Name: Ember.js And Frontend Architecture: Mike Hall Interviews Yehuda Katz | RailsConf 2014
Uploaded: 2022-05-13
Description: 🚀 Dive into the fascinating talk by Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale at RailsConf 2014! 🌐 Learn about cognitive capacity, defaults, and why abstractions are essential in software development. Don't miss this! 💡 #EmberJS #RailsConf2014 #SoftwareEngineering #TechTalks #DeveloperPodcast

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Hi, it's Mike with UGtastic. I'm here at RailsConf 2014 and I'm standing here with Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale, who are the creators of the Ember project and also contributors to Rails. Yehuda gave a keynote yesterday morning and they also gave a talk about how to build a smart profiler for Rails. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me, I appreciate it. Yehuda, I know it's the end of the day and we're all pretty tired, but can you sum it up a little memory of the keynote talk you gave yesterday and what the topic was?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

Sure, so I sort of talked about two areas. The first area was just sort of talking about the idea of cognitive or ego depleting. which is this idea that we have a limited store of cognitive capacity. It's sort of like you have a battery. Like the end of the day at a conference. We've made so many decisions today. And so a lot of people think of cognitive capacity as something that drains uniformly through the day or it drains when you work on hard problems. But actually it turns out that a lot of the things that drain your cognitive capacity are really mundane things like making choices or getting into a little bit of an argument can be really depleting. You could spend like five minutes getting into an argument. You've probably felt this. After five minutes you're drained for the rest of the day. Well it's like when you go to the grocery store, if you think about where you're there for like an hour, you're constantly making decisions. And you get to the checkout line and there's the candy bars. There's a reason there's a candy bar there.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

Because making even like what brand of spaghetti sauce should I buy.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

Causes your willpower to complete.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

So willpower, all these things are sort of the same thing. And the idea was just showing a convention over configuration. It's the idea that Rails I think spent a lot of time and energy advocating for. It's basically part of the same thing by reducing choices and getting everyone on the same page about defaults. Because defaults are really a psychological hack that we can use to allow us to both when we're in a really good mood, allow us to do more before we deplete, use up too much our capacity, but also keep us on the straight and narrow when we're in a bad mood. So you may think when you're being a programmer, what do I name this controller, that you think that it has zero cost. But in fact, it's actually stopping your willpower and your ability to actually think through the more important problems.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

I know I've sat in projects myself and been like, it's hard to even get started because I'm thinking about, oh, do I want to do Postgres or MySQL?

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right. Yeah.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

It's like odd. And really silly decisions like that, like by the time you've made a few of them. And I think the important part is not to say, well, we're going to take away your decision making, right? Because people don't like losing autonomy for very good reasons. What you're saying is we're just going to give you some sane defaults.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

Defaults are the hack that you use to prevent yourself from being cognitively depleted. So you have the energy to work on the real problems that matter for your business or for your product.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

And even thinking about defaults, did you ever see the movie Moscow and the Hudson with Robin Williams?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

No. There's a wonderful scene. It's from the '80s, but whenever I think about cognitive overload, I think about that scene where he goes and he wants to just buy coffee. And he's from the Soviet Union. He just wants to buy coffee. And he looks at the coffee and he says, Folgers, Taster's Choice. And then finally he's looking and then finally he's running back and forth and he's like, coffee, coffee, coffee. And then he picks up and he passes on. Because those choices hold a lot.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

As DJ said, people like, what's the book?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

People like choices a lot more than they like having to choose.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

So that was sort of the first half of it. The second half was talking about all the excuses that people give themselves to justify not building up these abstractions. So I think one of the most common ones is like, oh, I'm so special. I have all these special needs, special requirements. And if I don't, you know, if you make me use a tool that's for everybody, how am I going to get my job done with all these things so special? And then people, even when people get past that and they say, you know, I am doing really the same thing as everyone else, they use this excuse of the law of leaky abstractions. Like, oh, these abstractions, these abstractions are always leaked, so there's no point in even bothering with them. And ironically, you see people making these arguments about leaky abstractions sitting on the top of the most epic abstraction stack, right? So you have Node people who are really allergic to abstractions, but they're sitting on top of not just, you know, not just the hardware abstraction, but C, Unix, POSIX, LibUV, you know, one of the most amazing dynamic language jits that had ever been created. And then on the top of that, they say, oh, Promises, that's such a heavy abstraction. I can't remember to deal with that. Well, this is really funny, too, because you think about, like, it wasn't that long ago that people were literally like, if you want, like, hardware was bespoke. Like, every new chip was completely customizable. And then at some point, processors, CPUs, like general processors, got sufficiently good as abstraction that everyone was like, you know what, it's silly for me to be laying out my own chips.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Let's just use this off-the-shelf Intel chipset, right?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

And you would never think about it. No one ever is thinking, oh, okay, I want a new computer.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Should I get x86 or should I build my own?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

