What is your tech stack of choice these days? Have you tried the HOWL stack? Do you have front end clients that are bloated, have huge bundle sizes and have complicated tooling? Are you having to write business logic on the server AND the front end? The HOWL stack might be just for you. The HOWL stack is Hypermedia On Whatever (backend) you’d Like.

Hypertext you say? Yeah you know like text displayed on a computer screen that has references to other text. Sound familiar? It should, the most popular way to view hypertext today is via the World Wide Web which is itself the canonical hypermedia system. Today we are joined by Carson Gross to discuss what Hypermedia systems are, concepts like Representational State Transfer (REST), Hypermedia As The Engine of Application State (HATEOS), and his library, HTMX, which is in direct response to how complicated web development has become.

Carson has been the software industry for over 20 years and has his Masters of Computer Science from Stanford. He started programming in grade school in Apple Basic and then, later, with HyperCard and has worked in many languages like Java, Ruby on Rails and Python. He is very active in the open source community responsible for projects like intercooler.js, hyperscript and the main library of discussion today, HTMX. He also teaches part time at Montana State University, is writing a book on Hypermedia systems, and currently runs his own software development shop, Big Sky Software, which finds hot, new industry trends and then builds the opposite of that.

Connect with Carson:

Show notes and helpful resources:

HTMX Library
Hypermedia.Systems book
Hateoas Essay
Two states of every programmer meme
Components of a Hypermedia System
How Did REST Come To Mean The Opposite of REST?
Uniform Interface of REST
Mother of All HTMX code bases → real world HTMX port
html.org/examples → active search
Locality of behavior
The Grug Brained Developer
Hyperview - server driven mobile app framework - by Adam Stepinski

Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com

Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

Ep. 24: The HOWL stack is your new tech stack - An explanation of Hypermedia and HTMX with Carson Gross

Building With People For People: The Unfiltered Build PodcastBy Nigel FinleyJul 11, 2023