A Javascripter's trip to Phoenix and LiveView

In grad school Roger received one of the original PC clones for Christmas, so instead of working on his thesis he spent all his time learning to code. Today he specializes in fast and functional web and mobile apps. When not coding for work or fun, Roger can usually be found with his nose in a book.

Web app development over the last two decades has been a pendulum swinging between back-end and front-end. That is because we want as much interactivity as close to the user as we can manage without driving ourselves crazy. The incompatibilities of client execution environments pushed the development of ‘batteries included’ frameworks like Rails which promised: “You don’t have to write Javascript”. That was a lie. Today we have LiveView, which manages to push in both directions at the same time. Even so, we still need to write some Javascript. The big productivity win is that LiveView takes care of the mundane use cases, which frees us to work on the important and interesting bits.