Today we have the honor to spotlight a fundamental tool of the web ecosystem: Babel. If you don’t know Babel, it’s a JavaScript compiler that allows you to write next generation JavaScript and compile it to a version that is compatible with all the browsers.
Nicolò Ribaudo, one of the Babel maintainers, is on stage to tell us the story of this project, how it became so popular, and its role in the daily life of a web developer.
We’ll touch also on the topic of funding and sponsoring, and learn how Babel managed to hire engineers with Open Source donations!
Enjoy the show 👨🍳
Show Notes
- 00.00 Intro
- 00.45 Episode Start
- 01.32 Nicolò’s Introduction
- 02.53 What is Babel?
- 06.15 How Babel became so popular?
- 10.28 The web ecosystem speed
- 13.56 Browserlist
- 16.49 Babel & Performances
- 20.09 Continous Benchmarking
- 22.42 Extending Babel
- 27.20 Build tools integrations
- 30.07 How Nicolò got involved with Babel?
- 33.30 Who’s maintaining Babel?
- 35.33 Who’s funding Babel?
- 38.19 Hiring engineers with donation
- 40.39 Call for donations
- 42.29 Babel will never be done
- 44.35 Babel 8
- 47.11 How to get involved?
- 50.34 Further reading
- 53.23 Where people can find you online?
Resources
- babel/babel on GitHub
- Babel Official Website
- Mentioned Resources:
- @nicolo-ribaudo on GitHub
- @nic on Mastodon