Today we are joined by Sara Vieira, a developer advocate and maker of wacky stuff on the internet. She joins us today to talk about why she makes all of her weird experiments, how being a lazy developer doesn't mean she isn't doing work, the Redux cargo cult, why you shouldn't always use GraphQL, her meetups and upcoming conference for woman speakers, and of course making people smile.
Sara Vieira, developer advocate and professional maker of dumb shit, talks through why she does her weird experiments on the internet. Sometimes it is out of need, but honestly a lot of the time it is a random thing that she thinks of or something that someone says that brings up the idea, and she just has to make it. A lot of it is out of boredom, and also procrastination from other projects that she just doesn't want to do.
Sara calls herself a lazy developer, but that doesn't mean she isn't working. She finds simpler solutions that involve less coding and also avoids things that aren't necessarily interesting or fun for her to do, like CSS or writing her talk for a conference... A part of being a lazy developer is using the right tool for the job. GraphQL and Redux have an almost cult-like following, but for small apps, their solutions for state management and fetching data are complete overkill.
Netlify and Zeit's Now are great for deploying your projects, they allow you to get your unique dumb-shit out there quickly. There was this period where services were all focusing on scalability, but it wasn't easy to just throw your wacky side-projects out on the internet.
Sara is organizing the conference ReactJS Girls which will be happening in London on May 3rd, 2019. It started last year while Sara was living in London. She hosted a meetup where all the speakers would be women, but everyone was welcome to attend as a guest. Organizing it this way had multiple benefits, it acted as a filter for the dicks who wouldn't want to learn from women, and it empowered first-time speakers who'd otherwise feel imposter syndrome or fear of judgment.
"Making Dumb Stuff That Makes Strangers on the Internet Smile - with Sara Vieira" Transcript
Joel Hooks: Hi, Sara.
Sara Vieira: Hello.
Joel Hooks: I am always amazed at your ability to make weird demos. They seem to come out of nowhere, but I assume they have a point or purpose in your life. Where do you come up with these ideas to make wacky demos and then throw them out into the world? What drives that and what motivates you when you're doing these fun, interesting, technology related demos on the internet?
Sara Vieira: I can give you a really deep answer, or I can give you the normal answer.
Joel Hooks: What's the middle ground? What's the middle in between? We don't wanna get too deep on people.
Sara Vieira: Cause it's just starting, right? I think some of the ideas come from things that I need, some of the ideas are just random things that people say or that I say. Like one experience I was with a friend eating, I don't remember what, and we were talking about CSS and JS for some reason. And then we're talking about CSS and PHP and then I was like, oh, my God, dude, is there CSS in NDX? And he was like, no. I was like, I need to do that. He's like, why are you fucking doing that? I was like because I'm bored. And I think I have this thing where I get bored very easily, so when I'm bored I just make stupid things. Did you know there are 9015 airports in the world? I did because I scraped that all out of Wikipedia.
Joel Hooks: Just to get all the airports in the world, you're curious about how many airports there are and where they're at?
Sara Vieira: I'm making this website where you mark all the airports you cried in.
Joel Hooks: Oh, I like that.
Sara Vieira: So then you can list airports by the most cried in airports.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: And then you can have like, the happiest airports in the world, the saddest fucking airports in the world.
Joel Hooks: The saddest airport.
Sara Vieira: It's gonna be a weird mix. I've had a question which was, what happens if I cry on the flight? If you cry on the flight, you have to mark both airports.
Joel Hooks: Yeah, that counts for both. Coming and going.
Sara Vieira: That counts for both.
Joel Hooks: Do you build these for longevity? I was trying to load makefrontendshitagain.party, and it didn't work.
Sara Vieira: What? No.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: What?
Joel Hooks: And actually, your meme site didn't work last night either but-
Sara Vieira: What? Why is this not working?
Joel Hooks: I don't know, cause the Internet's horrible, but ... So I was curious if that's a strategy if they're just kind of broken that's a thing too but-
Sara Vieira: No, this is not supposed to be broken. I don't even know what error 451 is.
Joel Hooks: Yeah, I don't either. We're going to start debugging your website now.
Sara Vieira: Unavailable for legal reasons? What bitch? I think there's a problem with the party domains.
Joel Hooks: Oh, yeah. That's definitely a thing ...
Sara Vieira: I think we may have an issue because it says HTTP error 451, and apparently that's unavailable for legal reasons.
Joel Hooks: Oh wow.
Sara Vieira: But awesometalks.party works. I don't know, I'll try to figure this one out. I don't wanna email the German government though.
Joel Hooks: No.
Sara Vieira: That sounds like a lot of bureaucracy.
Joel Hooks: It does.
Sara Vieira: Yeah.
Joel Hooks: So, let's talk about awesometalks.party then. What's that all about? Where did that come from?
Sara Vieira: That was actually out of need, it's not a dumb thing. That was probably one of the non-dumb things that I made. Awesome Talks, I made it because I also end up on deep ends of YouTube that I do not wanna end up when I start watching talks. I start watching this really good talk and then all of a sudden I'm watching something about screw driving a motorcycle for some reason.
Joel Hooks: Yeah, alien invaders.
Sara Vieira: No, that's actually interesting. I'd watch the fuck out of that.
Joel Hooks: It's good.
Sara Vieira: I always had the issues of having a really hard time finding that and so I made that website. That one was actually on purpose. Also, the meme website is working, though. The meme website.
