Nader Dabit shares his motivation and experience on recently transitioning to focus on technologies and communities that support the decentralized internet. In this hot topics discussion, we cover all the buzz words you’ve likely heard over the past year. We have honest and nuanced conversations about the world of Ethereum, Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, and Web3. Hype or hit? You’ll have to tune in to find out.

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This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Ben Ford, former Royal Marine and founder of Commando Development, about the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act). Shipping is just a small part of it. The OODA loop that you know is probably the wrong one. We explore Mission & Command, Situational Awareness and a few other practices that will help you deal with complexity as you code and ship. As a former Royal Marine Commando, Ben learned these skills the hard way, and then refined them over many years as a software engineer. Check out the diagrams in the show notes - they are a work of art and precision.

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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.

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Hummingbot integrates cryptocurrency trading on both centralized exchanges and decentralized protocols. It allows users to run a client that executes customized, automated trading strategies for cryptocurrencies.

We created Hummingbot to promote decentralized market-making: enabling members of the community to contribute to the liquidity and trading efficiency in cryptocurrency markets.

There are many arbitrage opportunities between centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance (which often have high liquidity) and decentralized exchanges like Loopring and Terra (which thus far rarely have high liquidity).

If you have the financial stomach for it, Hummingbot could help you take advantage of these opportunities while providing liquidity to the decentralized markets.

Our friend Ron Evans is a technologist for hire, an open source developer, an author, a speaker, an iconoclast, and one of our favorite people in tech. This conversation with Ron goes everywhere: from high-altitude weather balloons, to life on Mars, to Zeno’s paradox applied to ML, to what open source devs should learn from the Wu-Tang Clan & more.

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The hallway track at All Things Open 2024 — features Carl George, Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat for a discussion on the state of open source enterprise linux and RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Max Howell, creator of Homebrew and tea.xyz which offers rewards and recognition to open source maintainers, and Chad Whitacre, Head of Open Source at Sentry about the launch of Open Source Pledge and their plans to helps businesses and orgs to do the right thing and support open source.

This code is experimental (as you might imagine), but it’s full functional. It doesn’t implement all the Airplay protocols, but quite a few!

What happens when your data operations grow to Internet-scale? How do thousands or millions of data producers and consumers efficiently, effectively, and productively interact with each other? How are varying formats, protocols, security levels, performance criteria, and use-case specific characteristics meshed into one unified data fabric? Chris and Daniel explore these questions in this illuminating and Fully-Connected discussion that brings this new data technology into the light.

RSS-Bridge is a PHP project capable of generating RSS and Atom feeds for websites that don’t have one. It can be used on webservers or as a stand-alone application in CLI mode.

I made a very poor-man’s version of this as my first ever Sinatra app way back in the day. It’s cool to see that vision live on, but it sucks that tools like this have to exist. It seems that the author agrees with me on that:

We want to share with friends, using open protocols: RSS, Atom, XMPP, whatever. Because no one wants to have your service with your applications using your API force-feeding them. Friends must be free to choose whatever software and service they want.

We are rebuilding bridges you have willfully destroyed.

In its creator’s own words:

It’s an API development ecosystem. Supports many API protocols. This project has crossed 31.6k+ GitHub stars in 2 years. One of the most growing open source projects in Asia / World.

Try it for yourself at Hoppscotch.io

Maddy Mail Server implements all functionality required to run an email server. It can send messages via SMTP (works as MTA), accept messages via SMTP (works as MX) and store messages while providing access to them via IMAP. In addition to that it implements auxiliary protocols that are mandatory to keep email reasonably secure (DKIM, SPF, DMARC, DANE, MTA-STS).

It replaces Postfix, Dovecot, OpenDKIM, OpenSPF, OpenDMARC and more with one daemon with uniform configuration and minimal maintenance cost.

IMAP storage is still in beta, but this is one to watch as it could dramatically simplify your infrastructure.

dog is a command-line DNS client, like dig.
It has colourful output, understands normal command-line argument syntax, supports the DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS protocols, and can emit JSON.

