# DevFest Florida 2017 Interview

Canonical: https://davidk.dev/talks/devfest-florida-2017-interview/
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulxg0bS5Nn4
Speaker: David Khourshid (@DavidKPiano), creator of XState
Type: Interview · Event: Thunder Nerds (DevFest Florida 2017) · Year: 2017 · Duration: 7:16 · Views: 91 (as of 2026-10-19)
Topics: CSS & animation, Visual modeling

## Summary
Today we have a special guest speaking at the Deaf Fest, Florida around 11:30. I was always interested in both music and technology, but the recent accounts of web development as a career specifically, was it was an intro to music technology.

## Key takeaways (quoted from the transcript)
- Today we have a special guest speaking at the Deaf Fest, Florida around 11:30. (0:00)
- I was always interested in both music and technology, but the recent accounts of web development as a career specifically, was it was an intro to music technology. (2:00)
- At Microsoft, I have to work on C-sharp, where if you use TypeScript with JavaScript, then it makes it a lot easier to understand C-sharp. (4:00)

## Chapters
- 0:00 Introduction
- 3:00 I mean, I know they say, I think it's some sort…
- 5:00 If all the electricity is off, I have no computers, no…

## Transcript
[0:00] Welcome to Thunder Nerds. I'm Brian Henson and I'm Fredrick Philipp von Vise. And you are consuming the Sun. And urge a conversation for the people behind the technology that love what they do and do web good. And today we have a special guest speaking at the Deaf Fest, Florida around 11:30. Today. We have a mid-course, she'd, which I'm probably brutalizing, his name. No, I can't tell if it's dang. We're out the back first time.

[0:00] Wow, baby, could you tell us a little bit about you and now what you're gonna be speaking about today? Yeah, sure, so I work in Microsoft, obviously not, I work remotely. Yeah, actually from Orlando. Nice, by the way. We're not in a romantic right now, we're a lot, but, yeah. I've been doing web development for about six years now and one of my passions is animations, just because I'm a pianist. And so when you think about like things that move and things that are tuned, right, I translate that to the web.

[1:00] And that's why I have a passion for things that aren't just sting. Still, right? Yeah, and you've got his code pen. It has some amazing things on. There's a anime at house things talking to us earlier about how he's known for his dog and it's cute, it's a little dog animated. And what does he do? The ball, the ball rolls. I haven't seen this one actually yet. Oh, it just wags his tail.

[1:00] Yeah, I think everybody has seen this house code then going around quite a bit. If you don't know what we're talking about, it's that one where you have the rooms and they go down. Yeah, so that was actually a recreation from. I like to go in Drupal and find, yeah, it's really cool. Animations in things like, make this with web technologies, so, and you can, yeah. And so today I'm going to be talking a little bit more about how you could do.

[2:00] You find that, playing piano got you into, yeah, did you go from so sick to somehow into web development? Sort of? I was always interested in both music and technology, but the recent accounts of web development as a career specifically, was it was an intro to music technology. Less in our final product, my ability, yeah, our final project was. Making our own personal marketing website. I didn't drive all the way to the lab just to do this stupid project.

[2:00] I was a big procrastinator and so I was like, how can I make it on my own computer? Because there's no iWeb? And then it's like, Oh, I had to learn CSS and HTML, so I spent a couple weeks and just like, jammed on that.

[3:00] And eventually, when I showed the class, a teacher was like, you should be doing this as a career. And then I looked up the salary. So I'm like, yeah, that's probably better than the musician. So so what do you do in Microsoft? Exactly? at Microsoft exactly? I'm on a top-secret team, but robots murder this is alive. There's no. But which? Teams were sort of like just moving resources around, and we were working on the project called project Lips.

[3:00] So if you go to the nose, get glimpse comm, it's sort of like a glimpse, yeah, g-e-t, and then glimpse, yeah. And so it's a Diagnostics platform for Node.js and express. And so instead of having two concert log and, you know, do all this debugging. You could visually see every single request as it happens. And so we worked really hard on that, just making the user interface as friendly as possible for developers.

[4:00] I personally use it, you know, dogfooding, and yeah, I can't imagine developing express apps without it, to be honest. Yeah, it looks really nice, super useful. You know, JavaScript is where you live. Basically, you're pretty much JavaScript, okay, what do you? What do you think about the heavy shift on everything being JavaScript these days? Even CSS is being replaced? I mean, I know they say, I think it's some sort of law allons law, or whether it's called, but that everything that can be written in JavaScript will be written on JavaScript.

[4:00] Yeah, however, I think that there's such an importance on exploring and learning other languages, too. Yeah, for example, I'm dabbling in Elm. At Microsoft, I have to work on C-sharp, where if you use TypeScript with JavaScript, then it makes it a lot easier to understand C-sharp. And I'll be interfaces and types and stuff like that, and type scripts. Microsoft as well. - yeah, Microsoft.

[5:00] I'm, like, he knows I'm a huge fan, even though I have. A Mac there, and they're doing so many awesome things. - and, you know, cut, Hey, come on. Oh, what's the a visual code? Visual Studio code is? You see your ghost? Yeah, just amazingly, everyone's switching to it. What's going on? Nice browser, it's a lot of people don't think about it, but it's shoes, modern, super modern, and it has amazing capabilities.

[5:00] Yeah, it's like, they're, you know, apology for Internet Explorer, but they really had to bring it at the time. Is for was at the top. Oh yes, it didn't update, I mean, they were implementing. At the time. It was pretty much everyone was like, our f. Our browser has these features and like, use our browser because has this functionality, so I think, why fix? Yeah, yeah, that's why. Well, not even that, but like filters like, yeah, yeah, there's more filters.

[6:00] Like. It was basically their way of being with you, all these complicated, complicated visual things, and it was just free. Why was the wild, wild west of browsers? But yeah, but we're getting kind of close. You want to bring them about Europe, you know? I wanted to ask. I love asking people this, and I hope you don't mind. If you weren't doing what you do now, what would you be doing? Would it be traveling Vienna?

[6:00] I mean, that was my original career, girl, just be a pianist, and I did that for a while. I taught piano, I played at churches, I did gigs here and there, so that's probably what I would fall back on. I mean, the money wouldn't be as good, but honestly, the money doesn't matter. It's all about being happy in life and at the end of the day. When I'm done programming, I just want to go to my piano.

[6:00] Like, if all the electricity is off, I have no computers, no, anything, my piano works without electricity, so I'm happy. What do you have? I have a grand Yamaha, I've done it cheap. It sounds, you know, expensive, but nice. That's awesome to have that. Alright, well, hey, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it and good luck today on you. Thank you. Final words. No rock on everybody. Thank you.