Joel Hooks: Okay. And this is another one that I'm interested in. It's here, I am Sara Vieira website, and it's the memes docz, right? Where does that come from?
Sara Vieira: Honestly that was because once I went to a conference called ...
Joel Hooks: There's the one picture that I think it's kind of the quintessential on why you're sitting there and there's-
Sara Vieira: Oh, that is fancy, the quintessential [crosstalk 00:03:54], it's from Fenton Newcastle.
Joel Hooks: Yeah, the flag.
Sara Vieira: Oh no, that was because I watched the England versus ... Oh yeah, we really like football this side.
Joel Hooks: This is a remake cause this is a meme made out of it. That's what's going on here.
Sara Vieira: Exactly, that's a meme made out of the meme. So the meme, it was basically because it was lunch and my talk was after lunch at Fenton Newcastle. And it was my talk about mental health and I was eating and I was like, why am I doing this to myself? Why am I telling people about my fucked up brain? Why do I hate myself? And Chris Almond took that photo and he has a lot of followers on Twitter, that's literally it. And then I started realizing that I'm very meme-able as a human being. There are a lot of photos that I have just look like Sharknado photos, they just look so bad that they are slightly good. So I started collecting them because I use them as reaction gifts for people.
Joel Hooks: Nice. So it's a resource for you to come back to people?
Sara Vieira: Yes. You might as well be on the Internet. So it's one of those things. Also, a lot of people seriously message me asking for my meme photo.
Joel Hooks: Yeah, so there are multiple birds being hit with that single stone, and that's good.
Sara Vieira: Yes, it's great. I'm really proud of this website.
Joel Hooks: This comes out of you before the talk on mental health, and you had a period of time where you were, basically every week ... Cause I think that's actually when we started communicating. You were writing the mail storm of every single week, you were in a different country giving talks at a different conference. Is it last year or was that the year before? Is that 2017, is when you were doing?
Sara Vieira: No, that was last year. This was right in the middle of it. This was the beginning of a month that I basically didn't go home for the entire month. I left on the 3rd of March and I came back home on the 4th of April. I went to four or five countries, I don't even remember very well. And that was the first conference. So I wasn't even tired at that time, I was just wondering why I'm doing this to myself.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: Not the traveling, the speaking about mental health in front of people.
Joel Hooks: Oh yeah.
Sara Vieira: And also the traveling.
Joel Hooks: You had a blog post of the dark side of conference talks. It gets into this idea of the glamorous life of the technology conference circuit speaker, and how that relates and what that ends up. Because we see it, this is why people show up, cause they wanna see the speakers give their talks and blah, blah, blahs, and all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, when you're on the other side of the microphone, it's not free. There's a cost to you when you're doing these things.
Sara Vieira: I've gotten actually plenty of really good answers to that, and I think one of the ones that actually stroked me the most was ... Before I did that, a week before I canceled a bunch of conferences, four or five. And one that I canceled was FrontEnd Con in Poland, and after I released that post, two days later I got an email from FrontEnd Con and it was the woman that I canceled the conference too, thanking me for doing that post. She was like, I assumed it was hard to speak, but I never thought that you could actually affect someone in such a way and I wanna thank you for making me a better professional. And I was like, oh my God thanks.
Joel Hooks: As an organizer they have to think about that too, right? They should be. They don't have to I guess, but they should be thinking about the health of the folks.
Sara Vieira: If you've never been a speaker or anything, it doesn't really make sense for people to complain about free shit. I get it. I expected like nine out of 10 comments to be like, rich complain about free shit and one coming like, a got you fan. Actually, the Internet was really nice, which was weird.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: I have really nice Twitter followers, it's really weird. I don't know where they came from but they're nice. I love them. They usually don't shit on me. It's great. I don't get man-splained a lot.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: It's great. Once I got man-splained about taxes in Portugal ... I am Portuguese Joel. I know how our taxes work, he was like, no. And I was like, dude it's like this. We get robbed. That's why we're poor.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. That seems like a universal truth also. We don't wanna go down that hole.
Sara Vieira: Yeah.
Joel Hooks: I'm from the U.S. I don't understand U.S. taxes but I don't wanna be man-splained on U.S. taxes either.
Sara Vieira: Exactly. I think that's the thing.
Joel Hooks: Nobody wants that. Of all topics, pick something useful or interesting.
Sara Vieira: It was one of those things, because like in Portugal ... Okay, we're gonna get into taxes now because this is important and apparently this is not a thing everywhere else. It's like we don't have brackets. So imagine that you make 35K a year or whatever, our salaries are very low. It's okay. Imagine now you make 35K a year and the tax bracket closest to you is 30K. So usually, apparently which I did not know, but usually what happens is that you pay 30K of the other tax bracket, like the lowest one, and then those 5K go to the higher one. We don't have that, you pay 35K to the higher one and that's it.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: So what happens is you can get a raise and get less money because you went up a tax bracket.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. That's a real slap in the face. No, I don't want my raise, keep me where I'm at cause I'm gonna do better.
Sara Vieira: Don't move to Portugal. Yeah, that happened to a friend of mine. He once got money for doing on-call, and she actually got less money and she was so pissed. It was so sad. I laughed, but she cried a bit [crosstalk 00:08:59].