It's like, okay, I'm just going to use x86 or ARM. Those are the two things that everyone's agreed upon. Nobody thinks about that. So it's a little bit arrogant, I think. But this happens every layer of the abstraction stack. Everyone always thinks, like, well, I rely on all these abstractions, but I'm at the peak mark. The thing that I am doing is so unique. Like, really, there's no shared solution or shared abstraction that could possibly encapsulate this problem that I'm having.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Until you get to it, right?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

I am going to cut this piece of wood. I need to go and craft something in which I can separate these pieces of wood from each other. Right, yeah, yeah, exactly. No, you just go grab the saw. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. And it's funny. And I think the reason is that people go in when you're-- there's kind of, as Huda says, there's this layer of experimentation at the top. So there's the abstraction stack, and then at the top, there's always a layer of experimentation. And especially, like, younger developers, less experienced developers, they come in and they say, well, you know, I tried the abstraction. It wasn't perfect yet. It leaked a lot. It wasn't quite perfect. And so their reaction is not, well, I should wait for this to mature. Their reaction is, well, of course, this abstraction as a non-principle must be bad because I failed at it. And then the next time they see an abstraction, they basically just hate abstractions. They hate all abstractions. And, yeah. And I think what's kind of cool is that when you get past this, when you say, no, F86 is the thing, Unix is the thing, C is the thing, you can actually start building much, much higher than you thought you could build before. You actually start being able to-- you get into a place where you have a shared understanding of what it is that you're building. And you can, as Steve Jobs said in the quote that I excerpted in my talk, you can start from the 20th floor instead of starting from the first floor. And there's way too many people that are always thinking, oh, I'll just, you know, I'll start from the first floor every time. It's a lot simpler.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

But really you want to be building things. Having that shared understanding allows everyone to kind of like solve the problem once and then start building on top. And a lot of times, as you could have said in the presentation, that means having a shared implementation, like Rails, Ember. These are shared implementations that everyone can build on top of. But even if you don't share the implementation, even just sharing common vocabulary, having a common interface. So a good example that you could have used was the idea of promises in JavaScript. Everyone is having to deal with asynchronous values. Everyone was having to, was implementing promises as a way of solving that. But everyone's implementing just a little bit differently.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

And you really couldn't build, you couldn't use these pieces together. You couldn't build on that abstraction. So Dominic D'Nicola really was the one that drove, okay, well, hey, look, we're all doing similar things. I'm going to write a spec. And it's going to be a set of tests. It's going to be a test suite. And if you write a promises implementation, everyone just conformed to this. And that, I think, had really unexpected properties, emergent properties where, okay, now everyone's set it out of the spec. Now it's in the DOM spec. Now it's in the W3C specs. And now actually support for it's being built into the language. And that had to happen in a layered abstraction sort of way. Yeah, because it gets to be something almost like an if statement. It's, you know, it's a construct that you're going to be able to take for granted. That you're going to be able to go from one platform. You know, you're already in this language. It would be like if there was no if and everyone wrote a if function using go-to. Well, you could imagine that someone says, I don't really think control flow really belongs in line. So this is the thing people say about process. I don't understand why control flow is in the language.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

It's like, hey, guys, guess what?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

Control flow is in the language. It's an if statement. It'll be okay. I think we can add another asynchronous control flow to the language. And I don't think anything's going to explode. Yeah, yeah. And as far as working in these abstractions, it can become complicated. And there's a product that you guys have launched. And as I said when I was interviewing Lea, that's, you know, I'm not being sponsored by this. But you guys are doing great. You have a long history of just putting stuff in the community. So I wanted to promote your company.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

And so can you tell us a little bit about Tilde and the product that you're creating?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

Sure, yeah. Because it relates also to your talk. And I think it's actually related to the open source work as well. Because the last company that we all worked at together, so the founders me, Yehuda, Lea, and Carl, we all worked at a VC-backed company before. And the experience was great. It was very emphasized open source. But at the end of the day, you know, the money, it wasn't necessarily self-sustaining. If you didn't achieve liftoff right away, it's basically like the team got scattered to the winds. And so when we started Tilde, we really wanted to do something that was bootstrapped. We wanted to be bootstrapped and proud. But it turns out it's hard to be bootstrapped and proud if you're bootstrapped and bankrupt.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

So we needed some way to make money.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

And the obvious way to do that is to become Ember Inc, right?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

There's like MongoDB Inc. There's Meteor Inc. There's NTM Inc. There's like a long, somewhat, history of VC-backed companies doing open source, where that's like the company driving. And that's a totally plausible model. But for us, we feel like the best innovation happens when you have kind of coalition of companies all working together and there's no one dominant company. We like Postgres. We like Rails, where there's a core team and there are members from many different companies all working on that problem. They steward it. They do a lot of work on it. And you have to reach consensus. Actually, you can't bully ideas and you have to argue for your ideas on the strengths and their merits. And I think that's very important.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

So what do we do now?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

Well, we wanted to build something cool. We didn't want to build something really lame. We believe in tackling hard problems. And we also believe in playing dear strengths.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

So we spent a long time thinking about, okay, what are our strengths?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

