what

32:22

you want, you're like, okay, maybe my

32:25

users table, let it be on Postgres, my

32:28

older table should be on MongoDB for whatever reason.

32:30

Sales is that flexible, it

32:33

can handle it, it's just

32:35

beautiful to see. This

32:42

is a changelog news break. YouTuber,

32:45

Internet of Bugs, posted a

32:47

lengthy breakdown exposing Devon's creators,

32:49

Cognition Labs, for falsifying claims

32:52

about their world's first AI

32:54

software engineer. Devon was pitched

32:56

as a fully autonomous software

32:59

developer, and one of the

33:01

more impressive demos showed it

33:03

completing and getting paid for

33:05

freelance jobs on Upwork. Sound

33:08

too good to be true? It did

33:10

to Internet of Bugs, who says, quote,

33:13

I broke down the Devon Upwork video

33:15

frame by frame, and here I show

33:17

what Devon was supposed to do, what

33:19

it actually managed to do instead, and

33:21

how bad a job of that it

33:23

did. On the whole, that's

33:25

not surprising given the current state of generative

33:27

AI, and I wouldn't be bothering to debunk

33:30

it, except, one, the company lied

33:32

about what Devon could do in the video

33:34

description, and two, a

33:36

lot of people uncritically parroted the lie

33:38

all over the Internet, and three, that

33:41

caused a lot of non-technical people to

33:43

believe that AI might replace programmers soon,

33:45

end quote. Devon really did

33:47

garner a lot of attention, also known

33:49

as money, because of that demo. We

33:51

talked about it on our shows with

33:53

a healthy amount of skepticism, I think,

33:55

but I'm thankful their claims have been

33:57

debunked, and I hope we all give

33:59

cognition labs, the side-eye from here on out.

34:02

Exaggerating your development capabilities? Maybe

34:04

Devin really is human after

34:06

all. You just

34:09

heard one of our five

34:11

top stories from Monday's changelog

34:13

news. Subscribe to the podcast

34:15

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34:17

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34:25

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34:27

attention. Once again, that's changelog.com/news.

34:34

Why do you think sales isn't more popular than it

34:36

is? Like, why do you think that people don't use

34:39

it all that often? So two

34:41

things. One, I think it's

34:43

more of like a marketing thing, right? So

34:45

in tech Twitter, in the tech space, it's

34:47

all about the loud air, it's all about,

34:50

you know, we went to more conferences and

34:52

all that. Mike McNeil, currently

34:54

is the CEO of Fleet Device Management. So

34:56

he definitely has his hands filled with working

34:59

there, right? I'll be in the CEO, right? So that's

35:01

why I come in. So for

35:03

the longest time, Mike, definitely not interested

35:05

in what's shining or

35:08

popular, but I'm interested in because I think

35:10

the project deserves all the flowers. Right? So

35:12

the reason why it's not a popular, probably

35:14

because I haven't stepped in the same for

35:16

a while, because like I said, Mike is

35:18

just, Mike, so anytime we speak, he always

35:21

say like, you know, sales is the only

35:23

way it can build full stack JavaScript

35:26

application. And he's not the only one who

35:28

thinks so. Like I said, there are lots of companies. In

35:31

fact, just the other day, I

35:33

found out an Nigerian company who is using

35:35

sales, they are doing up to

35:38

72 billion Naira internal transaction,

35:40

they're like a fintech company per

35:42

month, using this boring

35:45

stuff. And they just casually told me about

35:47

it. And they said that they

35:49

wouldn't move, they wouldn't have moved faster if it

35:51

wasn't for sales. But oh, really? So

35:54

it's all about shiny. It's all about to know

35:56

who's the loudest out there. So that's why I'm

35:58

coming to help it. Because I think that's the

36:00

only thing piece when I talk about it and get more

36:02

people excited about it and really

36:05

get the word out there because the tech is

36:07

too good. And one thing that

36:09

always blows my mind, we are at 1.x in sales.