Joel Hooks: I'd cry. I feel that pain actually. So I want to ask you another question about being a lazy developer. I think it's something that you claim that we all can maybe even aspire to. What does that mean when you describe yourself as a lazy developer, does it mean that we're not doing the work?
Sara Vieira: I don't think it's that we're not doing the work. I think first of all, I always try to come up with an easy solution for something that involves me writing less code and doing less things. And second of all, the main reason why I call myself lazy ... It's not even lazy, it's more of I do a lot of productive procrastination, and that's when you don't wanna do something so you do something else.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: So imagine that I have to write a talk, and I just make a dumb website and people think, I was so productive. And I'm like, nope. I'm supposed to be doing a talk, I'm just not doing it, I'm doing this. And by lazy I actually mean I think the combination of the two things. It's not that I don't do things, it's that I do the wrong thing sometimes.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: And then the things that I'm actually supposed to do take me forever. I think that's the main thing of a lazy developer. And for example there are things that ... I've been meaning to change my portfolio for six months, but if it involves any type of design work I'm like, it's gonna look like shit. I can see it looking like shit from all the way over here in Berlin. So I just procrastinate the hell out of it and that ends up in my head being a lazy thing, but it's more of a procrastination thing. I just procrastinate the hell out of everything. I feel like a lot of people are like this.
Joel Hooks: Because you're procrastinating yourself into a solution.
Sara Vieira: Yes.
Joel Hooks: How do you even ... All that design problem, right? So I'm just gonna wait until it makes itself easier or something occurs that I think of the idea to make it easier.
Sara Vieira: Until I get a girlfriend who's a designer and she'll just fucking do it. That sounds more likely than me doing it.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. That's how I feel about CSS work in general. I'm trying to improve my relationship with CSS, and you talked about ... I'm just imagining now cause I've been really loving MDX lately and now you're bringing CSS into my MDX, so I had this one last-
Sara Vieira: Am I ruining it or making it better?
Joel Hooks: ... Place where I was ... I would say if I don't need it ... Are you ruining it or are you making it better when you put CSS and MDX? That's a good question.
Sara Vieira: That is a very good-
Joel Hooks: I think you're actually making it better. You said it's making dumb shit but at the same time it's interesting to make that approach, and just thinking about that and can I do this? And then, is it useful to anybody else?
Sara Vieira: Weirdly enough it's useful for me though because MDX deck doesn't support CSS by default, you need to change either the layout or import the CSS loader or something. And actually if I just do CSSX, then I can use CSS in MDX deck, that's the thing I used to make slides. So it's actually slightly helpful for me because I can just put global CSS everywhere, but don't tell people that it's actually helpful. That was my cred.
Joel Hooks: So CSS and JSX and Markdown-
Sara Vieira: For slides.
Joel Hooks: And that's where we're at.
Sara Vieira: Oh my God.
Joel Hooks: To make your slide decks to give your conference talks.
Sara Vieira: Yes. Weirdly enough it's the easiest way for me that I got to make conference talks. I'm terrible at anything that's visual editing, that creates code or creates anything, I'm just terrible at it.
Joel Hooks: MDX is kick ass, or is it not? I've been blown away. I was a little hesitant at first, the idea of JSX. I think a lot of people already have a hard time with JSX, and then you're gonna combine that and put that in a Markdown document now. That's not what we do. Even me at first I was like, that's no good, but at this point I'm pretty much all in on the whole concept.
Sara Vieira: I think I was a bit hesitant like you were, I think most of us were. And then I used docz with a Z. Did you ever use that?
Joel Hooks: Yeah. I was just looking at that yesterday actually, it's pretty cool.
Sara Vieira: Yeah, so I use docz and I was like, this is amazing. Because the thing about docz is that you can create document, you create a style guide, you can create anything because it's react and I was like, this is amazing. We should all be building things with this. [inaudible 00:13:03] the things, this is so easy. I love this.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: I feel like it's one of those things that you need to use it because it looks stupid. You're just like, why do I need this.
Joel Hooks: It does.
Sara Vieira: I don't need this. There's no point for me to have this. And then you use it and you're like, oh it's very niche, but I love it.
Joel Hooks: I've been thinking about the potential in terms of interactive training and teaching and presentations like you're already doing with MDX deck and just the ability to combine multimedia. To me, if PBS didn't suck, cause they've been trying to put flash and graphs and video and all that stuff in PBS for forever, Michael Adobe, but it never works because it wasn't accessible, it wasn't portable. But now you have Markdown and this is extremely portable format. So I can use docz but then I can take that and I can make a Gatsby side out of it next week if I feel like it.
Sara Vieira: That's the thing, you can do anything with it. Cause Markdown is readable everywhere, you can transform it to HDML, you can do anything you want. Markdown is one of the best things.
Joel Hooks: Everything should be Markdown, right? Like all your texts, to me, why wouldn't it be in Markdown in general.
Sara Vieira: I just literally [inaudible 00:14:10] that was to remove HDML files and turn them into Markdown. The terms and conditions were written in HDML and I was like, no.
Joel Hooks: Yeah, great.
Sara Vieira: You Markdown this shit. We Markdown this.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. Not on my website.
Sara Vieira: I am not gonna touch this HDML file, and he was like, oh this is great. I was like, yeah. I think the moment you realize that Markdown can be combined with Gatsby and that Gatsby can be combined with source, like Gatsby source plugins, your life just becomes so much better.
