In this episode, Charles and Taras discuss "transparent development" and why it's not only beneficial to development teams, but to their clients as well. Please join us in these conversations! If you or someone you know would be a perfect guest, please get in touch with us at contact@frontside.io. Our goal is to get people thinking on the platform level which includes tooling, internalization, state management, routing, upgrade, and the data layer. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, the place where we talk about user interfaces and everything that you need to know to build them right. It's been a long summer and we're back. I'm actually back living in Austin, Texas again. I think there wasn't too much margin in terms of time to record anything or do much else besides kind of hang on for survival. We've been really, really busy over the last couple of months, especially on the professional side. Frontside has been doing some pretty extraordinary things, some pretty interesting things. So, we've got a lot to chew on, a lot to talk about. TARAS: There's so much stuff to talk about and it's hard to know where to start. CHARLES: So, we'll be a little bit rambly, a little bit focused. We'll call it fambly. But I think one of the key points that is crystallized in our minds, I would say over this summer, is something that binds the way that we work together. Every once in a while, you do some work, you do some work, you do some work, and then all of a sudden you realize that a theme, there's something thematic to that work and it bubbles up to the surface and you kind of organically perceive an abstraction over the way that you work. I think we've hit that. I hit one of those points at least because one of the things that's very important for us is -- and if you know us, this is things that we talk about, things that we work on -- we will go into a project and set up the deployment on the very first day. Make sure that there is an entire pipeline, making sure that there is a test suite, making sure that there are preview applications. And this is kind of the mode that we've been working in, I mean, for years and years and years. And where you say like if what it takes is spending the first month of a project setting up your entire delivery and showcasing pipeline then that's the most important work, inverting the order and saying that has to really come before any code can come before it. And I don't know that we've ever had like a kind of unifying theme for all of those practices. I mean, we've talked about it in terms of saving money, in terms of ensuring quality, in terms of making sure that something is good for five or 10 years, like this is the way to do it. And I think those are definitely the outcomes that we're looking for. But I think we've kind of identified what the actual mode is for all of that. Is that fair to say? TARAS: Yeah, I think one of the things I've always thought about for a long time is the context within which decisions are made because it's not always easy. And it's sometimes really difficult to really give it a name, like getting to a point where you have really clear understanding of what is it that is guiding all of your actions. What is it that's making you do things? Like why do we put a month of work before we even start doing any work? Why do we put this in our contract? Why do we have a conversation with every client and say, "Look, before we start doing anything, we're going to put CI in place." Why are we blocking our business on doing this piece? It's actually kind of crazy that from a business perspective, it's a little bit crazy that you be like, "Oh, so you're willing to lose a client because the client doesn't want you to set up a CI process?" Or in a case of many clients, it's like you're not willing to accept -- the client is going to say, "We want to use Jenkins." And what we've done in the past, in almost every engagement, we're like, "Actually, no. We're not going to use Jenkins because we know that it's going to take so long for you to put Jenkins in place. By the time that we finish the project, you're probably still not going to have it in place. That means that we're not going to be able to rely on our CI process and we're not going to be able to rely on testing until you're finished." We're not going to have any of those things while we're doing development. But why are we doing all this stuff? It was actually not really apparent until very recently because they didn't really had a name to describe what is it about this tooling and all of these things that makes why is it so important to us. I think that's what kind of crystallized. And the way that I know that it's crystallized because now that we're talking to our clients about it, our clients are taking on to picking up the language. We don't have to convince people that this is a value. It just comes out of their mouth. Like it actually comes out of their mouth as a solution to completely unrelated problems, but they recognize how this particular thing is actually a solution in that particular circumstance as well even though it's not something Frontside sold in that particular situation. Do you want to announce what it actually is? CHARLES: Sure. Drum roll please [makes drum roll sound]. Not to get too hokey, but it's something that we're calling Transparent Development. What it means is having radical transparency throughout the entire development process, from the planning to the design, to the actual coding and to the releases. Everything about your process. The measure by which you can evaluate it is how transparent is this process to not just developers but other stakeholders, designers or people who are very developer adjacent, engineering managers all the way up to C level executives. How transparent is your development? And one of the ways that we sell this, because I think as we talk about how we arrived at this concept, we can see how this practice actually is a mode of thinking that guides you towards each one of these individual practice. It guides you towards continuous integration. It guides you towards testing. It guides you towards the continuous deployment. It guides you towards the continuous release in preview. I think the most important thing is that it's guided us, by capturing this concept, it's guided us to adopt new practices, which we did not have before. That's where the proof is in the pudding is if you can take an idea and it shows you things that you hadn't previously thought before. I think there's a fantastic example. I actually saw it at Clojure/conj in 2016, there was a talk on juggling. And one of the things that they talked about was up until I think it was the early 80's or maybe it was the early 60's, the state of juggling was you knew a bunch of tricks and you practice the tricks and you get these hard tricks. And that was what juggling was, is you practice these things. It was very satisfying and it had been like that for several millennia. But these guys in the Physics department were juggling enthusiasts and I don't know how the conversation came about, you'd have to watch the talk. It's really a great talk. But what they do is they make a writing system, a nomenclature system for systematizing juggling tricks, so they can describe any juggling trick with this abstract notation. And the surprising outcome, or not so surprising outcome, is that by then, once you have it in the notation, you can manipulate the notation to reveal new tricks that nobody had thought of before. But you're like, "Ah, by capturing the timing and the height and the hand and we can actually understand the fundamental concept, and so now we can recombine it in ways that weren't seen before." That actually opened up, I think an order of magnitude of new tricks that people just had not conceived of before because they did not know that they existed. And so, I think that's really, as an abstract concept, is a great yardstick by which to measure any idea. Yes, this idea very neatly explains the phenomenon with which I'm already familiar, but does the idea guide me towards things with which I have no concept of their existence? But because the idea predicts their existence, I know it must be there and I know where to look for it. And aha, there it is. It's like shining a light. And so I think that that's kind of the proof in the pudding. So that's a little bit of a tangent, but I think that's why we're so excited about this. And I think it's why we think it's a good idea. TARAS: Yes. So what's also been interesting for me is how universal it is. Because the question of is this transparent enough? That question could be actually asked in many cases. What's been interesting for me is that asking that question in different contexts that I didn't expect actually yielded better outcome. At the end of the day, I think that a test for any idea is like, is it something that can help you more frequently than not? Like is it actually leading you? Does applying this pattern, does it increase the chances of success? And that's one of the things that we've seen, thinking about just practices that we're putting into place and quite asking are they transparent enough? Is this transparent enough? It's actually been really effective. Do you want to talk about some of the things that we've put in place in regards to transparency? Like what it actually looks like? CHARLES: Yeah. I think this originally started when we were setting up a CI pipeline for a native application which is not something that we've typically done in the past. Over the last, I would say, 10 years, most of our work has been on the web. And so, when we're asked to essentially take responsibility for how a native application is going to be delivered, one of the first things that we asked kind of out of habit and out of just the way t
