Jun 05 2020 37 mins
Show Notes:
Links:
Justin Jackson Twitter
12 Monkeys
Full Transcript:
Ben:
As I was getting this morning and reading Twitter and just... Twitter. Something that's come up lately, and Justin Jackson has talked about this, and there's a couple other people who have talked about this. On Twitter this morning, it was being talked about. But that's the idea of staying in your lane.
Ben:
If you're a technologist, and typically your podcast is all about business or whatever. I'm just talking about us, right? Then you should stay in your lane and not talk about current events, whatever. People said that to Justin Jackson as he's been talking about equity and the environment. Some of the things that are concerns to him, and things that he likes to think about and talk about.
Ben:
I was thinking about that this morning, and I was like, "Well, we could talk about current events on our podcast. There's no reason why we couldn't." Then I thought, "Well, except that, you know what? Maybe this is just a nice break for people that just have too much news in their lives. They can turn to FounderQuest, reassured that they won't have to deal with all the garbage that's going on." We just talk about happy things here.
Josh:
This is the escape.
Starr:
I think we're probably not taking an official stance on the staying in your lane thing.
Josh:
No.
Starr:
Honestly, this is kind of my break, and I don't want to have arguments during it. I don't really want to debate serious topics right now, because everything is just on fire. I guess that's our way of saying that even though this seems to be the worst possible timeline. I read this morning that the monkeys stole the coronavirus samples from the lab and are running wild with them.
Josh:
Sounds legit.
Starr:
Which is the plot of a Terry Gillian movie. Yeah, yeah. If you haven't seen, what is it, 12 Monkeys, there you go-
Ben:
Oh, that's a good movie.
Starr:
Yeah, it is. I don't know. I guess this is to say, we're all affected by it, but we're not... I don't know.
Josh:
As much as we want to be.
Starr:
I see some people, and people are just plowing ahead with React is... Here's my hot take on React right now. It's like, nobody really wants to hear that right now. Maybe they do, I don't know. It's just hard.
Josh:
I've been blowing up our Twitter channel with hot takes lately.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah, Josh is all about the anti-React this week.
Josh:
Not really hot takes, but.
Starr:
Is that the anti-poke?
Josh:
Oh, yeah, you mean my blog? The blog thing?
Ben:
Yeah, the blog thing. That was pretty cool.
Josh:
Yeah, it's been... I don't know if you caught it, Starr, but I've been kind of just working on my blog a little bit. Playing around with things lately. I use Jekyll, but I hadn't updated it in a long time, so I migrated my assets and stuff to webpack and did some stuff to kind of modernize a little bit. I decided I didn't want to go too far with the modernization, and kind of see how far I could get.
Josh:
A lot of people are using their blogs, rebuilding their blogs in JAMstack to kind of play with Gatsby or some of these newer front-end frameworks. I thought it would be fun to do kind of the opposite. See how close I could get to the performance that you see with one of these more modern frameworks, with just old school technology. I'm using just Jekyll and Turbolinks, and I got this cool prefetch script that will do prefetching of links if you hover over them with your mouse for 400 milliseconds or whatever, which kind of speeds up.
Starr:
Oh, cool.
Josh:
Really, it kind of turns it into a... It feels like a single page app, but it's just a webpage.
Starr:
That's really cool. I actually, fun fact, we had that at Honeybadger before we moved to Jekyll, we had a little prefetch thing.
Josh:
Yeah, I'm actually, I've been planning on-
Starr:
Not Jekyll, I meant Turbolinks.
Josh:
Turbolinks.
Starr:
Before we went to Turbolinks
Josh:
We have the pjax setup. I remember that, it was a jQuery prefetch plugin or something.
Starr:
Yeah, no, I wrote it.
Josh:
Did you write it? Okay.
Starr:
It was Starr's prefetch blue plate special.
Josh:
Yeah, that was cool.
Starr:
I eventually disabled it because it was hard to get right. I really got tricky after a while and I don't know. I was being too tricky, and it turns out, the world doesn't really appreciate that.
Josh:
I think that's why it hasn't been officially added to Turbolinks. When I was digging through, trying to figure out how to do it, which is what led my to this gist that someone made. There's a bunch of issues on the Turbolink's GitHub repo, talking about it. It's not that it will never get added, but I'm assuming it's a difficult thing to implement or something like that, for everyone. I don't know.
Starr:
I forget what the issues were. For blog, it seems like it would be pretty straightforward though, because it's just webpages.
Josh:
Yeah, it's working pretty well on mine. It's fun. I've been meaning to move that stack-
Starr:
I saw that you-
Josh:
... over to our blog, too. Eventually I'll apply the same optimizations to the Honeybadger website.
Starr:
Cool. We don't currently use Jekyll, are you talking about moving it to Jekyll as well?
Josh:
No, just the front end. It's simple to install Turbolinks and maybe some prefetching on things. And do some optimizations. Have you looked at PurgeCSS at all?
Starr:
No, I haven't, but I really like the name, so tell me what that is.
Josh:
It does what it says. Basically, it removes... So, it analyzes, once you build, if you have your HTML built already, or in the case of Jekyll if you're generating it. You build your HTML and your assets, like your CSS and stuff, then it analyzes all of your CSS usage. Then it purges the CSS that you're not using.
Josh:
Imagine if you're using Tailwind or Bootstrap or something, and you're importing the entire framework, right? Well, you're not necessarily using a lot of that framework, so you're having to download, everyone's downloading a bunch of useless CSS, basically. This removes the unwanted stuff.
Starr:
Is this something that is in webpack? How does it do that?
Josh:
It's a third party project, but they have a webpack plug-in. It just plugs in.
Starr:
Okay. So it's back-end code, though?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I thought for a second, because it has CSS in the name and a lot of times that means it's a CSS package, or whatever.
Josh:
Oh, yeah, no.
Starr:
Like Bootstrap, so I was like, "How is this doing?"
Josh:
This is a build tool.
Starr:
"What have they added to CSS since I last boned up on it?" I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah, it's a build. It's a build tool. Disclaimer, I'm new. I'm just starting to play with this, so if I butchered the description or something, I'm sorry. But as far as I know, that's what it does. It's pretty cool. It reduced... I forget, my CSS, the bundle wasn't huge to begin with, but I think it reduced it from six or 7k three to four. If you are importing something like a large CSS framework, I imagine that's a big savings.
Starr:
I have to ask, how does it know which CSS tags are being used and which ones aren't? Does it have to be used with a static s...