Joel Hooks: Like the idea they can take 15 different data sources and create a single unified graph jewel data source that now I can play with and build a site around, it blows my mind. It still blows my mind and I've built several sites doing it that way. It's just cool.
Sara Vieira: It's amazing.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: It's really good. You can source things from meet-up, you can source things from ... Examples that I had was Jason files, Markdown files, you can get things from Medium, Content full, Airtable, everything on the same site. And I'm just like, how does this magic even work? I honestly have no idea how Gatsby works, and it's one of those things that I feel like if I figured it out it would lose all the magic.
Joel Hooks: Have you looked at the source?
Sara Vieira: No. I think it would lose all the magic. Should I look at the source?
Joel Hooks: It's the most intense Redux I've ever looked at. It's interesting. It's actually really well-built and it's probably the best use case of Redux that I've ever seen, if that makes sense. A lot of times you're like, you don't need Redux, why is everybody using Redux, which is still the most popular single course on our site, it's Dan's Redux course.
Sara Vieira: Really?
Joel Hooks: Yeah. Three years running, still the most popular content that we've ever put out by a long margin. It's an outlier in a big way.
Sara Vieira: Damn.
Joel Hooks: Every single day and people like our search term, people are searching up Redux. And that has to do with the fact that that exists on the site as part of that. Like Dan's course, people wanna watch that. But still it's like, all right y'all, maybe you don't need Redux, but you look at Gatsby and you see how they're using it and seeing what they've used Redux for and it's like, oh, okay. Here's what we're doing, cause it's like event sourcing and all that fun stuff which I don't fully understand, which is what Redux is based off of and it makes a ton of sense in the Gatsby context.
Sara Vieira: I think the problem that happened with Redux, and this happens with everything honestly. It's the hype train.
Joel Hooks: Yeah, the cargo cult.
Sara Vieira: Do you ever go on a website then dot church?
Joel Hooks: No.
Sara Vieira: It's a photo of Dan, and it gives me life sometimes. I just look at it, it's great. I think the thing that happened with Redux was that ... I could tell you a story about a friend of mine. She's gonna get mad at me again, but I don't care.
Joel Hooks: I just went to Dan dot church by the way. Okay, tell me your story about your friend.
Sara Vieira: Okay. So I have a friend of mine, we went to boot camp and then tried to get a job, like you do after you go out to boot camp. And she did an interview for a company, and the company asked her to make a simple app. It wasn't a to-do app, it was basically when you try to not make a to-do app so you make a movies app or something like that.
Joel Hooks: Yeah, the address book.
Sara Vieira: Yeah. It's basically a to-do app with a different name.
Joel Hooks: It's a to-do app but it's not. Yeah right.
Sara Vieira: Yeah, it's a to-do app but not really. And so she did it and she delivered it and she made it with set state because it's a to-do app. And they failed her because she didn't know Redux.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: They were like, Why didn't you use Redux? And she was like, I've never used Redux. You can also just do this with this set state. It was for a junior position dude.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. That's why the Course is so popular though, right. It's a job thing to me and it always is, what's driving views on our courses. It gives us a really interesting look into the job market and what people are looking for in turn, because it's always what people are hiring for. That's what everybody wants. Everyone wants a good job so they can make money and not have to toil away all day.
Sara Vieira: What are the most popular ones besides the Redux one? What are people looking for right now?
Joel Hooks: It's React or Redux. Kraft Yell's huge, Angular is hard because it's split across RXGJ Angular and Typescript.
Sara Vieira: There's a lot of React people using Typescript now.
Joel Hooks: Typescript has picked up in the last six months like nobody's business. But you've also seen it ... It's Microsoft coming in there and it's job-
Sara Vieira: VS code man.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. VS code has definitely something to do with it. It's like they get a wedge because it's all ... A big part of it to me is marketing, they're big budgets to get these technologies in front of people, and VS codes eating the entire IB market right now because it's great.
Sara Vieira: It's beautiful. I honestly I'm okay with that.
Joel Hooks: I love it.
Sara Vieira: I love it. Before I used to use Adam which I think is actually way better now.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: The only problem I had with Adam was I was slow. I literally just used to should be as good as we got. We go so fast, and I was like, it's fucking electron, it's never fast, why are you lying to me? Apparently they fixed the electron.
Joel Hooks: I was throwing VS code into CodeSandbox is the most insane thing that I've seen in quite some time. It's just bizarre to me because at the end of the day they're electron apps, right?
Sara Vieira: Yeah.
Joel Hooks: So their page email, JavaScript and CSS, like ostensibly-
Sara Vieira: But they have a lot of node features, so it was actually had to probably feel a lot of ... It basically made node to work on the browser. So there's a browser to that FS that he has, which is basically the FS-
Joel Hooks: That's like his hobby though, right? Making node work in the browser is his hobby?
Sara Vieira: Yeah. So the next thing which was already shown at ... I'm sure it's completely fine is that Codex extensions work now. So I think the most amazing extension that works ... Did you ever use View in VS code?
Joel Hooks: No, I haven't used View very much.
Sara Vieira: So View has an extension called Vitter and it's literally the only extension he gives for View because it comes with ESLint, [inaudible 00:19:43]. It comes with syntax highlighting, it comes with literally everything. It made that shit work in the browser and I'm just like, I have no idea how you do ... I don't wanna even look at that code. I don't even wanna touch it. I feel like if I touch it I'm just gonna break it. So yeah, extensions now work. Oh so you have vim mode and everything now.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. I saw the pop up come up, then I was like, I thought that worked already but now it makes more sense. I haven't seen the talk yet. I'm here to check that out.
