This week we’re back at All Things Open 2022 covering the hallway track. Up first is Shivay Lamba and he’s schooling us on all things server-side WASM. It’s the new hotness. After that, we talk with Yishai Beeri, CTO of LinearB about the world of code review, PR queues, AI developers, and making human developers more efficient, and happier. And last, we talk with Guy Martin from NVIDIA about what’s going on in the Industrial Metaverse. He shares details about an open source project developed by Pixar called Universal Scene Description (USD) and what they’re doing with NVIDIA Omniverse.

This tldr from Guilherme Rambo is enough, but read the full post for all the details.

TL;DR: Any app with access to Bluetooth could record your conversations with Siri and audio from the iOS keyboard dictation feature when using AirPods or Beats headsets. This would happen without the app requesting microphone access permission and without the app leaving any trace that it was listening to the microphone.

This bug has since been handled by Apple. Also, after reaching back out to Apple (on Oct 25), Guilherme was told he’d be receiving a $7,000 (USD) bug bounty payment for reporting the issue.

This week Adam talks with John-Daniel Trask, co-founder & CEO of Raygun. Raygun is an award-winning application monitoring company founded by John-Daniel Trask (better known as JD) and Jeremy Boyd in Wellington, New Zealand. They have revenues in the 8 digits annually, and have done it with very little funding (~1.7M USD). Today’s conversation with JD shares a ton of wisdom. Listen twice and take notes.

inlets combines a reverse proxy and websocket tunnels to expose your internal and development endpoints to the public Internet via an exit-node. An exit-node may be a 5-10 USD VPS or any other computer with an IPv4 IP address.

You may be wondering why this project needs to exist, since many like it have come before. The author addresses that right up front:

Similar tools such as ngrok or Argo Tunnel from Cloudflare are closed-source, have limits built-in, can work out expensive and have limited support for arm/arm64. Ngrok is also often banned by corporate firewall policies meaning it can be unusable. Other open-source tunnel tools are designed to only set up a static tunnel. inlets aims to dynamically bind and discover your local services to DNS entries with automated TLS certificates to a public IP address over its websocket tunnel.

Team Adafruit is doing their first ever “X prize” type project. Hack the Kinect for Xbox 360 and claim the NOW $3,000 bounty! Hat tip to Himanshu Chhetri for letting us know about this. Thanks man!

The Open Kinect project has started a bit of drama around this contest. Microsoft seems to not be taking kindly to the bounty offer. Read the article titled “Bounty offered for open-source Kinect driver” over at CNET.

What is Kinect?

Kinect for Xbox 360, or simply Kinect (originally known as code name Project Natal (pronounced /nəˈtɒl/ nə-tahl)), is a “controller-free gaming and entertainment experience” by Microsoft currently only available on the Xbox 360 video game platform. In the future PCs via Windows 8 may be supported.

Kinect is based around a webcam-style add-on peripheral. It enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 through a natural user interface using gestures, spoken commands, or presented objects and images. The project is aimed at broadening the Xbox 360’s audience beyond its typical gamer base and will compete with other consoles, motion control systems and peripherals such as Wii Remote, Wii MotionPlus and PlayStation Move for the Wii and PlayStation 3.

How does it work?

An invisible light source illuminates the subject. A sensor chip then measures the distance the light has to travel to each pixel within the chip. A unique imaging software uses a “depth map” to perceive and identify objects in realtime and the end-user device reacts appropriately.

Wired has a great article about how motion detection works in Xbox Kinect!

What does Adafruit Industries want?

They are looking to expand open source drivers for this cool USB device. The drivers and/or application can run on any operating system. Here’s the catch, everything has to be completely documented and under an open source license. To demonstrate the driver you must also write an application with one “window” showing video (640 x 480) and one window showing depth. Then just upload your project to GitHub.

How get the bounty ($3,000 USD)

Anyone around the world can work on this, even folks from Microsoft. Upload your code, examples and documentation to GitHub. The first person or group to get RGB out with distance values being used … wins. All code needs to be open source and/or public domain.

Email them a link to your repo, and Adafruit Industries as well as some “other” Kinect for Xbox 360 hackers will check it out – if it’s good to go, you’ll get the $3,000 bounty!

Good luck.

[Source on GitHub]

Jerod & KBall discuss a trio of goings on in/around the web dev world: Evan You’s new startup, Matt Mullenweg’s WordPress mess & Ryan Carniato’s WebComponents debate.

