Recording of this essay: www.contraption.co/having-a-tj/Par Contraption Company

It’s tempting to want to take the simplistic approach of writing “to the framework” or to the external API directly in the places where you need to interface with those resources, but it’s sometimes a much better approach to create your own abstraction layer. Having this layer which sits between your high-level business logic or request/response ha…

Audio recording of this essay: www.contraption.co/distribution-vs-innovation/Par Contraption Company

Congratulations! You’ve got yourself a nice little World-Wide Web site. Now it’s time to deploy it for everyone to enjoy through their World-Wide Web browser. Easy, right? WRONG! Deploying web apps today is the portal to madness and pain, with many levels of misery awaiting as you descend into the depths of Hades. Or…if you play it right, it’s litt…

In this episode of the Contraption Company Podcast, Philip interviews Taylor Crane, founder of FractionalJobs.io, about the growing trend of fractional work. They discuss Taylor's journey from his previous venture, Clubs Poker, to his current focus on the fractional space, highlighting the benefits and learnings along the way. The conversation expl…

Philip Thomas interviews Ayush Newatia in London about his book, 'The Rails and Hotwire Codex'. They discuss Ayush's journey of writing and self-publishing the technical resource, the challenges of learning and teaching advanced Ruby on Rails concepts, and the shift towards a full-stack framework, including mobile applications. 00:00 Introduction a…

It's time for some acronym soup: SSG SSR CSR SPA MPA…MEAN? SSI?? PERL??? (Officially not an acronym…) If you're coming down with a headache already, trust us, you're not alone. It's…a lot. Thankfully, Ayush and Jared are here to break it all down for you, as well as talk about some of the history behind the many different rendering modes to be foun…

Audio version of this essay: contraption.co/the-next-iteration-of-contraption-company/Par Contraption Company

What if your backend could drive reactive UI changes on your frontend? Without dependencies? Without relying on any particular framework? What if your HTML could gain full-stack programming superpowers? Introducing Action Web Components—inspired by clever Ajax techniques of the past & present and ready to march boldly into the future. Hosted by Jar…

How did the Internet first begin? Why was it developed at the Advanced Research Projects Agency? Where was it initially launched at the end of the 1960s? Is it pronounced r-OO-ter or r-OW-ter?? These and other hard-hitting questions are answered as Jared & Ayush take a deep dive into the birth of humanity’s global computer network…with a dash of 90…

It’s been a wild, wild ride getting from the anything goes origin story of the mainstream web—anyone still remember “Netscape Navigator” and “Trumpet Winsock”?—to today’s carefully-curated experience in the age of Interop and using GitHub to achieve spec consensus. But the relative calm we enjoy today when it comes to progress and feature parity ac…

Whoa, there was one more “State of” survey from 2023 to mine for content! Who knew? Yes, the results are in, and we talk about them…but more broadly, our feelings about the state of web frameworks in our industry and the much-ballyhooed pendulum swing back to server-side rendering and HTML-first techniques (though the rate of change is perhaps not …

What if you could take HTML & CSS, package them up in a file, and publish that file as a singular artifact? That's essentially what ePub is. (ePUB? EPUB?) With Ayush's real-world experience publishing e-books, we are guided through understanding more about this important (and sometimes overlooked) spec. Alas, the devil's in the details, and we get …

When you've spent a good portion of your career as a web developer utilizing CSS processors & frameworks, what would lead you to embrace vanilla techniques and modern CSS features? This is the question in the air as we welcome our first ever guest to the show, Elise Shaffer. Elise walks us through her journey learning full-stack development via fra…

The results of the State of HTML 2023 survey are in! It’s an exciting time for HTML which has seen a lot of growth and expansion of capability in a welcome break with the past (when typically CSS and especially JavaScript would leapfrog the rate of change of the Web’s foundational markup language). Still, some might say we need a lot more progress …

Where data lives, how to retrieve data, how to change data, how to track updates to data and provide feedback accordingly to the user…in other words, state. Web application development can necessitate a wide range of possible options for how you manage state, and in this episode we look at many of the ways this may work from the server to the clien…

