119: Ryan Toronto - Why a Back-End Developer Made the Switch to SPAs

In this episode, Adam talks to Ryan Toronto about his journey from being a full stack Rails developer to focusing on single page applications, and why application developers should be betting on UI-focused frameworks like Ember, React, and Vue.

Show Notes

Topics include:

• How modernizing a Flash app drove Ryan to start building SPAs
• How products are really just user interfaces to the end user, and why that means it makes sense to make the UI the core of your codebase
• Why the backend will continue to be commoditized and application developers will be spending more and more of their time in the UI
• What makes something a web app instead of a website, and why almost everything is actually an app
• Why application developers still need to write server-side code right now and what areas have the biggest room for innovation and improvement

Sponsors:

• Cloudinary, sign up and get 300,000 images/videos, 10GB of storage and 20GB of monthly bandwidth for free
• DigitalOcean, get your free $50 credit at do.co/fullstack

Links:

• EmberMap, Ryan's tutorial site
• Mirage.js
• Client-side SQL
• GraphQL
• Hasura GraphQL Engine, an automatic GraphQL API over Postgres
• Conversation on ugprading API requests
• Interview with Michelle Bu of Stripe

What is Full Stack Radio?

A podcast for developers interested in building great software products. Every episode, Adam Wathan is joined by a guest to talk about everything from product design and user experience to unit testing and system administration.