The only downside is that (for now) you have to build it from source if you want to use it.

Tempo is cost-efficient, requiring only object storage to operate, and is deeply integrated with Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki. Tempo can be used with any of the open source tracing protocols, including Jaeger, Zipkin, and OpenTelemetry. It supports key/value lookup only and is designed to work in concert with logs and metrics (exemplars) for discovery.

Add this to the incredibly impressive open source portfolio at Grafana Labs.

A new CC0 book about WebRTC by Sean DuBois (and friends). Sean recently shared his love for and deep knowledge about the technology on our Go Time podcast.

This book was created by WebRTC implementers to share their hard-earned knowledge with the world. WebRTC for the curious is an Open Source book written for those that are always looking for more. This book doesn’t settle for abstraction.

This book is all about protocols and APIs, and will not be talking about any software in particular. We attempt to summarize RFCs and get all undocumented knowledge into one place. This is book is not a tutorial, and will not contain much code.

This is very much a WIP, but there’s a fair bit ready for consumption and the authors are actively collaborating in the GitHub repo.

The New Stack takes us on a fun trip down memory lane:

Fifteen years ago a number of the Linux kernel developers tossed their hands in the air and gave up on their version control system, BitKeeper. Why? The man who held the copyright for BitKeeper, Larry McVoy, withdrew free use of his product on claims that one of the kernel devs had reverse engineered one of the BitKeeper protocols.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds sought out a replacement to house the Linux kernel code. After careful consideration, Torvalds realized none of the available options were efficient enough to meet his needs:

The linked article is an excellent introduction to Algo, which is effectively a set of Ansible scripts that set up a Wireguard and IPSEC VPN for you.

Algo automatically deploys an on-demand VPN service in the cloud that is not shared with other users, relies on only modern protocols and ciphers, and includes only the minimal software you need. And it’s free.

For anyone who is privacy conscious, travels for work frequently, or can’t afford a dedicated IT department, this one’s for you.

Algo’s list of features (and anti-features) is compelling and most VPN services are terrible. 👀

I’m logging this not because it’s super-useful in its current form (it is not). I’m logging this not because it’s a good example of a modern Swift app (it may be, I have no idea). Nope. I’m logging FeedCompass because it represents an idea that deserves more attention.

Independent websites, loosely stitched together via open protocols, are what make the web great.

Yeah, let’s do more of that.

We’ve been chronicling Daniel’s work on #curl for some time now. December 11, 2018 will be Daniel’s final official day at Mozilla. He assures us that his work on curl will continue, saying this in regards to his time dedicated to curl and where he works for his full-time income, “I don’t think my choice of future employer should have to affect that negatively too much, except of course in periods.”

Here are the main points from Daniel (but you should certainly dig into the details):

1. It’s been five great years, but now it is time for me to move on and try something else.
2. …lots of the HTTP/2 development and the publication of that was made while I was employed by Mozilla and I fondly participated in that.
3. …we’re also losing Mozilla as a primary sponsor of the curl project, since that was made up of them allowing me to spend some of my work days on curl and that’s now over.
4. I will continue to follow and work with HTTP and other internet protocols very closely.
5. The future is bright but unknown! “I don’t yet know what to do next.”

Jeremy Keith in an excerpt from his new book Going Offline on A List Apart:

The internet is a network of networks, all of them agreeing to use the same protocols to shuttle packets of data around. Those packets are transmitted down fiber-optic cables across the ocean floor, bounced around with Wi-Fi or radio signals, or beamed from satellites in freakin’ space.

As long as these networks are working, the web is working. But sometimes networks go bad…

When the network fails, the web fails. That’s just the way it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Until now.

I’m really excited to see Jeremy Keith write a whole book on service workers. I’ve dabbled a bit here and there, but now that support for them continues to grow, I’m excited to dive in.

