🚦 TRANSMISSION #7: Apollo AKA Reactive GraphQL (Released)

:point_right: Howdy Meteor Forum peeps, It is time to plan show #7! What perked your interest this week(s) in Meteor?

Reply below, let us know which topics you want us to cover and who on the MDG team you want to be on the show!


Update

Show #6 was awesome. @debergalis and @benjamn joined us. Matt shared plans to include the community more in Meteor core repo(s) and Ben dove into all the details around 1.3. Viewership-wise it has been our fastest growing show to date with about 1,600 listens in the first 4 days.

Upcoming Iteration
@sashko and I have been taking feedback and iterating Transmission form day one based on feedback and analytics. From some obvious trends we have decided to shift production to be more centered around the YouTube audience.

In the next few episodes you will see us experiment on this idea. We are totally open to your suggestions on how we can make the video experience better.

The podcast will still exist and will stay a single full length show.

Thank you all for your support and feedback!!


About TRANSMISSION

TRANSMISSION is a weekly podcast/vlog covering the most important topics to come out of the Meteor Forums. Each week I need your help to pick the most relevant forum posts for @sashko and I to discuss in deeper detail.

Podcast Site: https://transmission.simplecast.fm/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTUf4ytkmI8Q7cbf4J6aQEYun5g8fxt9B

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This week doesn’t have as many hot topics compared to some previous ones:

Perhaps it’s an opportunity to do a shorter show after the massive episode 6. We can also elaborate more on Reactive GraphQL AKA Apollo!

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It’s funny, personally, after the first 6, a lot of my wondering about whats going on are mostly answered.

Just want things like

  • Can the meteor guide have a version selector for 1.3 :slight_smile: Also anything in the 1.2 guide that might be significantly different with 1.3?

  • Last transmission there was a bit of a question over React Native, and I got the feeling Cordova is the goto tech for mobile at the moment. Would be nice to here a bit more of a discussion around that

  • Why Galaxy? why not just mupx and $5 / $10 digital ocean droplet? At what point does Galaxy make sense for a developer? Does it make sense at all for small projects that you just want to throw out there and see how it goes?

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ApolloStack :smiley:

Nice name! Is this is just a codename or something fixed?

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To be honest, the past episodes answered all of the questions I had as well. I think once 1.3 lands there is going to be so much good discussions to be had.

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Very interesting hearing the feedback.

Do you all think Transmission might be better as a monthly show with the end product being a higher quality production?

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One idea that might take a bit of setting up: It would be interesting to hear from some of the MDG’s bigger customers, the ones running on Galaxy for example. I guess the sorts of things that might be interesting to know are:

  • How do they find Meteor at scale?
  • Do they still find Meteor advantageous now they’ve transitioned from the prototyping phase to the ongoing maintenance of a large app?
  • How do they manage their release processes, do they go for Continuous Integration, how do they structure their git repos etc.?
  • What are their testing philosophies?
  • Anyone doing TDD?
  • Have they had to ‘go round’ the ecosystem in places to get functionality that Meteor doesn’t offer, or to fork Meteor themselves?

It’s really interesting to hear MDG’s take, but it would also be fascinating to hear from the people in the trenches operating at the scales lots of us aspire to.

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Perhaps it’s just a question of taking the pulse of the forum and then tuning the frequency accordingly? Although I’d miss it!

Maybe say at the minimum it’s monthly, I think it’s really important that an MDG voice keeps speaking to the community at the moment and that someone keeps asking the hard questions.

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Interesting, that idea has crossed my mind more than once. I enjoyed interviewing Sean Young of Classcraft on Galaxy hosting with @joshowens .

The challenge that rolls around in my head is how we can use the Transmission show to attract outside developers to Meteor as well as fill the need for existing Meteor devs to get deeper insights. Ya know, find the sweet spot! :ice_cream:

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I love this idea, would be easier for me to consume as a listener and I know that it takes time to move along all this work.

