Speaker Interview: Yoshua Wuyts — an Open Source Hero

The first AmsterdamJS Conference is only a few weeks away and we are presenting you a series of short interviews with the speakers of this years event.

These interviews offer personal thoughts and perspectives from some of the most interesting personas in the industry. We have selected people who run companies, drive projects, build products and contribute to Open Source.

Today we are welcoming Yoshua Wuyts — mastermind behind Dat Data Project and Choo.io framework.

AmsterdamJS: Hi Yoshua, tell us a bit about yourself! What in your opinion was the first conscious step towards your current career?

Yoshua: Haha, hiii! — First conscious step? Hmm. I think it was when I was still studying in Amsterdam — around 2014. One day I decided that I wanted to play with Node and started writing some modules. That quickly also became React, and fast forward a couple of years I’m still writing JavaScript.

AmsterdamJS: We see your minimalistic framework Choo is getting a lot of attention lately. How do you see it’s positioning amongst other big players?

Yoshua: Oh cool! I feel like I sometimes live inside my own little bubble with my friends. We mostly hang out on IRC and we work on our projects there. I’m happy to hear others are picking up on the work we do! We definitely don’t have the marketing budget that other people do, so the only way people find out is word of mouth I guess haha.

For me Choo is a bit of a side project — a means to an end. I maintain an odd 400 modules or so on npm, and Choo is just one of them. With Choo 5 we’ve pretty much gone in maintenance mode. This means we keep the API stable and focus only on bug fixes and improving performance. This doesn’t mean we won’t make changes, but it should hopefully enable the ecosystem to flourish and grow.

AmsterdamJS: Could you tell us a bit about most notable projects using the framework? Which would be the biggest? How big is the ecosystem around the project?

Yoshua: Choo is a bit of an odd framework I’d say. The source is about 100 lines of glue around 6 or so modules. Some of the projects use different pieces, depending on their needs — and that’s been kind of the point of building a modular framework haha.

Choo is a bit of an odd framework I’d say. The source is about 100 lines of glue around 6 or so modules.

I think the most noticeable success has been the Washington Post 2016’s election homepage. They used Choo v4’s engine to communicate all of their components. It didn’t make sense for them to use the whole framework, so they just used bits. Think it worked out well for them.

AmsterdamJS: How big is the ecosystem around the project?

Yoshua: In terms of ecosystem I think things are doing pretty well. As a community I feel we keep pushing the boundries of what’s possible. Choo 5 is now performant enough to be used in video games & audio software. As a community we’re currently experimenting with full-page animations and sub-millisecond server rendering. Pretty exciting stuff!

As a community I feel we keep pushing the boundries of what’s possible.

We thank Yoshua for time taken to answer our questions and knowledge shared. At AmsterdamJS Conference Yoshua will be presenting his talk “Browser Framework Fundamentals”:

Ok, let’s try a thing. Close your eyes for a bit. No peeking. Now I want you to imagine the last time you wrote some browser code. Perhaps a component of sorts. Remember what that was like? yeah. Ok. Now I want you to imagine that was the very last time you had to write that component. New framework in town? No problem, still works. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Let us know whom we should interview next! https://amsterdamjs.com/#speakers