Prettier and Opinionated Code Formatting with James Long
Developer tooling shapes how software gets written day to day, but the best tools often disappear into the background once they succeed. Formatting, linting, and build systems can either create friction and endless debate, or quietly remove entire classes of problems from a team’s workflow. Over the past decade, the JavaScript ecosystem has wrestled with both extremes as it scaled rapidly and accumulated complexity.
Prettier emerged as a response to the surprisingly human problem of engineers spending too much time debating code style instead of building software. It offers a deterministic, opinionated formatter that helped normalize automation as part of everyday development.
James Long is a design and product engineer who has worked at Mozilla and Stripe, and he’s the creator of Prettier. He joins the show with Josh Goldberg to talk about the origins of Prettier, why formatting debates are so emotionally charged, the technical challenges of building formatters, the realities of maintaining popular open-source tools, and how the JavaScript tooling ecosystem continues to evolve.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.
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Local-first, y/n? (Friends)
Our friends Johannes Schickling & James Long join us to discuss the movement of local-first, its pros and cons, the tradeoffs, and the path to the warming waters of mostly local apps.
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Featuring:
Johannes Schickling – GitHub, X
James Long – Website, GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
James’ local-first post
Bear - Markdown Notes
livestorejs · GitHub
ElectricSQL | Postgres sync engine
Overtone
Zero Sync
Automerge CRDT
Jazz - Build local-first apps
localfirst.fm
Ink & Switch define “Local-first software”
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Actual(ly) opening up (Interview)
Adam and Jerod are joined once again by James Long. He was on the podcast five years ago discussing the surprise success of Prettier, an opinionated code formatter that’s still in use to this day. This time around we’re going deep on Actual, his personal finance system James built as a business for over 4 years before recently opening it up and making it 100% free.
Has James given up on the business? Or will this move Actual(ly) breathe new life into a piece of software that’s used and beloved by many? Tune in to find out.
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Featuring:
James Long – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Actual’s website
Actual’s Discord
Actual on GitHub
Open-sourcing Actual
You Need a Budget
Dave Ramsey’s EveryDollar
The Broken Window Theory
Absurd SQL on GitHub
Tauri
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
The burden of open source (Interview)
James Long joined the show to talk about his recent post, “Why I’m Frequently Absent from Open Source”. He shared several points in his blog post that struck a chord with us, so we invited him on the show to talk through the gritty details and peel back the layers of open source — the people involved, sustainability, the responsibility, the guilt, and the balance it takes to keep it all together.
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Featuring:
James Long – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
James recently left Mozilla and shortly after he launched an open source project called Prettier - an opinionated JavaScript formatter. It was a great success.
Needless to say, James experienced that overwhelming feeling many indie open source developers feel when faced with all the work required to maintain a successful open source project — the issues, feature requests, PRs, extra time required, and all the communication can really be a burden, especially when you have a full-time contracting gig and a family. His blog post was a response to this feeling as well as a love letter to his wife.
Why I’m Frequently Absent From Open Source
Prettier
gamedev.net
Scheme
James’ advice for getting away from your monitor is to make pizza. If you plan to take his advice, he recommends that you check out The Pizza Book by Aaron Quint and Michael R. Bernstein.
BONUS LINK (from James) — Watch Hammock Driven Development by Rich Hickey
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!