The Babel Podcast

You probably use Babel. Do you ever wonder who made or works on the software you use, especially in open source? Or maybe it's in your dependencies and you don't even know. Henry Zhu chats with other members of the team, TC39, and the JS community about the future of JavaScript, open source, and how it's all maintained. Join us in babbling about Babel!

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Episodes

Core Team Chats: Nicolò Ribaudo

Nicolò Ribaudo talks about his life as a math student, learning jQuery before JavaScript, doing oss on the side, his experiences in oss, doing an internship, participating in TC39, and some thoughts after three years of being on the team. (recorded in October). Transcript at https://podcast.babeljs.io/nicolo

Nov 23, 2020•22 min

4: Fred Schott on Breaking Changes

Fred Schott (@FredKSchott) joins Henry to have a discussion around the topic of breaking changes in programming. We chat about Snowpack and Babel's major versions, different vision means a new name (Rome), semver, RFCs, BDFLs, breaking changes as bug fixes, forking, and more (recorded in April)! Transcript at https://podcast.babeljs.io/breaking

Aug 13, 2020•52 min

3: Jason Miller on Compiling Your Dependencies

Jason Miller and Henry Zhu do a follow up episode on the issues around running modern JavaScript for not just your own code, but rather your dependencies (what's in node_modules). Discussed are specific approaches by bundlers to change package.json fields like jsnext:main/module, general issues for library consumers and maintainers as well as browsers, and the hints of some ideas for the near and far future. Transcript: https://podcast.babeljs.io/dependencies

Feb 28, 2020•45 min

2: Jason Miller on Modern JavaScript and the Future of preset-env

Jason Miller and Henry Zhu talk through a high level philosophy of transpilers (compilers), Babel's core mental model as the democratization of programming language design, and all nuances of the relationship between developers, TC39, browsers, tools. Let's look a the future of Babel.. through the future of preset-env with the newly released babel-preset-modules started by Jason! Transcript: https://podcast.babeljs.io/preset-env

Jan 16, 2020•1 hr 6 min

1: Sebastian McKenzie on Babel and the Road to Rome

Henry chats with Sebastian McKenzie, the creator of Babel, on it's beginnings, what he's learned both technically and personally, and what this Rome thing is all about. They surmise why it was popular, names/logos, vision/scope of projects, planning a launch, doing closed source development, burnout, motivations, setting priorities, delegating/letting go, and more! On Rome: why create something new, what's different than the current status quo, pros/cons of a mono-tool chain, on working privatel...

Jun 25, 2019•1 hr 21 min

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