Richard Feldman

The Web has changed a lot since its beginning as a platform for static articles. At first, Web applications did not exist. Then they began to appear in the form of servers generating HTML on the fly. PHP was huge, then fell by the wayside as JS rose. Flash came and went. Today, the Web has become the biggest application delivery platform in history and based on its past, the one thing we can be certain of is that more changes are yet to come.

What, specifically, might those changes be? What differences might the Web of 2020 have to the the Web of 2019? What about the Web of 2025? What would the impact be on Web developers? In this talk, Richard draws on his 12 years of professional Web development experience, and history of being an early adopter of technologies like React in 2013 and Elm in 2014, to make and justify some concrete predictions about the future of the Web in both 2020 and 2025.

2019

ReactiveConf

Predicting the Future of the Web

Distributed markdown apps

2017

Richard Feldman AMA

Today we have languages like ClojureScript, BuckleScript, and Elm, which treat JavaScript as bytecode; they compile to it, but do not emulate its design. They make it possible to build an entire modern web app without knowing JS.
Picture that same approach applied to HTML and CSS, and you've got elm-style: a library that doesn't have goals like "let's make vertical centering in CSS easier" but rather "let's scratch-build a layout and style system where vertical centering is innately easy. Where accessibility is natural and not an afterthought. Where it's as easy as possible to go from the design in your head to working software, and where you can maintain it once it's in production."

It's now possible to ship an entire responsive, performant, accessible, web app without knowing JavaScript, HTML, or CSS. Come find out how!

CSS as Bytecode

Lightning Talk - Richard Feldman

At NoRedInk, we've been heavily using Elm and React side-by-side in production for over a year. After 35,000 lines of Elm code and about the same for React, we've learned a lot about how well these powerful technologies coexist in a code base that's been battle-tested by students who have used it to answer over a billion questions. This talk will be a deep dive into Elm and React from a production perspective—what's familiar, what's different, and how they can work together. We'll start with initial adoption, continue on to shipping new features, and progress all the way through maintenance and scaling. We'll also look at the nontechnical impact of each: hiring, onboarding, and managing technical debt. Come see how two of the most revolutionary front end technologies on the planet can work together!

2016

Elm and React in production

Imagine a world without side effects, where the only way to make things happen was to call functions whose return values described what you wanted done. What gets easier in that world? What gets harder? What would that mean for debugging? Testing? 

We don't have to wonder about these things, because this world already exists — and it compiles to JavaScript. It's the world of Elm, where there are no side effects, all functions are stateless, and all data is immutable. Elm embraces the concepts that make reactive programming great, and goes one step further to shed the error‐prone mutations and side effects that so often lead to incidental complexity and buggy code. 

NoRedInk has reaped the benefits of this approach since they began using Elm in production earlier in 2015. It's helped them scale and maintain a complex front-end code base that students use to answer millions of questions per day. Come see how refreshing this world can be!