 Fluent Conference live in San Francisco. Wrapping up day two and wrapping up the conference here, O'Reilly Media's Fluent Conference, been a big success. It's all about the developers. And really about three things, the web, the web, and the web, and making it faster. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, and this is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, try to send them from our noise. It's our first Fluent Conference. We're not new to the developer community, but we've been following. This conference has been fantastic. It's been the explosion of JavaScript data to the next level. But really it's more important about the developers. It's about the user experiences. And it's about scaling. And letting developers be more productive in this exploding modern era of software development, software engineering, and now it's an easier experience. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick, and the co-chair of Fluent Conference is Simon St. Laurent. Welcome back to theCUBE. This is actually your show. We interview you at Strata, but welcome to theCUBE at your event. Great, thank you very much. We had Simon on earlier at the, kick it off, but you're wrapping it up so you're tired, and so we respect your time. But we want to get your take on it. And you know, it's a very big success. You know, developer conferences are, to me, are judged by the amount of hype that's at the event. And there's not a lot of hype here. It's just all real, good, solid developers. What's your take on how it went, and what were the key findings during the show? Well, I think it went really well. The fun of working in JavaScript is that there are actually multiple audiences. So there are developers, but then there are lots of different categories of developers. Some of them more enthusiastic about JavaScript than others. Some of them deeper into kind of broader web technologies. So it's all about making all of those different pieces come together. We had content for lots of different kinds of people. It's easy to do in a multi-track conference. A lot of it's figuring out what sparkly bits will draw people to the sessions and what solid content will actually keep them there. Those are the sparkly bits. I like that. What's the biggest thing that you, what's the biggest surprise from this event? Obviously, we'll talk about more of the meat and potatoes here, but what's the big surprise for you in this event? There's always that twist and turn. Well, there was the session where the presenters were having themselves selector-shocked, if at any time they said, um, and that the audience response to that was incredibly positive. And they were using JavaScript to do it, which made it even crazier. Now you're talking about the device, the USB device was plugged directly into the computer where you're controlling the hardware? Yes, yeah. That was just surprising behavior. It's without Lombardo in trouble at Stanford, if I recall, a similar type of experiment. Yes, yes. There's Lombardo, excuse me. I don't think we want to do this on a regular basis in all of our talks. Beyond that, the biggest surprise was actually the conversations in the hallways and how well they came together. I was pretty confident in the program itself with the usual, you know, will people get to the right kind of session for them? Are they going to go to the right level? How are presenters going to adapt to an audience? But I was really incredibly excited about some of the conversations I kind of walked through, walked by, heard at lunch. People taking the content from the sessions and saying, you know, I liked this because it applied to me this way. People actually getting into, even people kind of arguing because, you know, they'd seen things differently or came from a different place. It just, it really made the conference a whole lot richer. And the program you put together, give some color into the core elements you were focusing on this year. Obviously JavaScript is exploding, has legacy to it. So, you know, there's always going to be religious arguments, I should say, about what it could or couldn't be. We heard quotes, JavaScript's the assembly language of the browser. And obviously Firefox made some announcements here. Chrome OS is no surprise to us, watching what's going on with Chrome. But what were the key things that you focused in on this year? Well, the key things that we really wanted to get were the JavaScript language, the kind of explosion of frameworks, which is just continuous. And there was a framework announced two weeks ago that I would have loved to have here. It's tricky to get that in. The other thing that we've been trying to do is broaden the reach of the conference so that it includes more of the design people who have to talk with developers and who have to work with programmers, but might not be that deeply interested in prototypal inheritance and event asynchronous programming. So we were really striving for a balance. We wanted to make sure that all of those different groups of people had places to go, things to see. The announcements were great. It was really, Brent and I, bringing up the first person shooter game that was written in other languages and compiled to JavaScript and running incredibly smoothly was... Very well received, big round of applause on that one. I was in that one. Yes, yes. Actually it was startling how good it was. I didn't really believe that was possible and if you'd asked me a year ago if I would see anything like that, I would have said no, but we're there. Jeff, what's your take on the program? Because you've come into this, you know a lot about what's going on in the business side and the enterprise and the developer. You