119: Ryan Toronto - Why a Back-End Developer Made the Switch to SPAs

In this episode of Fullstack Radio I talked to Ryan Torano about what made him fall in love with single page application development despite his extensive experience as a back end rails developer. This is Fullstack Radio episode 119. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Full Stack Radio podcast. I'm your host, Adam Wadden. And today, it is my pleasure to be speaking with Ryan Toronto. How's it going, Ryan? Hey. How's it going? Thanks for having me. Yeah. So for anyone who's not familiar with you, do you mind, kind of briefly introducing yourself? Yeah. Sure. So, I'm a web developer. I've been building web apps for, I don't know, like, probably fifteen years. You know, I kind of got started with PHP, the back end world, and, more recently, I've been doing a bunch of front end stuff. So, yeah, that's sort of been my, my journey. Cool. So, yeah, the reason I wanna have you on the show is, I kinda met you through Sam Selkoff, who is kinda like your business partner where you guys run EmberMap together, which is like a awesome training site for Ember developers and people building all sorts of complex UI stuff. And, I know, like, Sam's experience, you know, based on the conversations we've had, he's sort of been basically, like, an SPA land almost from day one. Right? Like, he's like Yep. Yep. Been using Ember since basically it came out and that's kind of where he really cut his teeth on sort of his hardcore web development stuff. Whereas I know, like, you did a lot of Rails and stuff like that well before you sort of got into building SPAs. And, I know a lot of people who listen to the show and even myself included, you know, to some degree, have a lot of back end experience building apps, you know, with frameworks like Rails or Laravel. And, you know, a lot of people are still sort of skeptical about, like, going full client side for things and doing, like, a, you know, a fat client app with, an API. A lot of it just feels like you're adding a lot of complexity for, you know, why now you have to maintain two apps, an API, and a client. And there's just all sorts of reasons that people wanna kinda, like, stay in their comfort zone and just, like, keep building stuff, you know, that does, like, classic server rendering and form submissions. And, you know, it works. Right? Yeah. Totally. As as a front end developer, I mean, I feel that way too sometimes. So yes. Absolutely. I get that feeling. Awesome. So what I thought would be cool to talk about is, you are, you know, like, we kinda imagined you have a ton of Rails experience and have built a ton of stuff that way. But, you know, for the last, I don't know, five, six years, something like that, you …