News and podcasts for developers

This week we’re talking about NFTs — that’s right, non-fungible tokens and we’re joined by Mikeal Rogers, who’s leading all things InterPlanetary Linked Data at Protocol Labs. We go down the NFT rabbit hole on a very technical level and we come out the other side with clarity and a compelling use of NFTs.

The benefits of such a setup are numerous, especially for small sites and side projects:

Hosting a static website is much easier than a “real” server - there’s many free and reliable options (like GitHub, GitLab Pages, Netlify, etc), and it scales to basically infinity without any effort.

The how is also super interesting:

So how do you use a database on a static file hoster? Firstly, SQLite (written in C) is compiled to WebAssembly. SQLite can be compiled with emscripten without any modifications, and the sql.js library is a thin JS wrapper around the wasm code.

There’s more to the story, and the resulting solution is also open source.

Paul Bakaus from Google Web Creators joins Amal, Nick, & Jerod to talk about this new initiative to promote, educate, and equip people to create on the web.

Along the way we discuss Web Stories, AMP, RSS, Google Reader, and more, of course. Join us: for a more dope web!

Mark Eriksen:

Many great Phoenix LiveView examples exist. They often show the ease and power of LiveView but stop at multiple browsers talking to a single web server. I wanted to go further and create a fully clustered, globally distributed, privately networked, secure application. What’s more, I wanted to have fun doing it.

So I set out to see if I could create a fully distributed, clustered, privately networked, global game server system. Spoiler Alert: I did.

I like the way he frames his experience. He says the most remarkable thing about it is not what he built, it’s what he didn’t need to build in order to accomplish his goal.

Paul Graham on preposterous sounding ideas and how easy they are to dismiss:

Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they’re proposed by reasonable domain experts. If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they’re proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don’t. And if they have deep domain expertise, that’s probably the source of it.

Such ideas are not merely unsafe to dismiss, but disproportionately likely to be interesting. When the average person proposes an implausible-sounding idea, its implausibility is evidence of their incompetence. But when a reasonable domain expert does it, the situation is reversed. There’s something like an efficient market here: on average the ideas that seem craziest will, if correct, have the biggest effect.

I’m not a big ideas guy. Never have been. Adam is, though. And I freely admit that many of his ideas sound preposterous to me at first. But I’ve learned over the years to hear him out, because he’s usually on to something, even if it’s not fully-formed yet. And it turns out I’m pretty good at taking partially-formed ideas and helping firm them up. This is one of the reasons why we make a good team.

Having new ideas is a lonely business. Only those who’ve tried it know how lonely. These people need your help. And if you help them, you’ll probably learn something in the process.

Perspectives from both the workshop leaders perspective, as well as the workshop participants. What are some top tips, things to watch out for, and ways to innovate and keep your participants engaged, especially in the remote world we are now living in.

The motivation for building Slidev:

I always found myself spending too much time styling and layouting slides when using apps like PowerPoint / Keynote / Google Slides. Whenever I need to share code snippets, I would also need to use other tools to generate the highlighted code as images over and over again.

So as a frontend developer, why not solve it the way that fits better with what I am good at?

Looks slick: themeable, hackable, and you write your slides in Markdown. 👌

ClearURLs is an add-on based on the new WebExtensions technology and is optimized for Firefox and Chrome based browsers.

This extension will automatically remove tracking elements from URLs to help protect your privacy when browse through the Internet, which is regularly updated by us and can be found here.

Wormhole lets you share files with end-to-end encryption and a link that automatically expires. So you can keep what you share private and make sure your stuff doesn’t stay online forever.

Our #1 goal is speed – you should be able to get a share link in less than 2 seconds with the absolute minimum number of clicks.

That’s why Wormhole supports instant file streaming. There’s no need to wait for your files to finish uploading before you can copy the link and send it to your recipient. The recipient can start downloading even before the files have finished uploading.