Sara Vieira: I don't think that talk was recorded. It was a 10 minutes talk.
Joel Hooks: Okay.
Sara Vieira: I don't think it was recorded.
Joel Hooks: Okay.
Sara Vieira: It was just something like, we made extensions, we're gonna ... One really good thing about Eve is, I feel like no one appreciates. It's like he says we a lot, so it was me, him and Boaz, we were on stage showing the new things of CodeSandbox. He was like, we made extensions work in a browser. And I was like, Eve, that was you babe. That was all you, I didn't fucking touch that. I have no idea what you're talking about. He says a lot of we when he means he, and I'm just like, oh sunshine.
Joel Hooks: My favorite story is the day that they released the ability to donate or become a patron and I went to the slider and I was on Twitter and I was like, it doesn't go up high enough.
Sara Vieira: Still doesn't.
Joel Hooks: I had to hack it, I had to get in there and literally hack it and you can force it that way, you can hack it to make it go higher. It doesn't go high enough still, I think it's still stuck at the same level.
Sara Vieira: Yeah. I think the max is still 50. We got a Twitter thing a couple of days ago being like, free marketing, no free tip, make your slide go high.
Joel Hooks: No, I went in and I literally ... Cause you can go in and you can edit the source of the HDML and make it go higher. It's not protected, you can give more money, you just have to-
Sara Vieira: I don't think we should though, I don't think that's the thing we should protect.
Joel Hooks: No, I did. That's what I did. So I was able to give what I felt was appropriate. Cause we're literally using CodeSandbox across ... It's like a quarter of our business and I love it so much and I wanna support this project. It's bootstrapped, it has everything that I love about a project and just simplicity, but then the features keep coming at this crazy pace and it's so useful and it has so much to offer, and it's like, I'm totally down to pay for that. I wanna pay and help this project not just in some sort of altruistic sense but because it's amazing. It's really awesome.
Sara Vieira: I feel like one of the reasons that I started contributing to CodeSandbox was also because it's actually not hard to start contributing to it if it's actually very helpful. I don't think it was the first one, but one of the first things that I did was that when I did workshops, it kept happening to me that I saved the thing and then I was like, so let's do this exercise and I'll start typing in it. And then I lose the start of the exercise, I bet this happens to everyone. Every time I think I'm special Joel, fucking damn it. So I made a slider that just freeze the sandbox, so that means that if you try to edit it when you save it you actually just force it. It was intense, trying to figure out what the fuck was going on with that state management. After you figured it out it's actually pretty good.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: It was so friendly and everyone was so friendly and it was something that I already used and I was like, oh my God, I could actually help on this. It's something that I use, I already am a patron to it but this is something that I use and then I can actually make better. I actually have a voice in this. I think it was the first time that I was like, oh shit, I have a voice now. I can make things, I'll just go merge more things.
Joel Hooks: That's gonna help you and it's gonna help a lot of other people too. I don't know the daily use statistics on it but I have to imagine they keep going up and up.
Sara Vieira: I actually have no idea, but I researched one thing for a talk.
Joel Hooks: Are you clicking that?
Sara Vieira: Yes. CodeSandbox has been around for like a year and a half. There's 32755 results for to-do app, so it has a lot of people.
Joel Hooks: A lot of people making to-do apps.
Sara Vieira: I was so sad that Ben doesn't actually give you the number of results for search because I think that would have been amazing.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. A lot of people wanna get to-dos done. That's what I know.
Sara Vieira: I have a friend who actually started working at a to-do app company and she was like, all the interviews prepared me for this.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. It's everything. It's all just come together now and this is the pinnacle.
Sara Vieira: Yeah. She's like, I got this. I'm good, I'm moving, this is great.
Joel Hooks: So speaking of state management, what's your go-to? How do you manage state in your reactor.
Sara Vieira: I try to go with set state if I can. If its small things ... By set state I mean either hoops or set state or context. The core react things-
Joel Hooks: Yeah, the built-ins.
Sara Vieira: Yeah. The moment you put something on, you will increase the difficulty of the app. If I'm using GraphQL and I need a lot of state and not just stating contexts, I will use what comes with Apollo,[inaudible 00:24:34], evolving state and that basically allows you to manage state with GraphQL. Which I really like if I'm using GraphQL mostly because if you're already writing GraphQL query so you don't have to get that mind shift to go from GraphQL to another thing to manage basically just another Jason File, every state is just the Jason object. This is it, this is the moment, this is the groundbreaking moment where I tell everyone that state is just an object and everyone's like, I know Sara shut the fuck up. And if I'm just using GraphQL, I really like Maven by Michelle Sprostater. I think that's how you say his name, and it's really nice. It's reactive and you can also use that with Maven state tree which allows you to have types and everything. So it's actually pretty nice.
Joel Hooks: It's my favorite library for state management for sure. It just makes a lot of sense and it's lightweight and it's kind of opt in. It doesn't have to do everything, it can just do the small things where you need that extra special state management.