In this episode of the Contraption Company Podcast, host Philip Thomas sits down with Ben Weiss, an entrepreneur who transitioned from founding Zcruit, a software company for college football recruiting, to working in creator businesses. They discuss the nuances of running software versus creator businesses, the journey of growing and selling Zcrui…

The rumors are true: I became a Ruby developer because of Rails. It’s probably common that folks find a tech stack or framework which offers the features and the community they desire and so learn the language undergirding that stack. Truth is, Ruby did not appeal to me at first and I resisted it! I wanted to remain a PHP developer, damnit! But the…

Join us for a meaty conversation all about the various levels of specifications and conventions which make the World-Wide Web go: from TCP/IP to HTTP to WebSockets and beyond. We also talk about conventions in various languages and frameworks to enable building web applications servers in a straightforward and portable manner, as well as building a…

Oh yes, we’re back! In this first Just a Spec episode of the year, the lads speculate on the grand conspiracy behind the results publication delay of State of HTML 2023 (not really!), catch up on personal news from during the podcast’s year-end hiatus, and run through a very entertaining list of all the goodies being worked on by browser vendors as…

Aaron is the co-founder of realnice, a simple personal website builder. realnice competes with my product, Postcard, which is also a personal website builder. So, I thought it would be fun to sit down with a competitor and talk shop. Show notes + links: contraption.co/essays/talking-shop-aaron-cohn-realnice/ Join the Contraption Company newsletter:…

Presentation about what software developers teach us about the future of collaboration Originally given at Almost Perfect in Tokyo on 3 Feb 2024. Links: Written version of talk PDF of accompanying slides Contraption Company Get future content via email Booklet FRCTNL The focus of the talk is on the significant shifts that modern-day work practices …

Thanksgiving’s coming up here in the U.S. and we thought it’d be fun to talk about of our favorite aspects of the modern web (and how it compares to the “dark days” of old). In addition, Jared’s launched a brand-new course platform over at The Spicy Web with the first offering being a deep-dive into crafting vanilla CSS architectures and formulatin…

Ah yes, that notorious hard problem in computer science. Time to name some things as we talk abut the philosophy undergirding software development, why “naming things” is hard but also a core aspect of the job, the sometimes reluctance to name things in as disciplined a fashion on the frontend as on the backend, how to communicate across teams and …

A whole grab bag of topics today! We talk about some of the well-known storage APIs like localStorage and sessionStorage, as well as the newer IndexedDB API which pairs well with Service Workers. We also talk about the three Observer APIs to help with reacting to DOM mutations, scrolling, and size changes. Apparently fetch DID happen (!), and testi…

The results of the 2023 State of CSS survey are in, and we're here to break it all down and uncover the most interesting nuggets and opportunities as we look ahead to the future of CSS and the web platform. But not before some spicy meta chat on open source governance and how frequent contributors are treated in light of the recent Hotwire Turbo / …

The lads are back with an action-packed episode full of juicy details about “buildless” architecture & “Turbo” architecture, server components, tools & techniques which encourage server-rendered HTML pages and fragments sent over the wire, making websites which work without JavaScript, the huge pendulum shift we see in the industry back to coupled …

Gather ’round the accessibility tree, dear listeners, and hear a grand tale about roles and attributes, screen readers and DOM inspectors, and how to be a good A11Y. We also touch on why accessibility isn’t something you bolt on after you design a website but is part of the process from the very beginning. Hosted by Jared White & Ayush Links: Want …

We're here to deep dive into the technical underpinnings of everyone's FAVORITE internet technology: email. ;-P Amaze your nerd friends with all the exciting trivia you will learn in this action-packed episode! Hosted by Jared White & Ayush Links: From Ayush: Scattergun The Rails and Hotwire Codex Scary weather 😟 Rhodes wildfires - Andy Bell Histor…

It’s hard to imagine in this current world of any dot-something you could possibly imagine when looking to register a domain name, but there was once a past era of the internet when all we had was .com, .net, and .org. A dark time. A sad time. How did we get there in the first place? And how did we eventually arrive here at today’s promised land? J…