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Jamie Tanna (who has a website) joins us to discuss the indie web, living with ADHD, sharing his salary history with the world & building DMD – a dynamite open source tool to help you better understand the use of dependencies across your org.

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Matt Asay thinks the open source licensing war is over, LangUI is an open source Tailwind component library for your AI chat app, Ivan Kuleshov modded a Mac mini to run via PoE, Apple joins Pixar and others in the Alliance for OpenUSD & John D. Cook says sometimes you shouldn’t pick the best tool for the job.

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Darcy Clarke, former GitHub Staff Engineering Manager and founder of vlt, joins us to discuss a major bug in the npm ecosystem that he recently disclosed. We cover the bug’s timeline, nuances, and impact, all while setting some important context on npm packages, clients, and registries. Tune in to learn how to protect your codebase and gain a deeper understanding of this crucial part of the JavaScript ecosystem.

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In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris explore recent highlights from the current model proliferation wave sweeping the world - including Stable Diffusion XL, OpenChat, Zeroscope XL, and Salesforce XGen. They note the rapid rise of open models, and speculate that just as in open source software, open models will dominate the future. Such rapid advancement creates its own problems though, so they finish by itemizing concerns such as cybersecurity, workflow productivity, and impact on human culture.

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What’s the current reality and practical implications of using 3D environments for simulation and synthetic data creation? In this episode, we cut right through the hype of the Metaverse, Multiverse, Omniverse, and all the “verses” to understand how 3D assets and tooling are actually helping AI developers develop industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, and more. Beau Perschall is at the center of these innovations in his work with NVIDIA, and there is no one better to help us explore the topic!

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This week we’re talking with Daniel Stenberg about 23 years of curl. Daniel shares how curl came to be, what drives and motivates him, maintaining a good cadence of an open source product, what to expect from http3, how many billions of users curl has, and Daniel also shares some funny stories like the “Spotify and Instagram hacking ring.”

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This week Adam and Jerod talk with Brian Bondy, Co-founder and CTO of Brave. They talked through the beginnings of Brave and how BAT (Basic Attention Token) could be driving the future of how we offer funding and tips to our favorite websites and content creators. Of course, they go deep into the historical and the technical details of the Brave browser and their march to Brave 1.0. The last segment of the show covers how BAT works, how it’s being used, and also their interesting spin on an ad model that respects the user’s privacy.

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Suz Hinton joined the show to talk about live coding open source on Twitch. We talk about how she got interested in Twitch, her goals and aspirations for live streaming, the work she’s doing in open source, Twitch for open source, how you and others can get started — and maybe some other fun stuff we have in the works at Changelog.

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Chris Beams joins the show to talk about Bisq, the P2P decentralized Bitcoin exchange and open-source desktop application that allows you to buy and sell bitcoins in exchange for national currencies, or alternative crypto currencies. We get some background on the issues faced by crypto exchanges like CoinBase, and the now defunkt Mt. Gox. We discuss whether or not Bitcoin is a censorship resistant payment system and what it means to have anonymous transaction currency options. Bisq also has an interesting white paper about its own DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) to support its contributors and we discuss that in detail at the end of the episode.

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This is an AMA show with live questions from the #jsparty Slack channel. We cover everything from BasicAttentionToken, Robotics, Microsoft, IDE’s, and other fun stuff.

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Ron Evans joined the show to talk about Gobot, writing software for hardware, and open source software’s role in improving the human condition.

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Todd McLeod joined the show to talk about teaching and learning Go, his work as an Instructor at Fresno City College, Udemy and on YouTube.

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Gavin Wood joined the show to talk about Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, The DAO, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), what could you build with Ethereum, and the future of digital currency. Gavin Wood is Founder of Ethereum, creator of the Solidity contract language, and Founder of Ethcore — the company that created Parity, an open source Ethereum client.

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Ever wanted to add an obtrusive Dickbar to your iOS apps?

Wait no more, for Ching-Lan HUANG 黃青嵐 AKA @digdog has packaged up this UI tragedy for you to use in less than ten lines of Objective-C:

UIDickBar *dickBar = [[UIDickBar alloc] initWithDickTitle:@"#DickBar" dickBadge:@"Stupid" actionBlock:^{
    // Anything you want to do after UIDickBar tapped
    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://digdog.tumblr.com"]];
}];
[dickBar showInView:self.view];
[dickBar release];

[Source on GitHub] [Blog post]

Chris Shank has been on sabbatical since January, so he’s had a lot of time to think deeply about the web platform. On this episode, Jerod & KBall pick Chris’ brain to answer questions like, what does a post-component paradigm look like? What would it look like if the browser had primitives for building spatial canvases? How can we make it easier to make “folk interfaces” on the web?