36:13

And I could tell you for free

36:15

that we are feature priority with any

36:18

other framework out there. I'm

36:20

not even kidding. But we're still at

36:22

1.x to tell you how stable because stability

36:25

is at the core of sales. Stability is

36:27

what Mike wanted. So at 1.x,

36:29

just think about what will happen if we are

36:31

too serious for. I

36:34

actually dream of those days. I can tell.

36:37

I can tell you're very into this. You do

36:39

a good job of being an advocate

36:41

for both sales and for this

36:43

combination of tooling. Where

36:46

do you see this going? I mean, if you cast

36:48

forward your efforts now, go a year,

36:50

two years, five years down the road,

36:52

what do you see in the boring

36:54

stack and sales feature? So I

36:56

see more adoption because I am very

36:58

entrepreneurial. In fact, I have something called

37:00

the African Indie Hackers Project

37:03

I'm working on, which is encouraging more people to build

37:05

products on the web and get paid for

37:07

it. So I get to see more people,

37:09

more indie hackers using sales and the boring

37:12

stack because it's just a

37:14

no-brainer because I've seen it both

37:16

ways. So even more enterprise companies

37:18

using sales because it's really the boring

37:20

stack. And of course sales, if you just want

37:22

back end. So I see more people

37:25

knowing about it and more people picking

37:27

it up as a no-brainer and as

37:29

a very modern

37:31

replacement for demand

37:33

stock or MongoDB Express

37:35

reaction. Anyone

37:38

using Express or demand stack

37:40

have no reason not to

37:42

use the boring stack. And

37:45

from what I've seen, more people

37:48

that are tired of the complexity of modern

37:50

web dev from things like next year's will

37:52

be coming to sale because like I said, people are already coming. Like

37:56

I have someone who was building their first product, they

37:58

were working with next year. They were

38:00

so frustrated and he's be able to do it. I got to

38:03

try the boring stuff. They set it up in a

38:05

day. Everything they've been building on, and they set it up

38:07

in a day, and it was

38:09

a little night and day difference for them,

38:11

and they loved it so much. So I

38:13

get to see people who want simplicity, because

38:15

I like to code, but I

38:17

don't want to spend hours coding. I just want to

38:19

do work for like an hour, and I get my

38:22

stuff done, and I'm gone. It's

38:24

because work should enable me to leave

38:26

as soon as possible. So my tools

38:29

should not keep me on my desk

38:31

for hours, just because I'm debugging something

38:33

specific. So there's some work. There's

38:35

going to be very much more adopted, and

38:37

what I want is my opinion is, I

38:40

don't want people building demo apps to

38:42

use the boring stack. I want people

38:44

shipping businesses. So agencies, they

38:47

want to ship for their clients. Businesses

38:49

that are, you know, they're building SaaS, freelancers,

38:53

and anyone that just want to ship stuff, like you don't

38:55

really care about the shiny, but they can also go from

38:58

the ship stuff. Yeah, I see them

39:00

using SaaS and loving it, because I love it. Well,

39:03

I think if people try it

39:05

out, they may love it as

39:07

well. What's the best way to

39:09

get started with this project? Yeah,

39:12

so quickly, if you get your hands

39:14

dirty, if you're like me, you want to see

39:16

something on your screen really quickly, just on MPX

39:18

Create Sails, here with

39:20

the, just on MPX Create Sails, you could

39:22

also pick the project name, and the,

39:25

with a view, React does that,

39:27

right? You could pick those. So

39:30

on MPX Create Sails, that's all, and you

39:32

can get started. You could also look at

39:34

the docs. So docs.salescars.com,

39:37

because I work on a ton

39:39

of open source projects, so we have this

39:42

unified docs at the sales cards company. So

39:44

go to docs.salescars.com, slash boring stack. Then

39:46

you get to see the docs, our nice

39:48

little mascot. So

39:51

fun fact, the mascot is a

39:53

manatee, which are the

39:55

gentle cows of the sea, if you

39:58

will. Very slow, very boring. So

40:01

that's why we picked that mask cut.