Web developers and content authors have a rich array of tags to chose from as they build experiences using HTML. Learn about some of our favorites young and old which may pique your curiosity, as well as enjoy a spirited refresher on the importance of writing semantic and accessible HTML. Hosted by Jared White & Ayush…

Witness the rise of the Fediverse! In this episode we talk about early attempts at building decentralized social networking protocols for the web, the modern effort to craft a true W3C-published standard, challenges at scale with building out ActivityPub-based services, some of the new companies and infrastructure adopting ActivityPub, and what Met…

A whirlwind tour through the history of CSS, where it's landed today, and the myriad of goodies we can expect in the very near future. And do we still need pre/post-processors in this day and age, or can we just, like, y'know, write vanilla CSS?! Also, shockingly, Roy Kent makes an appearance on the show with an epic rant about Tailwind CSS. You're…

Not just a great Enigma song, shadow and light is the theme today as we dive deep into an exciting new frontend web specification: Declarative Shadow DOM (DSD). Having just landed in Safari as well as Chrome (crossing our fingers for Firefox support soon!), DSD has the potential to transform how we build UI for the web. We also take the opportunity…

In our kickoff episode of Just a Spec, we take a look back at the early use of forms on the web to facilitate messaging and payments, the introduction of XMLHttpRequest which started the Ajax revolution, how JSON-based API calls began to veer away from the spirit of progressive enhancement, modern page update techniques which still take advantage o…

What are signals? What is find-grained reactivity? Why is everyone talking about them on the frontend these days? And what, if anything, can we apply from our newfound knowledge of signals to backend programming? Is it possible to use signals in Ruby? (Yes!) Learn all about signals, the Preact Signals library, and the new Signalize gem right here i…

Ayush is on the core team of Bridgetown, a specialist in Ruby on Rails and Hotwire app development, and a personal friend. I'm very excited to have him on the show today to talk about all things fullstack web dev, his new book The Rails & Hotwire Codex, and why vanilla is awesome! Links: Bridgetown – Ruby site generator & fullstack framework The Ra…

Ruby can now run on Wasm! WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications. So…we can now run "real" Ruby in the browser, right? Yes! …and no. Caveat emptor, b…

Every Ruby web framework has its own way of configuring itself as well as third-party dependencies. In some cases it's largely up to you, in other cases it's clearly spelled out. There may or may not also be some "magic" involved in requiring gems added to a Gemfile. As a maintainer of Bridgetown, I'm currently working through all these issues as I…

Ruby is optimized for programmer happiness. What does that even mean? Which programmer? Whose happiness? What if you use Ruby and aren't happy? Does that mean Ruby failed? All this and much more to be covered in today's episode—not a deep dive into a technical topic, but a deep dive into the philosophy of programming, the "Ruby way", OOP, the dange…

Design patterns on the frontend: this is a subject far too little discussed from what I can tell, yet with a fundamental awareness and regular usage of design patterns, you can dramatically uplevel your frontend code. Rubyists in particular will have a major leg up here over devs coming from communities which are more FP (functional programming) in…

Typically when you mention "Ruby" and "template" in the same breath, people will think of ERB. Perhaps even Haml. But did you know that the Ruby ecosystem offers a wide variety of template engines, and quite a few are built upon pure Ruby? In this episode, I break down the main conceptual difference between "string-based templates" such as ERB and …

There are no full stack engineers?! Let's talk about that. Also, just what is a componentized view architecture anyway? What are components? For that matter, what are templates? What are partials? I break it all down and explain why I'm gung-ho about view components. Plus I answer questions regarding Stimulus, nice_partials, and other Rails tooling…

Hey everybody, I’m so glad you could tune in for the debut episode of Fullstack Ruby. I’ve been on a few Ruby-themed podcasts over the past 18 months, but this is the first time I’m running a show about Ruby myself! To kick things off, I'd like to introduce you to Ruby2JS and explain why I think this technology is a game changer. Ruby2JS isn’t simp…