So, one, I think we know how to build developer tools. We've been doing it for a long time. Carl's a badass at building distributed systems.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

And I think we have a pretty... And we know the real stack. And we know the real stack. Obviously, we know the real stack. So that's good. You guys tricked it up at some point.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

So we built Skylight. And the reason we built Skylight was that all the way back in 2009, hard to believe, five years ago, DHA wrote a blog post called The Problem With Averages. And he said, if you're thinking about the performance of your web app, thinking in terms of averages, the words he used were useless and wrong. He said, what you really need is a histogram. You need to see the distribution. Because if you're a statistician, you use averages to think about normal bell curves. But that's not what response times are.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

So he said this in 2009. It's 2014. And there still has not been any tool on the market that developers can take off the shelf and get that tool.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

If you're a Google or you're a Facebook or Twitter, you have teams building this for you. But that's not Joe small shop.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

So that's what Skylight does. Skylight basically gives you the tools that the big companies have to think about for web performance in a way that's super accessible, super fast. An Ember app is really, really fast, really responsive. And I think pretty easy to use. Is it possible with Skylight to be able to look at the metrics and be able to try to figure out what kind of characteristics like a specific type of user, like an admin logging in and doing a bunch of crazy things?

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

So that's what the histogram is for. Basically, if you have an average, you're taking cache hits, cache misses, RSS feeds, XHRs, admin users that causes three more database queries to happen.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

You're taking all of that and you're compressing it into a single number. So having the histogram there, we keep the whole distribution. So we can show you the histogram for any time slice up to 30 days for any endpoint. And so you can see, like, oh, it looks like there's a cluster. You can zoom in and you can say, oh, it looks like if the request is taking 700 milliseconds instead of 200, it's because I'm doing all these extra queries for my database. So one thing that you left out is that it's not just the histogram. Once you've decided what part of the distribution you want to look at, you actually get a really high-fidelity trace, which tells you, you know, first you had this wrap thing. Then you went into this controller. Then you made these three database queries. Then you started rendering a template. You made these three database queries. And we just announced at RailsConf that we're adding CPU profiling. Very, very low impact. Maybe like 10 microseconds per request of impact to do CPU profiling. And then that means we'll be able to say, here are the actual Ruby code that actually was spent. So we can basically not just show you here's the distribution of your request, but we can show you exactly what is happening inside those requests. And not just what's happening inside of, you know, the average request, but what's happening in slow requests or fast requests. You know, maybe a fast request is fast because you're not running all this code. And that maybe sounds like an incremental improvement. But it actually completely, completely changes the way that you diagnose it. It changes the work of how you diagnose the front.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

Because the way that you can do it today without Skylight is you say, oh, it looks like there was a spike in production. Our response has gotten really bad. And you know they're bad. Because if the average is bad, then you know it's really bad. So you're like, okay, let's go diagnose this.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

So what do you do?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

You check out the app on your local machine. You run it. You maybe put some seed data. You try to, like, put some load on it. You plug it into the production database. You can't reproduce it. Well, I guess we'll just pray that this doesn't happen again.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah. But what you can do with Skylight is you have a graph, right?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

You zoom back and see, ah, here's a spike. Here's where the 95% algorithm spiked. You select it in the chart. And now you have a full fidelity stack trace of exactly what was happening in your app, in production, on your production boxes. And it doesn't matter. You don't have to think about it ahead of time. You can go back 30 days.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah. And, I mean, can I even find out, like, maybe if another process was impacting what I'm doing?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

Like, if I'm running something. So I'm looking at my app, and I get these really slow requests at a certain time in the day. I can't see anything weird in my app, but does that CPU help me, like, see, like, oh, there was a bunch of other stuff maybe running at that time? So we don't do anything like that right now. I think you can definitely imagine us doing it. Our goal in general is to identify the kinds of problems that are hitting, that people are hitting. And we're a very small team. We're only six people. It gives us a lot of focus.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

And what that means is that we look and we say, okay, what kinds of problems are we related?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

So a really common one that we noticed was n plus one queries. We're running the same query over and over. So we spent the time to actually, you know, to automatically show you when you have repeated queries. We had a CPU profile because a lot of people said, well, this is great, but I have this big area of just Ruby code. I have no idea what it is.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

How do we get more?

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale Ember.js and frontend architecture

So if we notice that this kind of problem of like, you know, there's a background job and it's fake, my request flow is really common. I think we'll probably start looking at, we have a lot of areas and things like distributed tracing that we want to get into. And really what we end up working on is based on what's the next thing that we can do that will help another group of people effectively diagnose what's going on. So you're kind of a little bit of dog fitting in as well. Yeah, I mean, we run Skylight on our own app. Our own app is a big chunk of it is a Rails app and we use Skylight. So we're looking at Skylight every day basically to see what's slow and what's fast.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Well, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. No problem. And thanks for all your work. Thanks very much for having us. Number and Rails and all that stuff and Bundler. No problem. Great. Thanks. Great. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you. Yeah. [Music]

Mike Hall

Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale

The Conversation