Matt Marenghi
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2014–2016
28:39 · 70K views · Mar 22, 2014
A Netflix JavaScript talk on using Reactive Extensions (Rx) for asynchronous UI code. It covers Observables, composing events such as drag and drop, and sequencing Ajax requests.
Recommended as a clear, mind-changing introduction to observables and async programming from engineers using Rx in production.
9 comments from Hacker News
I don't really like await . It seems to be a syntactical fix which acts in a quite magical way. Not sure if introducing magic to a language syntax is what we want. Rather, we should think about data flow of our async apps differently. I believe Observables are the future of async code. Once you grasp the concept that everything in your app can be transformed into streams of events, and you work with these events using chains of .map(), .filter(), .reduce(), etc. you'll grasp the true power of this paradigm and how well it fits async and/or concurrent apps. I suggest anybody that doesn't quite swallow the await syntax, to have a look at this presentation about Observables at Netflix as it's quite mind changing: this video
The conf talk on youtube by Matt Marenghi [linked in the post] is really awesome. Provides great examples and resources. Really worth 28-min. Direct Link: this video
i thought it was a good presentation, however, I recently watched a Netflix one, published by Matt Marenghi, which to me was infinitely better. I think the description of events as just another collection, albeit a time based collection flow was nicer ( Observable === Collection + Time ), and also that this collection must have the ability to tell you that it has terminated. this video
Yes I meant what "Reactive Extensions" does. Should've been clearer that it was a reference to "functional reactive programming" and not a specific library. edit: "Async Javascript at Netflix" is a great talk on this - this video
It's not a fad at all, with Netflix and other companies using Rx in all flavors on their platforms. See this video from Jafar Husain, a tech lead at Netflix, talk about how they use RxJS at Netflix: this video