Wormhole uses super fast peer-to-peer transfer to send files directly to the recipient when possible. This improves speed and security – especially when transferring files over a local network, like when you just want to get a file from your phone onto your computer.

In addition, Wormhole stores your encrypted files on cloud servers for 24 hours so the share link will keep working for your recipient even after you close the Wormhole site.

This comes from Mike Bostock (D3.js) who knows a thing or two about visualizing data in the browser.

It has a concise and (hopefully) memorable API to foster fluency — and plenty of examples to learn from and copy-paste.

Smart home data is complicated. There are all kinds of devices, and they are in many different combinations, geographies, configurations, etc. This complicated data situation is further exacerbated during a pandemic when time series data seems to be filled with anomalies. Evan Welbourne joins us to discuss how Amazon is synthesizing this disparate data into functionality for the next generation of smart homes. He discusses the challenges of working with smart home technology, and he describes how they developed their latest feature called “hunches.”

This repository offers a collection of services with great free tiers for developers on a budget. Because not everyone has 20$ per month to spend on app or database hosting for every single side-project.

Nowadays, a lot of services are offering really good free tier more than enough for testing small apps and even put them in production. They are just waiting to be used by you.

I got a kick out of their FTDD acronym: Free Tier Driven Development

This article provides an in-depth view and comparison on modern regular expression engines. Hyperscan and RE2 come out on top and offer great scalability for large scale regex applications.

In the wake of recent events at Basecamp (and DHH’s continued involvement with Ruby on Rails), many have questioned the governance process for Rails. This post from “The Rails Team” is meant to “clarify how the team is structured,” and how they operate.

…no one on the Core team, or their employers, have sole control over the framework or community. There is no individual or subset of individuals who have power to enact policies unilaterally in the Rails community spaces that we operate (for example on issues, pull requests, or the forum).

Thanks to Muhammad Raza for sharing some of his favorite command line one liners to make his workflow productive and more efficient.

As a regular Linux user, I have been using commandline extensively to perform daily tasks such as creating files, navigating through directories, moving files and editing files using vim.

Any git repository may contain tons of information about commits, contributors, and files. Extracting this information is not always trivial, mostly because there are a gadzillion options to a gadzillion git commands – I don’t think there is a single person alive who knows them all. Probably not even Linus Torvalds himself :).

David Cassel, on The New Stack:

Widely-respected security expert Dan Kaminsky passed away on April 23 from diabetic ketoacidosis at the age of 42. His considerable legacy went beyond expertise with a rare and memorable kindness.

I met Dan very briefly at ShmooCon back in 2004. His kindness was memorable, for sure, but the thing I remember most was just how larger-than-life he was to me at the time. The guy contributed so much to the infosec community and yet remained humble and kind despite it all. It was striking.

By the age of 22, he was giving talks at Black Hat himself, as well as at other tech conferences around the world. Kaminsky told the site he was thrilled to be interacting “with the smartest people I’d ever met in my life.”

Oddly enough, that’s how I felt when I interacted with Dan. It’s a tragedy that he died so young.

The feed is hosted on GitHub Pages (which means it’s public to all) and is static until it gets rebuilt. Building is done periodically via a GitHub Action; configuration is via a YAML file (It’d be cooler if you could import an OPML instead). Even if it’s not something you’d use, I think this project is interesting for two reasons:

1. It’s part of a “GitHub as Stack” meta-trend
2. It promotes RSS, which is one of the web’s great treasures

KBall, Amal, and Feross are joined by special guest Jenn Creighton to talk about all things Apollo. How does Apollo fit into the GraphQL ecosystem, what’s the next big thing, and when would you choose to use it?

A handy shell script to help you undo all the things (commits, pushes, pulls, you name it).

SQLite is so hot right now.

Even if you start out small and later need to upscale, as long as your web application can run on the same machine as the database, which it can in 99% of the time, you can just upgrade the hardware to a beefier machine and keep business as usual.

The only time you need to consider a client-server setup is…