Supper Club × Redwood JS with Tom Pretson-Werner

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
I sure hope you're hungry. Oh, I'm starving. Wash those hands, pull up a chair, and secure that feed bag, because it's time to listen to Scott Tolinski and Wes Bos attempt to use human language to converse with and pick the brains of other developers. I thought there was gonna be food. So buckle up and grab that old handle, because this ride is going to get wild.
This is the Syntax Supper Club.

**Wes Bos** (0:37)
Welcome to Syntax. This is the podcast with the Tastiest Web Development Treats. Today, we've got another supper club for you. This is our new part of the podcast where we bring on people from the industry and talk to them about what they're working on and all kinds of interesting stuff. Today, we're sponsored by two awesome companies, Aioseo. That's the all-in-one SEO toolkit for WordPress that helps you improve your website rankings. It's used by over three million websites and has powerful features you need to rank higher. We'll talk about them partway through the episode. We're also sponsored by Whiskey Web and Whatnot. That's another podcast. They talk about Whiskey. They talk about the web. And they talk about Whatnot. We'll talk about them partway through the episode.
But you're going to want to check that one out. We've got an awesome guest on for you today. Tom Preston-Werner, who is working on Redwood JS amongst a very, very large background of stuff.
We're really excited to talk to him about Redwood JS and possibly whatever else comes on. So welcome, Tom. Thanks so much for coming on.

**Tom Preston-Werner** (1:40)
Thank you. Glad to be here.

**Wes Bos** (1:42)
So do you want to give us a quick one-minute rundown of what your background is and all the way up to working on Redwood JS?

**Tom Preston-Werner** (1:52)
Yeah. Well, if we go way back, I wanted to be a physicist. So I thought I'd get into theoretical particle physics, but it turns out that physics is just math and I don't love math that much.
So I had always been into computers, so I switched to computer science in college.
And then I actually ended up dropping out of college to work for a startup because this was in like 2000, so things were frothy and things looked like they could be lucrative if I ended up at the right place. So I wanted to get in the startup world. Oh, yeah.
So I did that for a few years, bounced around between a couple of places, got into Ruby on Rails. That eventually landed me up in San Francisco where I worked for a startup called PowerSet. And during that time, I came up with the idea for GitHub and started working on GitHub. So I founded GitHub and then from there did that, as you know, and then have done a couple of things since then. I worked on a nonprofit called Code Starter where we tried to get laptops in the hands of kids that wanted to learn how to code. I did start up with another ex GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon called Chatterbug. It's a language learning app that's still going and now I've gotten into Redwood.js, which is a JavaScript framework that I'm sure we'll talk more about and of course I've done a bunch of open source stuff. So Jekyll, one of the first static site generators, defined the semantic versioning specification a number of years ago, created the Tamil specification, the configuration language that is used in a variety of different languages and projects now. So those are some of the big things and Redwood's kind of the latest project. I always have a side project, so it's kind of the latest.

**Wes Bos** (3:35)
Amazing. Can we just point out for a second, we get a lot of people ask this question, the guy who made GitHub, Jekyll, Semver, Tamil not good at math. We get this question all the time for people. I want to get into programming, but I'm not good at math.

**Tom Preston-Werner** (3:51)
Yes.

**Wes Bos** (3:52)
I think that's awesome to hear.

**Tom Preston-Werner** (3:53)
The problem for me was, I mean, math is fine. I like math when it's well taught.
And the problem was, I think in college, it was not well taught, and especially things like linear algebra and discrete algebra. I just couldn't deal with it. And then it got into proofs.
And let me tell you, my brain just doesn't do proofs well, for whatever reason. It's like, all right, here's the thing, write down the proof for it. I just want to be doing anything other than this right now, which is weird because I feel like I have a fairly logical brain. But for some reason, that part of it just wasn't working for me. And then especially getting into advanced physics. And it just becomes, it's just pure math. It feels totally divorced from the real world, which is fascinating. What is it about the fundamental nature of our universe that the universe is just math, that we can describe it so well with math? That's weird. We can talk about that later if you want.