ReactiveConf — In the loop with Richard Feldman
Get to know speakers before meeting them at the conference
Yay! We are getting to the final weeks before the conference! If you didn’t know, we are doing a series of interviews to introduce you to some of the ReactiveConf speakers. We use these to know what are they up to these days and what are preparing for the conference. Today we will be talking with Richard Feldman who will be speaking on Elm programming language!
Note: questions and answers have not been transcribed but adapted from notes.
Good morning Richard! Tell me a bit about yourself
Good morning! Sure thing. I work at NoRedInk as the Director of Engineering. NoRedInk makes software to help English teachers teach writing and grammar. We have been using Elm as our core programming language for the last 2 years. Our platform has grown over 200K LOC but regardless this huge code base, we can say we have had not a single exception thrown! Within the team, when we talk about it, we joke that we should send flowers to the first user that receives a runtime exception together with a note of how sorry we feel about it =)
I’ve been writing the book Elm in Action since last year.
I play saxophone and used to be a competitive Magic: the Gathering player.
Awesome! What have you got in store for ReactiveConf?
The talk will be about an alternative layout and design system that compiles to CSS, which lets people create UIs in the browsers without actually knowing or using CSS directly.
I am also preparing a Workshop that is an Introduction to Elm.
That sounds very interesting. For people still not familiar with Elm, how would you briefly introduce it?
As a brief overview I would say
- Elm is a Language that compiles to JavaScript
- Elm uses a very smart compiler that catches more errors and gives you improved error messages
- Elm allows you to run your code without crashing
That’s impressive. What would be Elm’s key features?
In my opinion these are Elm key features
- Zero runtime exceptions
- Developer Experience: integrated package manager, great error messages, easy refactoring, progressive learning curve
- Great performance. Some benchmarks outperforming React, Angular and Ember
I can see why developers love to use Elm. What are you working at the moment?
I am working on these projects at the moment.
- Elm-test A library to run unit and fuzzy test for Elm
- Elm-css A CSS preprocessor to share styles between Elm and CSS
For Elm-test I just released a feature to include highlighted diff results between actual and expected values.
For Elm-css I have got a first proof-of-concept to integrate CSS-modules like functionality to auto-generate the necessary CSS classes for you.
That’s awesome. Looking forward to your talk covering CSS in Elm! As a last question: what talks or topics are you looking forward to at ReactiveConf?
Things I am excited to learn more about are: Vue as I hear a lot of good things about it; and the other languages that compile to JavaScript like Cloujure and Reason. So I’ll be watching out for the talks from Evan You (Vue), David Nolen (Clojure Script) and Jared Forsyth (Reason).
All interesting topics. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and see you at ReactiveConf!
You are welcome. I enjoyed the conversation. Looking forward to meet everyone at the conference!
