458: Learning Typescript with Aji Slater

Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at Thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joel Kenville. And today, I'm joined by fellow Thoughtbotter, Adi Slater. Patty. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Anji, what's new in your world? Yeah. I think the most exciting thing that's new in my world is on a personal project. I've been playing a little bit with Ruby two d. Do you know anything about that? No. Is that like a graphics library to do, like, two d graphics? Yeah. It is. So I had been watching and looking into folks doing, computer and generative art with things like Processing, which is a Java platform, and p five JS, which obviously runs in the browser, and was getting super jealous that there wasn't anything like that with my favorite language, Ruby. And so I first went to Dragon Ruby, which is a game engine, but it is very specifically for creating games and the community around that. Like, everything is is built up around building games, and some really great projects are coming out of there. But it's also a subset of Ruby, so it's not the entire language because it's a new interpreter all its own to do what it has to do. So I started looking around for other alternatives. Ruby not really known for creating images and animations, but there is a project, Ruby two d, that has a, like, drawing loop in the same way that processing does, and I can interact with it with Ruby. And it's been a lot of fun kind of exploring that, and I'm looking forward to keep playing with it and seeing where the limits are and, like, where it can push them. So we typically write Ruby in the context of a web server. And the web is sort of unique in that you're tied to that request response cycle. The requests are typically very short lived. How is working with Ruby in a, like, two dimensional graphics setting maybe change the way you think about a program? Getting used to the idea of a game loop or an animation loop in Ruby was really different. Like you said, we're usually thinking about a request response or maybe it's a script. It runs something from beginning to end to completion instead of looping over again and again and again to update a Canvas sort of situation. So that was definitely something to wrap my head around, the use of things like more global variables, even if they aren't specifically global variables, but having a global state and these other things that are generally a no no in the web world that are just sort of table stakes or they're how it works in in that sort of idea. Ruby two d is a little different than Dragon Ruby in that the state isn't passed in …