40:03

So we are taking this boring thing

40:05

really seriously, if you haven't noticed.

40:07

Not to be confused with a hippopotamus,

40:09

which is also in the water, but

40:11

not boring at all, right? Very

40:14

dangerous. Hippos. Yes.

40:17

Good choice, manatees. Manatees are awesome. That's

40:19

a great... Yeah. How'd you get that

40:22

artwork? Did you have dolly draw for you or did you

40:24

have a human draw for you? Yeah.

40:26

So, the designer was working with me for

40:28

like three, four years now. She does all

40:30

the logos. She's so good. So

40:33

she did that. Cool.

40:37

Very cool. The boring JavaScript

40:40

stack. Kelvin, this is all really interesting

40:42

stuff. I like how exciting you

40:45

make the boring things. I do also

40:47

think that choosing boring technologies serves people

40:49

well most of the time. And

40:52

we do find ourselves chasing yet

40:55

another shiny object too often. In

40:57

fact, around here at J's Party,

40:59

we're often covering the new frameworks. And most of

41:02

the time I say no because we've covered so

41:04

many frameworks. And

41:06

in fact, when I first heard from you, I was like,

41:08

I don't know, another stack. Should we talk about yet another

41:10

stack? But I'm like, well, this one has a little bit

41:12

different view of the world. It's trying to

41:14

be maybe your last stack that you

41:16

need for your business. Because if you

41:18

pick these tried and true tech, you

41:20

won't have to find yourself upgrading,

41:24

refactoring, rewriting, and migrating

41:26

to another stack

41:28

six months, 12 months, three years from now. Very

41:32

cool, Kelvin. Well, what's the best way to

41:34

connect with you and to connect with the

41:36

boring stack and say hi out there online?

41:38

Yeah, for sure. So I am most active

41:41

and I'm like very notorious on

41:44

ex Twitter. So you could

41:46

find me at Domino's underscore

41:48

Kelvin, Domino's underscore

41:50

Kelvin. And also you

41:52

could check out the docs because I

41:54

think the docs are quite good. They're

41:57

not perfect because there's still so much

41:59

to add. from the perspective of new

42:01

people coming into the stack. So

42:03

check out the docs, let me know how you hate it and

42:05

how you like it because I always want to make it better.

42:08

Then you could

42:11

also look forward to SalesConf Africa because I

42:13

am given a workshop. Migrating

42:15

for Murn to the Boeing stack is

42:18

by May 17th. So it's going to be live streamed.

42:20

So anyone can watch it from wherever they are in

42:22

the world. So it's going to be like this hands-on

42:25

thing because people are going to ask questions in real

42:27

time. If you have any questions online too, go also

42:29

bring it. So those are like the

42:31

ways. So first of all, just Twitter, then

42:34

also you could join the SalesConf community

42:36

Discord so you could ask questions. So

42:38

salesconf.com.chat will redirect you to the Discord

42:40

invite that you come in and bring

42:43

in a question. I like

42:45

to see fresh perspective because I've been

42:47

using this for like six, seven

42:50

years. So I definitely have bias

42:52

whether it's easy or not. So

42:54

bring your perspectives. I love

42:56

to hear them. Very good. Well,

42:58

Kelvin, send us all the links to

43:00

all those things you mentioned. I'll make

43:02

sure that everything gets into the show

43:04

notes so that our listener can click

43:06

through and connect the easy

43:09

way. Well, that is our show for

43:11

this week. Thank you for listening to the JS party on

43:14

behalf of Kelvin Omerichone and

43:16

the boring JS stack and

43:19

hagfish and sales cast, all

43:21

the things. Thanks for listening. We'll

43:23

talk to you on next. That

43:43

is JS party for this week. Thanks

43:45

for hanging with us. We

43:48

would love to get more awesome

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44:07

this. Thanks once again to our

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partners at fly.io, to our beat

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44:13

Cylinder and to our friends at Sentry.

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