were kind of, it was your first time exposed to the Fluent Conference. What was your take? Yeah, I mean, again, we've had a great theme of this really transformative period in time and I've been in the valley since I moved here about 85 and we've gone through a number of waves and the most recent one was all just about kind of consumer and fun and they turned out to be the hyperscale guys. I always wondered, do they start out that way or do they kind of grow into it and I remember the first time Google was like, come on, the browser wars are over and the switching costs are zero so it is exciting to see the marriage of the big global trends that we're seeing with socialization and really mobile, I think it's just phenomenal and the opportunity for people to really rethink the way they're doing things and then again this notion of the citizen developer and even with some of the recent editorials coming out that everyone needs to learn to develop and then now to come here and I'm not a developer, I'm an app user for sure but to hear now that there's the tool sets and really the infrastructure in place to enable folks to really start to embrace and to be able to really deliver their visions to be able to execute new applications where before I think the hurdle rate was much harder that the baseline infrastructure was much more difficult to cost and what you had to do to get to the point of actually implementing what you were trying to do was so much further so I think it's exciting, what I love about these conferences is that people are working, I mean for the folks at home it is quiet as a church mouse out here, I mean everyone is in the sessions, they're in the sessions, they're learning, they're sharing ideas, but I mean they're working and then in between everybody's out and people are sitting around tables and actually coding together and of course I love the startup, I love startups. Some of my notes here on the conference I'll share with you since you're kind of chilling out I want to relax and share what the knowledge we've acquired that we've shared and extracted and shared to the audience, one is obviously the fluent conference itself, the conversations and the content was fantastic. The notion that JavaScript is solidly solidified itself as legitimate software engineering paradigm, I mean this is not just a kitty script or go do some web design stuff, this is like the real deal, node reinforces that and obviously stuff going on the database side. People are making friends here and I saw a lot of commentary on Twitter using the hashtag making friends and people talking, I see people connecting, maybe debating as you said from a position that they've come from and then just real life code examples was another comment we saw and were hearing. So the girls, the women for code was another highlight that was pretty positive. Obviously the normal talk about GitHub and what that does for agile so all that stuff was really kind of what we've heard. I don't know if you saw this and heard the same thing. Yeah, one of the things we've figured out last year was that there were a lot more enterprise people coming to this than we'd expected. Being sort of San Francisco, having a startup showcase, we were focusing more on that and this year we had like yet more enterprise people, not necessarily seeking enterprise content. What we're finding is, and I think Bill Scott did a lot of this in his keynote, is that people are turning to the web stack because it's actually an easier place to get things done than the traditional enterprise stack. And so we're seeing a shift, a very, well it's kind of slow and then sudden and then slow again movement of people across from what used to be kind of the enterprise community and we have this set of values and the web community was very separate. I mean there were intersections but they weren't tight. Well the web was a basement organization initially when the corporations get the literature on their self-service, get some information out there, reduce your direct mail cost, et cetera, et cetera. So that was the beginning in the 90s but now it's a legitimate business drive. We see that as strata and other things but I think what's interesting about the enterprises is that, and we were talking about this in the Cube, is the mainframe days, everyone had in-house developers, who used to call it spaghetti code or cobalt or whatever was out there, then that became more prepackaged software, that office of the rest history horrible SAP, networking, three comm, Cisco. But now we're going back and we're seeing at the Cube events that we've done in the past, there is a resurgence in transformation for in-house development in enterprises and that's new, that's not new new but it's like a new increase in transformation where they've been getting cut and IT's been cut to the bone, do more with less but now there's an investment thesis saying, hey, let's drive business value and the land stack and the web stack and web scale, companies have shown them some new tools and that to me is driving a lot of it. And the web players are forcing their hand. I mean, I think one of the most fascinating is the Amazon web services where that service now is forcing internal IT staffs to act like they're Amazon to compete face to face, to have branding and to keep the guy from going to shadow IT. So this whole resurgence in the enterprise, learning lessons from what we're kind of traditional web companies that have now grown to hyperscale and really shown what you can do with these tools is fascinating and it's really an exciting time as the enterprises are starting to adopt this stuff. Yeah, Simon, I want to get your comments on that and do a little drill down on