You can use Web Components inside Cycle.js apps. I've done that in a project and it's running well in production. That's the promise of WCs: they should just work, like other normal HTML elements.

On the other hand, there is wrapping Cycle.js apps as WCs so you can use them in other frameworks. I made a simple library for this: https://github.com/staltz/cycle-custom-elementify/ which is still experimental, and if we have enough time we will try to improve that approach, together with the core team in Cycle.js.

I would flip that question around: how are we supposed to learn anything when we're supposed to get so much work done?

Think of programming as an iceberg. The tip is the visible part, and it's just 10% of the iceberg. The invisible part is 90%.

Actually shipping code that delivers features is just the visible part of programming. If managers focus too much on only that visible part, you end up producing a lot of code. And actually, code is a liability, not an asset. Think about it: if I give two options, project A is 100 lines of code and delivers a tetris game, and project B is 10k lines of code and delivers the exact same thing, which would you pick? Or: if you ask me where do I live, do you prefer "Foobar Avenue, 123", or do you prefer a 15 page document explaining each single step how to get there?

I think coding is an activity that constantly requires taking a break and rethinking the strategy. Of course there is a lot of "just getting things done" involved, but we shouldn't think that it's just that. Programming is learning. It's learning how to solve the problem at hand while optimizing user/customer experience (through various metrics such as lack of bugs, speed of feature delivery, performance, etc).

At that time, the hot technologies were Java, MySQL, Hibernate, and maybe Flash. I was at the University and I studied a bit too much of math (like 4 courses on Linear Algebra). I really wished I had studied more about compilers, and all sorts of programming paradigms, from Assembly to concatenative languages, to very high level languages like Haskell. Stretch your brain as much as you can while you're young. It's not so much about what things are useful, it's mostly about opening your mind as much as possible.

In the few months before Cycle.js, I was using RxJava and Kotlin, so I would say RxJava was an influence, but it's quite obvious (since Cycle.js used RxJS from day one). I was mostly guided by a gut feeling about "separation of concerns" that led me to eventually explain reactive programming as A -->B not A--> B (cycle.js.org/streams.html).

I am not sure if these influenced me, since they happened long ago, but in the University I learned Prolog, which was a fully declarative paradigm, where many concepts were backwards. In the syntax itself, you declare "this if that", not "if (this) then that". Also another important paradigm was an Event Matrix in game editors like The Games Factory, which is a programming environment without (text) code. All you have is a matrix describing actions (rows) that should happen in reaction to events (columns). Those two things defined my idea of programming very strongly and very early in my career.

I'm sorry, I'll be honest: I always thought AngularJS was kind of weird. I never really understood why did people start liking it in the first place, so I'm not surprised people are migrating away from it.

Angular.io on the other hand does a lot of things right. There is also some beauty in it, most components are specified as CSS+HTML+JS, and it reads in that order from top to bottom in one file. That's kind of cool. But I don't have hands-on experience with that framework so I don't have any qualified opinion.

All that said, there is also a strong network effect when it comes to adopting technologies. People just use what most people are using, and that's because it's the easiest to justify: the most popular solution is the least surprising solution, and people can get defensive or scared of risks when it comes to new and surprising stuff, so they prefer to have a feeling of "safety" that comes from picking something familiar (I'm reading a psychology book about these effects). At the moment, that seems to be React.

I wrote a blog post about why I joined (not started) the scuttlebutt project: staltz.com/my-last-day-and-my-first-day.html

Basically the motivation is panic: we are losing our internet. It's not ours anymore, and it's becoming something else. It's time to build something else, from ground up, which guarantees it belongs to us. No one owns the oxygen in our planet, it's for free and belongs to everyone. So is interpersonal-communication, it should be for free and belong to whoever is speaking, only. Facebook is a threat to that, today and in the future.

and why has the focus not been on mobile and usability? Do you see any possibility of scuttlebut being mainstream, and not just being used by esoteric techies?

I joined the project to bring it to mobile and with a focus on good usability. We have plans for bringing it mainstream, it's not going to be just for techies, for sure.

Making programming become visual and intuitive is our (distant) goal, so yes, but there are many milestones before that. I'm actively working on fixing important issues with the framework, and one issue at a time will take us closer to that goal. For instance, we recently had to stop and think how include pull values (e.g. Math.random() or makeUUID()) into the framework (https://github.com/cyclejs/cyclejs/issues/581) in a way that makes it best for a visual editor.

My first job as a programmer was in Finland, Europe, so I'm pretty out of touch with the brazilian IT market, but I'm coming to BrazilJS this month and looking forward to meet a lot people there. :)

ReasonML: I don't have any qualified opinion because I haven't tried it yet.

Elm: has a great proposition but in my perspective seems a bit "stuck" at the moment. Not a lot of progress, while usually its pain points are downplayed by key people in the community.

PureScript (the "other" functional language): highly under-rated language worth taking a look. It's a bit heavier on the learning investment side, but it's not gratuitous. PS has some features that surpass Haskell (it's like Haskell done right from day one), and plenty of features that benefit people in a concrete way, like type holes (compiler tells you what's missing), row types, reflection, etc. Give it a serious try.

In random order (and twitter accounts):

P2P and/or cool ideas

• Dominic Tarr (@dominictarr)
• James Haliday (@substack)
• Paul Frazee (@pfrazee)
• Mathias Buus (@mafintosh)
• Feross (@feross)

Functional programming or just programming

• Phil Freeman (@paf31)
• Brian Lonsdorf (@drboolean)
• Brian Marick (@marick)
• Justin Woo (@jusrin00)
• Paul Taylor (@trxcllnt)
• Jan van Brügge (@SuperManitu)
• Tylor Steinberger (@TylorS167)
• Nick Johnstone (@widdnz)
• Gleb Bahmutov (@bahmutov)
• Oleg Grenrus (@phadej)
• @paldepind
• David Sheldrick (@djsheldrick)
• @briancavalier
• @mattpodwysocki
• @cmeik
• @yoshuawuyts

Smart and outside-of-the-box thinkers will suddenly hear about this company and feel like joining you.

In other aspects, there isn't a "risk" in adopting this technology. You can integrate plugins from jQuery, components from React or Polymer (for Material Design), you can get things done, there is a chat with activity everyday, 3 core maintainers with time/budget to fix bugs and improve the framework. Other frameworks might be bigger, but usually people don't measure the risks accurately. There is very little risk involved in picking such technology. It's MIT licensed (no PATENTS file), and it's not as critical component as a database for your backend.

In a vehicle, looking outwards and thinking. :)

I wanted to copy-paste the Scuttlebutt (https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/) libraries into a React Native project to get access to that P2P social network. It obviously didn't work in React Native due to lack of support for many modules like http, fs, dgram, sodium, leveldb, so I started looking for options. Apparently other programmers in the NPM P2P space also faced a similar need: https://github.com/node-on-mobile/node-on-android

After leaving my previous job, I became self-employed and most of my time goes to building open source, so I wanted to find a suitable title. I make a living by: teaching open source tools (in Egghead.io or in private workshops) and building open source tools (through OpenCollective backers).

The "hacker" part is about doing what you're not "supposed" to do. I want to find ways to do open source even when people expect closed source software, because I believe closed source software is an ingredient for corruption. One (not the only) reason why people's privacy's and freedoms are abused by tech giants and 3-letter institutions is due to massive closed source systems. I want to build a better future and one small way is to provide transparent software.

Finland is fantastic and even when Finns complain about it, I usually don't see any serious problem. Of course nothing is perfect, but this is a 9/10 country. PS: I like the winter darkness because the computer screen doesn't get reflection from the sun. :D

Haha, true 😎