Datastar – It’s Pretty Good

I usually leave the essays to the mad scientist Delaney. However, with Datastar being done and all, I wanted to share what I consider to be a significant, yet easily overlooked, milestone.

Background #

For well over a year, we knew that David Nolen, lead developer of ClojureScript and one of the sharpest minds in the JavaScript world, was actively interested in Datastar. Alongside Anders Murphy, he was part of a small team that rebuilt Instabooks, a faster, more polished version of QuickBooks Online, from using React to using Datastar.

Based on conversations with Anders, we knew the team was doing stellar work. Shortly after launching their product, we were able to get some of David’s time to talk about his experience with Datastar on the podcast.

The interview #

As one of the most experienced, thoughtful, and level-headed engineers we’ve interviewed, David didn’t hold back when sharing his diatribe on mainstream web development and the JavaScript ecosystem.

To me, the entire mentality of not wanting to learn how something works, always leads toward software that that you don’t want to use. You know, it’s like when I look at the web and I’m on a random website... I'm like, “the person that built this doesn’t care how it works. They’re just uninterested. They want to see a thing that looks like the image they have in their mind, but their measuring stick for what is acceptable is very low. It’s very very very very low.”

To the point that he had largely checked out from the web.

I honestly like checked out from the web. I was like, nothing was going on. It’s like, I was very uninterested. There was nothing happening. And then I saw Datastar, and I was like, “Okay, something is happening. I better read up on this now.”

Fortunately, he did. And having put Datastar through its paces, it turns out David thinks “it’s pretty good”.

Datastar is definitely the best tool that I’ve added to the web technology stuff that I do in at least 12 years.

The milestone #

The milestone wasn’t merely social proof.

It was a highly respected engineer, working with a capable team, at a real company, choosing to use Datastar for a real product, completing the project successfully, and publicly sharing the experience afterward.

Not as a conference demo. Not as a toy project. Not as an experiment. A full rewrite of a production application – with no regrets.

Watch the full interview below. It’s quite the story!

– Ben