some of those things we're finding, also we heard from developers here and also in the hallways around, what are the challenges for JavaScript? Obviously standardization is a big thing and again, that's been kicked around, it's had some legacy but the comments about a RESTful API is really a big deal. So that was one that's going to enable. The second thing we're seeing is this kind of general purpose platform using REST APIs and other tool links, built tool links to support whatever IDE people are using, whatever language is Ruby, whatever you're using, .NET, Ruby, whatever, so depending on what your programming is now independent, you can do that stuff. And then new things like Angular was very popular and not much talked about at the conference but we're hearing web sockets is really becoming something that's much more focused attention on because of the Firefox announcement and the browser OS, this is an OS, it's native browser code. JavaScript applications are a real deal. What's your take on all that? Do you agree with that? And can you expand more color? I mean JavaScript started out as, you could change the text in the status box that was really exciting in 1996 to me I think. At this point, Mark Andreessen said long ago about the browser becoming the operating system and this provoked all kinds of browser wars, firestorms. But he was right. And it's not just the browser as the big window on the web that's becoming the operating system, it's that the web is percolating into every corner of your devices. Things like web sockets let you have kind of continuous small communication on a different model than we started with. The web approach is pretty much percolating into everything that programmers have typically done. There are still places where it's not appropriate. I'm not gonna tell somebody who's writing a device driver to go do it in JavaScript, there's C for that. And there are cases where you want something that's really, really hardened and functional programming languages might be a better choice for that. But for broad general purpose programming and especially interfaces and things that are connecting to user interfaces, JavaScript is becoming the default in a lot of cases and web technologies, even if you're using other programming languages are, well just growing like Kudzu in places that used to house mainframes. So what's next? So obviously there's a lot of head room. Okay, there's a lot of stuff with IO, with Node and that's been fairly popular. What's next? What's on the horizon for you guys content-wise and then within the community? Well I'm really feeling at this point like there's a major change about to happen in the web and I'm not entirely certain what it is so it's a little tricky to say. But we've kind of, with Ajax we saw this pattern where the web seemed like it was very quiet, the browser wars were over, there wasn't much happening and then Jesse James Garrett says, there's this way we can do things and these tools have been here for a while and suddenly Ajax exploded onto the scene and the web became a very much more important interface than it had been for a while. And I think we're gonna see something similar. We've had this explosion of technologies, this explosion of techniques and we haven't fully digested what they're going to be good for. HTML5 has given us all of these different APIs and people are putting them together in different combinations. But we're just on the edge of figuring out what we can really do. We're still in the kicking the tires phase. We're doing a lot of great prototyping, there's a lot of experiments happening but as far as how the big picture all comes together, we're just getting there. I think there's a lot we can do with communications between developers and designers that's gonna change. I think the restful APIs and hypermedia are a really critical piece of this. The code is kind of becoming independent of where it came from and the web really makes that happen a lot faster. I really liked what you were saying about in-house developers. We're making IT maybe go further away but at the same time we can bring in programmers to build code that's really for us, that's really specific to what we wanna do in a particular project. So the dynamics are changing on business levels, on technology levels. I really wanna know where we're gonna be next year and I see change but I'm not sure which change yet. The good news is positive change would be the Velocity Conference which is under the covers, that's the engine and the obviously strata making use of the data and the beautiful thing about having in-house developers that have standards-based programming like open source, in WebStack is that there's good investment, there's good leverage. I mean so they can create agile programming which is known methodology on mobile and web and still deliver business value and that's the conversation we're hearing in the enterprise and the beautiful thing about it is the stuff that we're hearing here that you put together are from those web scale companies now being referred to as hyperscale. So you're seeing hyperscale in the enterprise, DevOps, you're seeing that convergence where developers can take advantage of those things and be faster, more productive, more efficient. So very cohesive separation but yet coupled nicely together on environment. So I think you hit the home run here. Simon thanks for going on theCUBE and thanks for having us. Congrats on a very successful program. Great attendance, good commentary. And we'll be right back with our wrap up here on day two after the short break. Simon, the co-chair of the Fluent Conference, Simon Saint Laurent, we'll be back with our next guest after the short break.