Just a Spec

Jared White & Ayush Newatia

A podcast about the protocols, the projects, and the people who make the open platform of the Internet possible.

  1. Deploying Your Web App…What Could Go Wrong?

    02/10/2024

    Deploying Your Web App…What Could Go Wrong?

    Congratulations! You’ve got yourself a nice little World-Wide Web site. Now it’s time to deploy it for everyone to enjoy through their World-Wide Web browser. Easy, right? WRONG! Deploying web apps today is the portal to madness and pain, with many levels of misery awaiting as you descend into the depths of Hades. Or…if you play it right, it’s little more than the press of a button. Let’s talk about that in this our Season 2 finale of Just a Spec. Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future Links & Show Notes: Follow Just a Spec on MastodonThe Spicy Web & That HTML BlogHaggis Ruby, 24th October 2024 (Ayush is a speaker)Social Web FoundationRender (hosting)“Premature optimization is…”

    53 min
  2. Your Static Just Zapped Me

    11/09/2024

    Your Static Just Zapped Me

    It's time for some acronym soup: SSG SSR CSR SPA MPA…MEAN? SSI?? PERL??? (Officially not an acronym…) If you're coming down with a headache already, trust us, you're not alone. It's…a lot. Thankfully, Ayush and Jared are here to break it all down for you, as well as talk about some of the history behind the many different rendering modes to be found on the web and when you might reach for one or the other…or on so many projects these days, both!Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive FutureLinks & Show Notes: Follow Just a Spec on MastodonThe Spicy Web & That HTML BlogHaggis Ruby, 24th October 2024 (Ayush is a speaker)Follow up: i-htmlHear also Episode 9 (“server components”, “islands”, etc.)Blast from the 2003 past: Review of Blosxom blogging toolMovable Type (Wikipedia)Bulma 1.0 CSS frameworkAyush: Rails and Hotwire Codex updated

    47 min
  3. Action Web Components for Full-Stack Magic

    28/08/2024

    Action Web Components for Full-Stack Magic

    What if your backend could drive reactive UI changes on your frontend? Without dependencies? Without relying on any particular framework? What if your HTML could gain full-stack programming superpowers?Introducing Action Web Components—inspired by clever Ajax techniques of the past & present and ready to march boldly into the future.Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive FutureLinks & Show Notes: Follow Just a Spec on MastodonThe Spicy Web & That HTML BlogHaggis Ruby, 24th October 2024 (Ayush is a speaker)Bridgetown 2.0 Beta is out!Action Web Components Which Span the the Server-Client Divide (article)DemoRepo

    45 min
  4. And Lo, There Was ARPANET (Baby Internet!)

    15/08/2024

    And Lo, There Was ARPANET (Baby Internet!)

    How did the Internet first begin? Why was it developed at the Advanced Research Projects Agency? Where was it initially launched at the end of the 1960s? Is it pronounced r-OO-ter or r-OW-ter?? These and other hard-hitting questions are answered as Jared & Ayush take a deep dive into the birth of humanity’s global computer network…with a dash of 90s nostalgia thrown in for good measure.Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive FutureLinks & Show Notes: Follow Just a Spec on MastodonThe Spicy Web & That HTML BlogEpisode 15: The Plumbing That Makes the Web MovePacket switching (Wikipedia)The first Internet connection, with UCLA's Leonard Kleinrock (YouTube)How the Internet Was Invented: Part 1 (YouTube)How the Internet Came to Be | Part 2 (YouTube)Did the U.S. Government Invent the Internet? | History (YouTube)How the Internet was born: The network begins to take shape (The Conversation)The Internet Review (born in 1996, reborn in 2024)1989 Networking Poems!

    39 min
  5. The Browser Wars & an Uneasy Peace

    24/07/2024

    The Browser Wars & an Uneasy Peace

    It’s been a wild, wild ride getting from the anything goes origin story of the mainstream web—anyone still remember “Netscape Navigator” and “Trumpet Winsock”?—to today’s carefully-curated experience in the age of Interop and using GitHub to achieve spec consensus.But the relative calm we enjoy today when it comes to progress and feature parity across browser engines perhaps doesn’t quite tell the whole story…there are still threats to an open web which works well for all, protects our privacy, and guards us from bad actors.In this episode, we look back at the history of the web browser—touching on such memorable moments as the & tags, DHTML with the launch of JavaScript, and the arrival of responsive design for mobile as well as desktop—while attempting to learn from history so that we’re not doomed to repeat it.Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive FutureLinks & Show Notes: Follow Just a Spec on MastodonThe Spicy Web & That HTML BlogWikipedia Links:Netscape NavigatorInternet ExplorerIE for MacDHTMLFirefoxSafariChromeResponsive DesignSir Tim Berners-Lee on threats to the open web (as reported by The Internet Review)

    50 min
  6. Pendulum Swings & 2023’s State of JS

    10/07/2024

    Pendulum Swings & 2023’s State of JS

    Whoa, there was one more “State of” survey from 2023 to mine for content! Who knew? Yes, the results are in, and we talk about them…but more broadly, our feelings about the state of web frameworks in our industry and the much-ballyhooed pendulum swing back to server-side rendering and HTML-first techniques (though the rate of change is perhaps not what we might wish for). Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive FutureLinks & Show Notes: Follow Just a Spec on MastodonThe Spicy Web & That HTML BlogState of JavaScript Survey 2023Our past "State of" episodes:State of HTML Episode 17State of CSS Episode 10

    42 min
  7. How Many Books Could ePub Pub if ePub Could Pub Books

    26/06/2024

    How Many Books Could ePub Pub if ePub Could Pub Books

    What if you could take HTML & CSS, package them up in a file, and publish that file as a singular artifact? That's essentially what ePub is. (ePUB? EPUB?) With Ayush's real-world experience publishing e-books, we are guided through understanding more about this important (and sometimes overlooked) spec. Alas, the devil's in the details, and we get into many of those details here on today's episode of Just a Spec.Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive FutureLinks & Show Notes: Follow Just a Spec on MastodonThe Spicy Web & That HTML BlogEPUB file format (Wikipedia)Asciidoctor publishing toolchain

    36 min
  8. From Frameworks to Using the Platform with Elise Shaffer

    12/06/2024

    From Frameworks to Using the Platform with Elise Shaffer

    When you've spent a good portion of your career as a web developer utilizing CSS processors & frameworks, what would lead you to embrace vanilla techniques and modern CSS features? This is the question in the air as we welcome our first ever guest to the show, Elise Shaffer. Elise walks us through her journey learning full-stack development via frameworks like Rails and Tailwind, and then more recently enjoying the freedom and simplicity of web platform features on the frontend. It's a celebration of doing more with less with Just a Spec.Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive FutureLinks & Show Notes: Follow Just a Spec on MastodonThe Spicy Web (vanilla CSS course) & That HTML BlogElise Shaffer: Website  / Ruby on Rails PodcastEpisode 513: Modern Rails Apps with Ayush NewatiaOpen PropsTailwind v4's CSS-first configCUBE CSSVideo tutorial by Kevin Powell

    48 min
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About

A podcast about the protocols, the projects, and the people who make the open platform of the Internet possible.

Information

  • Creator
    Jared White & Ayush Newatia
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2024
  • Episodes
    25
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Just a Spec
  • Show Website
    Just a Spec