Hello, I'm Mario. A London-based software engineer. I mostly work on backend/system software but I'm very interested in how we could improve the way we code. I've been listening to the podcast for a while and I just realised that there is also this Slack community, which I'm sure has a lot of interesting content and discussions

I am a backend programmer too, I am trying to make serverless more approachable with a functional reactive literate programming javascript env built on top of observablehq. zero tools to install, its 100% browser based. I guess the easiest place to start is with the example OpenAI app https://thetarot.online/index.html which has a link to the source at the bottom. I'd love to hear what you think or brainstorm on other ideas.

Using Observable is pretty interesting. I like how it leads to “literate programming”-like code. It's really cool how the app has been built entirely from the browser. The flip side is that the everything is a single notebook, which makes it pretty big. Also, the transition from notebook to web app seems a bit forced. Kudos for getting it to work but I'm wondering if https://replit.com/ could be a better fit - I haven't spent too much time with any of replit or observable so my guess is very possibly off :)

You can import other notebooks and break them up, the tarot one did grow a bit big. I prefer observable to replit because observable is JavaScript running in the authorative JavaScript environment (the browser) which means you can debug your program with state-of-the-art tools whereas replit is a proxied interface to a container with a simulated debugger. Normal Industry JavaScript stuff like sentry.io, replay.io just works with observable whereas replit has to manually backport everything so I can't get behind the engineering choices when thinking about optimizing DX. Replit you need to provision a container but observable works with ephemeral federated compute that I think is the future of computation. I think the web is the future for everything though, that might be optimistic :p JS does suck and machine learning and other important things, replit no opinionated runtime options is pretty nice, but I just love DX too much