Sara Vieira: Yeah, exactly. I feel like it also doesn't really slow down your development and a store, because you can just pop it in and start doing it. And I don't know, it's just nice. I feel like it's one of those things that's just nice. It feels nice, I never had any growing pains with it so I'll just stay with it.
Joel Hooks: And it rides through, it's had a lot of change and react in the last six months and hooks are here and suspense is on the way and all this stuff, and I feel like Mobex is going to ride those waves.
Sara Vieira: Yeah.
Joel Hooks: And still be there and still be a useful tool even when it all settles down.
Sara Vieira: Yeah, that's the thing.
Joel Hooks: Are you all in on GraphQL? Is that your go-to whenever you sit down to do a new app? Is it GraphQL or ...?
Sara Vieira: If you have an end point that's gonna [inaudible 00:26:15] just make it Rest API.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: There is no point to making a GraphQL API for something like ... Imagine that you have a weather app and it just returns if it's raining or something like that. There's no need to make a GraphQL API, just send some Jason. But if I have two or three layers of data that I can actually combine, if I have cars and people and storage facilities for cars, then I will use GraphQL because I can combine all of those into one thing and make less stupid requests. But honestly if it's one call or two calls that you have to make in your app and if all of that is fetch, there is no need to use GraphQL. There's no need to add that type of complexity to your front end and back end and everything because it's two calls and it's fetch, just make a fetch API call. I think one of the things is that we tend to be gentle like ... I forgot the name you gave before the hype train.
Joel Hooks: The cargo cult.
Sara Vieira: The cargo cult is great. I love that. And if you try to use a hammer for everything, it's not gonna work. It is gonna work but it's gonna be terrible and it's gonna fuck up your whole house.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. You're trying to get in there and fit in something that doesn't fit just because it's popular or some thought leader told you that this is the way.
Sara Vieira: Yeah, exactly. Don't do it. If you look at something and be like, this would be easier to do with rest, than you could probably do with normal rest call. The reason GraphQL was created was because of big things.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: It was because of big stuff like ...
Joel Hooks: Facebook.
Sara Vieira: Facebook, yeah. But I think the best example of GraphQL and its use is that you get API. If you try to get three or four things and they get API and the rest one you cry because you have to make a shit ton of requests that give you so much data. And if you're using the GraphQL API, you just make one call and it's great. And that is a really good use. I think that is the power of GraphQL, but if you don't need that type of power there's no need to have that type of complexity and force yourself to use it just because, yeah I use GraphQL now. Cool.
Joel Hooks: So if you're building an app then you don't necessarily start at GraphQL? I don't know, it really depends. And then to me it feels like hybrid solutions are gonna be here for a long time for what we have. We're making fetch calls, and we have a GraphQL API and we're doing a hybrid approach.
Sara Vieira: Yeah. I feel like that's gonna happen. Also, one of the trends that I've been seeing a lot, and I actually really like it, is to just wrap rest end points with GraphQL. So if you have rest end points you can just wrap it with GraphQL and it works pretty okay and I really like it. And I think we're still gonna do both things for a long time, but for example, for Awesome Talks I picked up GraphQL automatically because I knew I was gonna have speakers and talks and probably categories and everything. I feel like that was gonna be easier with GraphQL.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: So if I have something like that I'll pick up GraphQL automatically, but if I have a weather app ... I just did a weather app a couple of weeks ago, there's no need to pick up GraphQL. Let's just put a function on [inaudible 00:29:19] and call that function. It's just basically like an express end point, so lambda. A middle lambda, I'm proud of myself.
Joel Hooks: They're making it easier. Cause first I was like, I don't think I wanna fire up the AWS console for whatever that is. But now with ZEIT and Netlify, they're pretty nice functions right there in your face and make it a lot easier, which I appreciate. I've only made one function personally so I'm getting there. I'll be server list one day.
Sara Vieira: I'll probably never be suitable.
Joel Hooks: Probably not.
Sara Vieira: I like my service.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: I feel like we don't appreciate Netlify, and love for one thing is that they allow us to put anything on the Internet.
Joel Hooks: Quick too.
Sara Vieira: Yes. And it's not for someone who is starting out, it's not easy. Netlify is more because you can just plug it in with Get Hop, but if you don't know a lot of get hop then you still can't do it. But if you have some get hop experience and anything, you can put anything on the Internet. And that allowed us to make so much dumb shit, and I love it.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. It's like it's dumb shit party time for sure, and if somebody sets it up for you, you're set. Okay, now you just have to get pushed and then it just works. It's amazing because it does, it just functions as expected. It's really glorious.
Sara Vieira: And that's literally all we needed. And I think up until now all we got was a lot of things that a lot for scalability and blah blah blah and I was like, but I just wanna put things on the Internet. Why do you all hate me.
Joel Hooks: That's why WordPress is whatever massive percentage of the Internet. It's because it was just, okay, I can just go punch two buttons and now I can do some configuration and look at my Website and just made it relatively simple. And this is still a little more technical I think than, I go to wordpress.com and firing up one of their instances or whatever. But it's a lot more accessible than having to ... Even services like Roku or whatever, which were great but this is like the next evolution of that abstraction to me.
Sara Vieira: I feel like it is too. I feel like Roku is a really good idea and I feel like it depends on what you want. But if you just wanna put something online then just go with Netlify here on out.
Joel Hooks: Yeah, we use Roku at Egghead. For us it would be either that or straight AWS, which we still like a little abstraction over AWS.
