Reactive JavaScript with Ben Lesh

Netflix has a highly interactive user interface. As I move my mouse around the page, hovering over titles and inspecting movie descriptions, there is a lot going on under the hood. One component of this UI is RxJS, a library for building reactive JavaScript. Reactive programming uses the observer pattern to create objects that emit streams of events. We can compose these streams together to create elegant abstractions.

Reactive programming may seem confusing at first, but it can simplify certain patterns that may be hard to describe with imperative programming. Ben Lesh, a senior software engineer at Netflix, joins the show to explain why reactive programming is useful, and how RxJS is used at Netflix.