Dear New Developer,

You know that there’s a chasm between your skill level and that of the mythical “senior software developer”.

If you build a list of topics you encounter on your job that, if learned to a deep enough level, would put you on the same level as a senior developer, you’ll end up even more demoralized than before compiling that list.

No need to assemble this list yourself! I’ve done it for you.

I’ve heard many people recommend Deep Work over the years. Add this one to the list.

(I like this style of writing where you imagine a hypothetical new developer –knowing full well they real thing is out there– and tell them things you wish you’d known when starting your career as a dev.)

This is not a use-it-in-the-real-world kinda thing. It’s being written as a learning project, but may interest you if you want to learn about database internals. It includes:

• Raft-based distributed consensus engine for linearizable state machine replication.
• ACID-compliant transaction engine with MVCC-based snapshot isolation.
• Pluggable storage engine with B+tree and log-structured backends.
• Iterator-based query engine with heuristic optimization and time-travel support.
• SQL interface including projections, filters, joins, aggregates, and transactions.

A fun way to discover interesting color combos. Whatch out for that undiagnosed light indigo.

This is a really interesting usage of blockchain technology to ensure you are really getting what you think you bought. Michael del Castillo writes on Forbes.com:

The fifth-largest oil and gas company in the world, valued at $262 billion, is investing an undisclosed amount in LO3, a New York startup using a modified version of the ethereum blockchain to make it easier for individuals to buy and sell locally produced energy using the existing network of power cables.

While the bitcoin blockchain lets users track the flow of value without the need of banks to audit the system, LO3’s platform, called Exergy, is designed to track the flow of energy as it is added to a shared, local energy network, giving the neighbors who purchase the energy absolute certainty it really came from a windmill, a solar panel or a gerbil running on a treadmill.

Follow along as our friends at Phusion walk us through the process of creating a GitHub Actions workflow to build and publish a Ruby gem to the RubyGems registry.

One of the actions featured in the version that’s currently exclusively available to GitHub employees and a selected and undisclosed group of Beta testers, is the ‘GitHub Action for npm’, which wraps the npm CLI to enable common npm commands.

We set out to instead make an example workflow to build and publish a Ruby library (or: gem) to the default public registry, and created a GitHub repository, with a Docker container for a ‘Rubygems’ action: github.com/scarhand/actions-ruby

Biscuit is a monolithic, POSIX-subset operating system kernel in Go for x86-64 CPUs. It was written to study the performance trade-offs of using a high-level language with garbage collection to implement a kernel with a common style of architecture.

With ~38k commits and 8+ years of dev, this has been a massive effort. Find the research paper right here.

A good API wrapper should handle network transport, payload serialization/deserialization, and authentication, abstracting these details away in order to let the developer deal with the business domain of the API. Projects like Faraday, Requests, and others have made creating higher level wrappers much easier.

MBRequest from Mobiata does the same for iOS and OSX:

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/top_rated?alt=json?time=this_week"];
NSMutableURLRequest *urlRequest = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[urlRequest setValue:@"gzip" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Accept-Encoding"];
MBJSONRequest *jsonRequest = [[[MBJSONRequest alloc] init] autorelease];
[jsonRequest performJSONRequest:urlRequest completionHandler:^(id responseJSON, NSError *error) {
    if (error != nil)
    {
        NSLog(@"Error requesting top-rated videos: %@", error);
    }
    else
    {
        NSArray *videos = [[responseJSON objectForKey:@"feed"] objectForKey:@"entry"];
        for (NSDictionary *videoInfo in videos)
        {
            NSString *title = [[videoInfo objectForKey:@"title"] objectForKey:@"$t"];
            NSString *author = [[[[videoInfo objectForKey:@"author"] objectAtIndex:0] objectForKey:@"name"] objectForKey:@"$t"];
            NSLog(@"'%@' by %@", title, author);
        }
    }
}];

Check out the examples folder in the project source for implementation ideas.

We sit down with Scott Hanselman at Microsoft Build 2025 to discuss open sourcing all the things, cool stuff Windows can do, where we want (and don’t want) AI to fit into our lives, building arcade cabinets, and so much more.

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Declan Chidlow proposes that AI is stifling tech adoption, Ariel Salminen shares 17 pieces of advice she’s learned about leading successful product teams, Benj Edwards tells the story of WikiTok, the React team sunsets Create React App & Ruben Schade says boring tech is mature, not old.

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