Sara Vieira: Honestly I've used AWS like two times. I have this domain that stuck there and I can't get it out. And so I have no idea how and I just gave up on it. I gave up on the entire website, I'm just like, just let it die.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: It's fine.
Joel Hooks: That's your graveyard. Good luck.
Sara Vieira: I'm never gonna get it back.
Joel Hooks: They're making amazing strides too, amplifier is really cool and does a similar idea to Netlify or ZEIT now.
Sara Vieira: They're trying to make a lot of CLIs which I really appreciate because AWS is not easy and I'm glad they hired someone to actually show us how to build things with it, like anyone. Because it's not easy and I think they just get this idea that it's easy because when you make something it's easy.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: That's the main issue that we have. We'd like everything intact, like the documentation. I can't write documentation about things that I made because I'm like, it's so easy cause I mean it and I'm stupid.
Joel Hooks: Once you know it, it's easy, that's the things.
Sara Vieira: Exactly.
Joel Hooks: It's easy when you know it.
Sara Vieira: It's like riding a bike.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. Riding a bike algebra. Like oh yeah, that's easy. Algebra is easy.
Sara Vieira: Yeah. Algebra is super easy.
Joel Hooks: If you know it.
Sara Vieira: I have this thing where like if someone tries to speak to me in English, in Portugal or some shit and they misspell a word, not misspell because I also misspell words, but they say something wrong, just under my breath I'm correcting them. That's because I just fucking know English. It's so fucking easy, and I don't remember when I was learning it because it was so long ago that I'm like, it's so easy. You should fucking know this. This is everything that we ever make as people. For example if you know how to a play guitar you're gonna tell me that it's really easy to play a guitar, and I'm gonna tell you that it's really easy to play drums. And then you try to play drums and I try to play guitar and maybe we both cry.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. Cause then we're learning to play them together and that's the next level.
Sara Vieira: That's some guitar hero level shit right there.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. Rock Band. Tell me about React Girls. I'd like to hear more about this project and your involvement.
Sara Vieira: While Dee and I started the React Girls in, I don't know when but it was last year back when I was living in London, I lived in London for about four months. I came back because I didn't like it, straight up. And so we started this thing and so I came from Portland, there's not a lot of meetups, by not a lot I mean there's one.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: That's about it. It's great. It's not one. You're going to the meetup.
Joel Hooks: Yeah, the meetup.
Sara Vieira: It's sad actually. Continuing, Greta which is the marketing person, she's great. She doesn't like when I call her a marketing person. So she came to me and she was like, we should make a react meetup and we should just have it with girls. And I was like, Greta, I have no idea how you're gonna get people. She's like, you'll speak at it. I'm like, fuck I knew this would happen. And so we started that in London and it actually got a lot of attraction. I remember that when I actually attended the meetup without speaking, it was the first time that I realized that we actually did something good. Because I realized there were a lot of women who were making their first talks there because they felt more comfortable. So there's usually about 60% women and 40% men, but the thing is, and that's what I've realized. If you tell men there's only women speaking, the dicks won't go because they think they can not learn from women, so they won't go. So it's so cheap.
Joel Hooks: It's a filter, right? It's not that men aren't welcome, it's just a filter for-
Sara Vieira: No, any man is welcome to come. It says on every meetup page men are welcome to come, only women speak though. And the men who are like, I'm not going to girls meetups. I'm like, yeah cool. I'm so glad you're not coming, that's sounds great. That's exactly what I wanted, thanks.
Joel Hooks: Mission accomplished.
Sara Vieira: Mission accomplished, dick repellent. And so I've started to realize that that was actually a good thing because one of the people that actually did one of their first talks there then ended up speaking at a conference in London and everything, and she's great. [inaudible 00:35:39]. She's great. I just started noticing that women felt way more comfortable doing it that way, speaking in front of more women and it was not as daunting to them. So when I moved to Berlin I started the same meetup in Berlin. It's been hard getting speakers but I'm doing it slowly and steadily, getting speakers. I speak at my own meetup last month. It's not good. Apparently that's the curse of the meetup organizing.
Joel Hooks: Yeah, that's not uncommon. I know our local meetup, the react meetup organizer is a frequent speaker just because-
Sara Vieira: Yeah, you can't get anyone else.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: It's actually really hard to find speakers and it's also I think really hard to find women speakers mostly because I think we suffer more from ... If we don't have college degrees, we suffer more from imposter syndrome. More from the idea that we're gonna be judged even though maybe we won't be judged, but we have this idea that we will be judged and we will be found out or something. And it's just harder for us. So after a while I just thought like, I think we should make this into a conference and I think it would be a great idea to have something. It does what some conferences do, but the other way around. So the thing that a lot of conferences say is that we don't get enough females because of the CFB.
Joel Hooks: Right.
Sara Vieira: Which is valid, it's true probably. So what happens if all those CFBs women, then does that make it a worse conference, does that make it a better conference. What happens if they're not afraid to speak cause everyone else is also a girl. And I feel like it's a really good opportunity to bring more women into speaking. I'm not speaking or I'm seeing or doing anything at this conference, I'm just helping around. Not gonna do anything, people have seen enough of me for fuck's sake.
