Positioning Open Source Projects with Sam Selikoff

This conversation covers:

• Mirage’s role as an API mocking library, the value that it offers for developers, and who can benefit from using it.
• How Mirage empowers front end developers to create production-ready UIs as quickly as possible.
• How Mirage evolved into an API mocking library 
• How Mirage differs from JSON Server 
• Sam’s relationship to Mirage, and how it fits in with his business. Sam also talks about open source business models, and whether Mirage could work as a SaaS offering.
• One interesting use case for Mirage, which involves demoing software and driving sales.

Links

• Mirage
• Sam’s teaching site
• Follow Sam on Twitter
• Subscribe to Sam’s YouTube Channel

Transcript
Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.

Emily: Welcome to the Business of Cloud Native. My name is Emily, I'm your host, and today I'm chatting with Sam Selikoff. Thank you so much for joining us, Sam.

Sam: Thanks for having me.

Emily: Yeah. So, today, we're going to do something a little bit different, and we're going to talk about positioning for open source projects. A lot of people talk about positioning for companies, which is also really important. And they don't always think about how positioning is important for open source. Open source maintainers often don't like to talk about marketing because you're not selling anything. 

But you are asking people to give you their time which, at least for some people, is actually more valuable than their money. And that means you have to make a compelling case for why it's worth it to contribute to your project, and also why they should use it, why they should care about it? So, anyway, we're going to talk with Sam, about Mirage. But first, I should let you introduce yourself. Sam, thank you so much for joining me, and can you introduce yourself a little bit?

Sam: Sure. My name is Sam Selikoff. These days, I spend most of my time teaching people how to code in the form of videos on my YouTube channel, and my website, embermap.com. Most of it is front end web development focused. So, we focus on JavaScript. I have a business partner who also works with me. And then we also do custom app development, you know, some consulting throughout the year.

Emily: Cool. And then tell me a little bit about Mirage.

Sam: Yeah, so Mirage is the biggest open source project I've been a part of since falling into web development, I'd say about eight years ago, I got into open source pretty early on in programming, kind of what made me fall in love with web development and JavaScript. So, I was starting to help out and just get involved with existing projects and things that I was using. Eventually, I made my way to TED Talks, the conference company where I was a front end developer, and that's actually where I met my business partner, Ryan. And we were using Ember.js, which is a JavaScript framework, and we had lots of different apps at TED that were helping with various parts of publishing talks, and running conferences, and all that stuff. 

And we were seeing some common setup code that we were using across all these apps to help us test them, and that's where Mirage came from. There was another project called Pretender, which helped you mock out servers so that you could test your front end against different server states. And we first wrapped that with something called Pretenderify, and then it grew in complexity. So, I was working on it on my learning Wednesdays, renamed it to Mirage, and then I've been working on it basically ever since. And then, the other big step, I guess, in the history is that originally was an Ember only project, and then last year, we worked on generalizing it so that it can be used by React developers, React Native developers, Vue developers, so now it's just a general-purpose JavaScript API mocking library.

Emily: So, we would say that the position is an API mocking library. And—does that sound right?

Sam: Yeah. If I had to say what it is, I would say it's a mocking library that helps front end developers mock out backend API's so that they can develop and test the user interfaces without having to rely on back end services.

Emily: Why does that matter?

Sam: It matters because back end services can be very complicated, there can be multiple back end services that need to run in order to support a UI, and if you're a front end developer, and you just want to make a change and see what the shopping cart looks like when it's empty. What does the shopping cart look like when there's one item? What does it look like when there's 100 items, and we have to have multiple pages? All three of those states correspond to different data in some back end service, usually in a database. 

And so, for a front end developer, or anyone working on the user interface, really, it can be time-consuming and complex to put that actual server in that state that they need to help them develop the UI. That can involve anything from running, like, a Rails server on their computer to getting other API's that other teams manage into the state they need to develop the UI. So, Mirage lets them mock that out and basically have a fake server that they control and they can put into any state they need. So, it’s like a simplified version of back end services that the front end developer can control to help them develop and test the UI.

Emily: And when you first started Mirage, did you think of it as an API mocking library?

Sam: Not exactly. We used it mostly because of testing. So, in a test, it's usually a best practice to not have your test rely on an actual network. You want to be able to run your test suite of your user interface anywhere, let's say on an airplane or something like that. So, if your user interface relies on live back end services, that's usually where you would bring in a mocking library. 

And then you would say, okay, when the user visits amazon.com/cart, normally, it would go try to fetch the items in your cart from a real server, but in the test, we're going to say, “Oh, when my app does that, let's just respond with zero items. And then in this next test, when my app does that, let's respond with three items.” So, that's the motivation originally, is in a testing environment, giving the UI developer control over that. And then what happened was that it was so useful, we started using it in development as well, just to help during normal times, just because it was faster than working with the real back end services.