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Yes! As soon as we are done writing the content and 1.3 is released! And the 1.2 version will always be around if you want to take a look. Most of the articles from 1.2 will remain the same, except polished up with some new code style and modules. The biggest change will be the addition of several new articles, most notably testing and app structure.

I think this is the name we’re going with (Apollo, not “ApolloStack” - that’s just going to be the github org, twitter account, etc)! Hope to have a logo and a basic website up within the week. I think having a name will make it a lot easier to refer to the specific project rather than saying “Reactive GraphQL” all the time.

There are a couple talks at Devshop/Meteor night about this, which you can hear on youtube - do those not answer all of the questions?

I think it’s safe to say we can skip this week - maybe we can just revisit every Wednesday and see if we should do an episode that week?

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You could formally split each show into parts, maybe:

  • Meteor News featuring the hot topics and latest news (e.g. new and upcoming releases),
  • Meteor in Action featuring one company talking about how they find Meteor and
  • Meteor Deep Dive where you talk in depth about one technical subject

That would give something for everyone maybe? I think it’s really important that we spread the message that Meteor is in use in real apps making real money, that MDG are right there with us and that the community is vibrant and interesting.

Edit: Another thought for attracting a wider audience is to talk about developments in the wider JS community. ES2015, build tool fatigue, React, Angular etc. are all part of the Meteor world too, I guess content in those areas might broaden the appeal too?

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Nooooo! Maybe I’m in the minority on this one, but the more frequent episodes the better! (actually, the more Meteor based podcasts the better!) My vote goes to keeping them coming as frequently as you guys can. There are so many topics to consider; I really don’t think you’ll run out of content anytime soon.

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I’ve not heard those yet, I’ll have a look, but I’d imagine there are a lot of people who listen to podcasts but don’t necessarily watch youtube videos on this kind of stuff (because they listen to it on the train, running etc.). The real attraction though would be that it would be more of a conversation than a talk, with @benstr working his magic of asking questions in a positive but also probing manner.

Anyway, food for thought, I was just throwing out some ideas, the show is great as is too :slight_smile:

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I don’t know, at the moment, weekly is good, haven’t bored me yet, I use the podcast and just listen to it on my commute.

I don’t know peoples opinions on this are as much use as just tracking listening / response stats and trying to make decisions from that.

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I started learning Meteor about 1.5 years ago and I was amazed on how easy it was to develop an app on Meteor and the “easiness” of it. I didn’t keep up with Meteor for the last 9 months until recently and now I learned about the path Meteor is taking, which I think it’s awesome. But it also adds a lot of things that a newbie that was happily developing with Meteor a year ago might find a bit overwhelming with things he never learned before such as: React, ReactNative, NPM, Webpack, GraphQL, Tests, etc…

If there is nothing interesting on the forums to talk about. maybe it would be good to talk about what these technologies that will integrate with Meteor are. Maybe you can bring an expert of each field to talk about them and why it might be good to sacrifice some of the “Meteor easiness” in favor of them.

Something like “Opening the newbie’s eyes”

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Great work on the show! Some ideas:

  • Where is Meteor now, with 1.3 and hopefully by years end for on-demand/lazy-loaded bundling and delivery of static assets, code, stylesheets, etc. Data on the wire for stuff that’s not stored in the persistence layer. Maybe how 1.3+ /imports (might) work in relation to HTTP/2, tree-shaking, Webpack (2), etc.

  • Same but for CSS modules (including JSS, pre-processors, so related to the above)

  • Same but for Web workers

  • Copy the 90’s talk show format, as used by Google’s DevTools Tonight, before it becomes stale

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Was it ever discussed as to what will happen to DDP? It was proposed on the first transmission, but I can’t remember if it was touched on.

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Keep it weekly and dedicate a part to best practices, eg: why globals are bad for build time and size, meteor guide dive ins, modularity techniques… This way people from outside the meteor community will have a reason to listen, and eventually join us.

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Thank you all for the feedback. From what I see, we have done an effective job in being part of the effort bridging the community and MDG and even if the news and debates have slowed you still want to get a fresh Transmission each week?

P.S. :heart: you all, thanks for the encouragement and support!

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