Sara Vieira: So the idea is that we bring new people into speaking that we try and show people that it's not that scary, that it doesn't always have to be the same people and that you can do it too, that it's not that hard. And also that it's not that glamorous, that it's just sharing your knowledge and that you don't have to be scared and there is no reason to believe that you're gonna be humiliated or found out or something like that. It's about giving people a safe space basically. And I honestly didn't realize that until I myself went to the meetup. I was like, yeah girl meetup, sounds like a great idea. And I was like, oh you actually did something good, okay.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. Like you had an idea, and it turns out it was a good one. It makes a lot of sense to me. You had to catch some flack in terms of Twitter and the public. I personally appreciate you putting it out there and willing to go there in general and create something that's interesting and different and a place where other people can get an opportunity. I think that's amazing and very commendable. So thanks for that.
Sara Vieira: A lot of the flames that I got on Twitter were also people that didn't actually read the thing and assume that only women could attend, which if not by any reasons it would be stupid financially because we cannot afford to do the conference.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: We have to pay bills, but it would also be ... How do you call it when you're being bad to a scent that could generate a thing of people?
Joel Hooks: Discriminatory.
Sara Vieira: It would be discriminatory. Completely just be like, no you cannot enter because you are a man. That doesn't make any sense.
Joel Hooks: Like some sort of old school country club shit-
Sara Vieira: Yeah.
Joel Hooks: ... But we're the opposite. We're, oh no, you have to be a stud, white dude or you can't show up here.
Sara Vieira: No, that doesn't make any sense. The idea's that men will come and will applaud these women, these people for speaking and will be there. That's the idea. The idea is not that no man can ... It's a no man's land.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: That doesn't make any sense. I think most of the hate was because of that and there's also one dude who was like, I cannot forget this because he was like, well, I don't think this makes any sense because I'm gay, I wouldn't like to go to a conference where everyone's gay. And I was like, oh my God I need this conference.
Joel Hooks: Sounds like an amazing conference to be honest.
Sara Vieira: I know, and I was like, I should make gay JS night. Every speaker is either gay or trans or anything. I'm like, this sounds amazing I need this. And everyone was like, oh my God, we should make this a conference. I think that one backfired.
Joel Hooks: Yeah.
Sara Vieira: It was like, I would feel uncomfortable in a conference where every speaker's gay and I'm like, I would not, I would fucking love it.
Joel Hooks: I think that sounds like a theory that might not even be true for the individual, but maybe it's true. Who knows. I can't speak for them.
Sara Vieira: I can't speak for them but I really wanna make this conference now. I feel like that's the next one, it's gonna be career JS.
Joel Hooks: Thanks. I like it. When is this happening?
Sara Vieira: It's gonna be in London.
Joel Hooks: When is the react JS Girls conference occurring?
Sara Vieira: The conference is on the 3rd of May. It's in London. So we already have three conference speakers, which is great, and the website already operates on tickets and everything and CFB is still open. So if anyone wants to submit their thing please do. Everything is still open. Everything is great, and we already have three speakers. We have Erin Fox, Laura Medalia, and Mercy Sutton.
Joel Hooks: Nice.
Sara Vieira: I'm really excited to meet Mercy cause I never did.
Joel Hooks: She's awesome.
Sara Vieira: She looks awesome.
Joel Hooks: She is.
Sara Vieira: Once I was actually at Script Gowns and I was like, does anyone want anything? Cause I was gonna pick up some water and someone was like, when you pick up water can you also pick me up some food. I was like, yeah sure. So I went to the food thing and like Mercy was speaking to people next to the food thing, and I was just like, not worthy of this. I went back to my seat and they were like, where's my food. I was like, Mercy Sutton is there. They were like, what does that matter? I'm like, I just left. You go get your food. Like, are you serious. I was, I'm not gonna ask her to move.
Joel Hooks: Right. Can you please get out of my way, I need food.
Sara Vieira: Yeah. I wasn't gonna ask her to move so I just left. I don't want food, you go get your food. You ask Mercy Sutton to move, I'm not doing it.
Joel Hooks: She's one of the most down to earth, coolest people I've had the pleasure of meeting. So when you do meet her in May, it will go all right.
Sara Vieira: I think so. I still won't ask her to move though.
Joel Hooks: Yeah. I get that. Sara, I really appreciate it and I look forward to the dumb shit you're gonna make in the future because-
Sara Vieira: I'm gonna try and fix my website. No idea what's up with that.
Joel Hooks: You make me smile honestly. Twitter sometimes can be a little rough and I think you're a bright light on the tech world and I really appreciate all your efforts and look forward to seeing what you do next.
Sara Vieira: Thank you so much.
Joel Hooks: Thanks for talking to me, and I'll talk to you soon.
Sara Vieira: That's the deep thing that I wanted to say. There is no better way to make the world better than to make people smile, and when you make dumb shit people will smile because it's dumb.
Joel Hooks: That is deep and awesome and also true, and I couldn't agree more.
Sara Vieira: See, but I shouldn't have said it at 58 seconds. It wouldn't have that much impact. It would just be like, look at this girl, she moved to Berlin and now think she's deep.
Joel Hooks: We've come full circle. It's great.
Sara Vieira: I know.
Joel Hooks: Awesome.
Sara Vieira: Thank you so much for saying that. It really means a lot to me that it actually makes people smile, the things that I make and dumb things that I say and that's really all I can hope for. So thank you so much for saying it. Seriously it means a lot. And thank you so much for having me.
Joel Hooks: My pleasure. Cheers.