Bay Area Meteor Night Returns! - July 9th [UPDATE: Livestream Link]

[stolinski]

Any updates? You mentioned that Ben’s video would be up on Monday.

[minhna]

[menewman]

As someone who was lucky enough to be able to attend in person (but is not otherwise affiliated with the event), I do think that the slides posted above convey >95% of Ben’s message (they are very detailed and Ben pretty much followed them), so if you’ve read through the presentation slides you should have a pretty clear idea of how the talk went!

Come join the TypeScript conversion effort!

Issue: Help getting up and running to port Meteor tools to TypeScript

(I don’t mean to diminish from the request to have the videos, which is totally valid; I just wanted to reassure non-SF readers that you probably don’t have anything from Ben’s talk to be surprised by. I’m also not sure if there are slides posted for the first talk.)

[storyteller]

Would like to watch the other talks as well.

[stolinski]

Totally, the slides are great to read through, but this is more of a failure to inspire and promote confidence in Meteor within the community. If MDG doesn’t care enough to make these videos available, why should the community care about the updates. I get that this might sound harsh, but this was suppose to be the future of Meteor.

[rijk]

If you don’t mean to sound harsh, try sounding a little less harsh

The slides are very clear in my opinion and paint a very positive picture for the future of Meteor. So no need to worry.

Having the video would be a bonus, but you also gotta respect this is all volunteered by people doing their best – criticising them is a little misplaced IMO. I do agree the official communication coming from MDG could definitely be improved though. (what happened to the podcast??)

[vooteles]

Guys, I too would like to say that a kind word or two here would go a long way. Qualia people are doing this as volunteers, as far as I can tell, and no doubt work and business comes first, as it should.

[stolinski]

The preface about my tone was to let you know harshness was not my intention in tone. This is the internet where things can be read in many different voices and tones. My intent was concern.

I’m not criticizing MDG because I need to see the videos, I’m personally able to read the slides. It was my understanding that MDG was the one in charge of the video and release of those videos. If it is Qualia and they are just volunteering time, then I totally understand and I apologize for my critique.

That said, can you imagine any other platform (NextJS, Vue, React, Gatsby) announcing the future of their platform in this way? With a non-public announcement at a local meet up and slides posted on a forum? A post saying it would be available and then radio silence?

I’ve been apart of this community for a long time and this does not instill confidence in this platform going forward. You can say that critique is misplaced, but these forums get quieter all the time.

As someone who loves and uses this platform, I honestly think things like this hurt the Meteor community and cause others not to take it seriously.

All of that said, I don’t blame Qualia for any issues here. I just believe that MDG isn’t putting the time or resources into Meteor or it’s community and it shows.

[rijk]

Yep, I agree on the part of MDG. I just think Qualia is doing their best to solve exactly this issue, and thanks to them at least we now know something, so we should thank them

It’s a shame Sashko is gone at MDG, he was very active in keeping touch with the community. I just think they are missing some of those profiles in the team. However, it seems they have been pretty successful in building a community for Apollo, so I am hopeful they will apply these learnings to Meteor as their focus shifts back to the framework now.

I have to admit I have also been a little nervous from the lack of communication (although Meteor is working fine as is, still using it daily in multiple projects), but with the new funding round I am confident they can and will give Meteor some lovin’. Especially when they find a way make it a little more ‘shiney’ like Apollo (instead of being the boring old backwards compatible workhorse that no one really wants to work on). That’s why I am heartened reading Ben’s slides: it seems he is finally passionate about Meteor again. Disclaimer: of course I have no idea about Ben’s motivations, feelings, or priorities Just guessing based on observation.

[stolinski]

I agree with you on everything here except for your optimism. I’ve held a similar optimism in MDG updating and reviving Meteor for a long time, but at this point I’m not holding my breath.

@veered My apologies to you Lucas, I was unaware that Qualia was in charge of the production and release of the videos.

[veered]

Hey guys! Sorry for all the delays, Qualia takes a loootttt of my time (we’re 175 people now). Pretty dumb of me to try to manage this event personally.

Until I get the video uploaded to Youtube here is a direct link to Ben’s talk:

Meteor Night at Qualia San Francisco - July 9, 2019.mp4 (video)

[stolinski]

No worries @veered , thank you for posting the link.

[lgandecki]

tldr: Could you please upload the original talk? We’ve waited long enough.

The added slides covering the original ones in the video are messed up from right the beginning - 1:18m…

I’d prefer to just watch a video with the original recording of the screen - I can always use the slides if something is not visible. Still much better than watching slides that are completely out of sync and distracting. To be honest, it would be better to not have slides there at all.

Yes, I could just read the slides. Yes, I could listen to the audio from the recording and change slides myself.
I don’t see the point - since the recording is there, and it’s just someones decision to not release it for weeks.
If Ben wanted us to wait, he wouldn’t upload the slides. This makes me think that he would prefer the video to be released by now. And it really should be his decision.

[veered]

I didn’t produce the video and wasn’t aware the slides are out of sync. Sorry about that. I’ll upload the original video as soon as I can.

God this has been such a nightmare. The guy I trusted to do the A/V did an unbelievably terrible job, despite all assurance that it would go smoothly. I checked with him over and over again that’d it go well, and yet… here we are.

At least the live event itself was great!

[lgandecki]

No worries. We all feel that you are going through a nightmare, but meant well - so sorry!
We are just all curious, Ben is such an unbelievably good programmer, with a head full of ideas, it’s a pleasure to hear him speak… Slides don’t do the justice…

A bit surprising that things like that (AV mess ups) are happening in the SF, from all of the places

[veered]

Will do, I’m getting the raw files now

[alawi]

Great talk! thanks for sharing, I’ve to say Ben adds a lot of character/personality to the slides!

I’m happy to see the core of Meteor is constantly evolving. In the JS land where everyone jumps behind the latest hype and everything is rewritten from scratch, it’s really refreshing and admirable to witness first-hand the effort of evolving a complex system such as Meteor to the competitive, faced-paced, and rapidly evolving JS ecosystem and within the constraints of backward compatibility. For me that is a real sign of maturity and very solid software engineering.

With that said, I do think the JS ecosystem will stabilize, the language went through a renaissance in the last few years, which is expected given that it was designed for browsers and all of the sudden it started being used in creating complex backends and build tools. Ben managed to successfully co-evolve Meteor tools with the JS ecosystem and typescript, as I see it, is the latest addition to this journey. I think Meteor, MDG and Apollo are in really good spot now, and look forward to seeing them get better in the future. I also think that Meteor site can get some updates to make it more open source friendly and reflect the latest updates.

[arggh]

Thanks for uploading Ben’s talk, it was inspiring!

Do you by any chance have footage of the Q/A’s after?

[lgandecki]

I’ve decided not to wait anymore, watched the uploaded video - the slides are misaligned in the beginning but when they start to be helpful - it gets in sync and is in sync till the end. So, in other words - I can recommend watching that version, just ignore the slides for the initial, I think, 20 minutes.

Great talk!
Now, if I only could find sometime to help with the transition… Will try to squeeze a few hours here and there:)

[deeann]

Hey, Meteor and Qualia Fans!

In case you missed it,
Qualia is HIRING!

Ping me at Deeann@qualia.com
if interested in exploring further.
(Even if it’s just to get a t-shirt, spend an hour with Lucas,
refer a friend, or join us for lunch/happy hour!)

Or check us out: https://www.qualia.com/jobs/software-engineer-ii-sf/