Chris Dixon on Medium:

Early internet protocols were technical specifications created by working groups or non-profit organizations that relied on the alignment of interests in the internet community to gain adoption. This method worked well during the very early stages of the internet but since the early 1990s very few new protocols have gained widespread adoption.

Cryptonetworks fix these problems by providing economics incentives to developers, maintainers, and other network participants in the form of tokens. They are also much more technically robust. For example, they are able to keep state and do arbitrary transformations on that state, something past protocols could never do.

What Chris is advocating is the protocols of the past weren’t made for the internet of the future. The next era of the internet is being built with Web 3.

This episode wins the contest for the most protocols discussed. Matt Holt joined the show to to talk about TLS, Let’s Encrypt, the ACME protocol, CaddyServer, and a host of other important information security issues.

Since airing this show, Pieter passed away due to his battle with a metastasis of bile duct cancer in both lungs. But rather than listen to this show with sadness, listen with a happy heart and let’s celebrate Pieter’s life, and what he has accomplished. Thank you Pieter from the bottom of our hearts for your time on this show and for all that you are. You are loved by us my friend. This show will forever be a very special show for us.

Pieter Hintjens is the creator of ZeroMQ and The Collective Code Construction Contract (C4), a writer of many books and protocols, as well as a developer with decades of building software and communities – he’s someone who’s given so much, and continues to give - even up until the time he is planning for his death.

For many of you reading this, you might be playing catch up on the disappearance of Mark Pilgrim — like I was while writing this.

On October 4th, 2011 various websites of Mark’s (diveintomark.org, diveintohtml5.org, diveintoaccessibility.org, diveintogreasemonkey.org, diveintopython.org, etc.) started to return the HTTP status code, 410 Gone.

The 410 response is primarily intended to assist the task of web maintenance by notifying the recipient that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the server owners desire that remote links to that resource be removed. ~ 410 Gone

Mark also deleted his Twitter, Reddit, Google+ and GitHub accounts as well. But don’t worry, we are now more than 145 days past all of this so there’s no need to launch a manhunt — he’s OK. All that’s over now.

There is a lot more to this story, but I don’t desire to regurgitate that here when other sources have already good and covered it. However, before we move on from that subject — I did get a chuckle from this response from Mark to Jason Scott on Twitter.

Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring.

— Jason Scott (@textfiles) October 5, 2011

…and there you have it …

So where’s the code?

Since we know he’s OK, and that he obviously intended to pull a _why — I guess we can simply do our best to preserve his contributions to the web community.

Thanks to Kenneth Reitz, Paul Irish and Jonathan Neal, most of Mark’s public work has been preserved in the mirror of Mark Pilgrim’s GitHub — special thanks to Kenneth for switching github/diveintomark to an org so we can all contribute.

Sources and links

• github/diveintomark org on GitHub
• The disappearance of Mark Pilgrim
• diveintohtml5.info
• diveintohtml5.org resolves to a 410 (Gone) status.
• (Mark) - I’m a four-time published author. I write free books and people buy them. It works out surprisingly well.
• Ask HN: Anyone know where Mark Pilgrim went?
• Needs updated to redirect to diveintomark/diveintohtml5

Greplin, the personal search engine for your Cloud Data, released a new set of Python bindings for Google’s Protocol Buffer’s C++ Library.

What are protocol buffers?

Protocol Buffers are a typed “efficient yet extensible format” for serializing/transporting/interfacing with structured data. They are used internally at Google for everything from file formats to RPC protocols.

Google has released its internal Protocol Buffer C++ library, with wrappers for Java and Python. The Google bindings have been criticized for being a performance bottleneck for many people trying to adopt the new standard.

This new wrapper by Greplin is faster than the one Google provides. Much faster. 10-15x’s faster.

While fast-python-pb is fully usable, it’s not yet feature-complete. Currently, it only supports string, int32, int64, double, and sub message members.

It’s released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Pull requests are welcome!

[Source on GitHub] [Protocol Buffers Documentation]

Needing an uber efficient means of transporting and storing data, Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats.

Not satisfied with the current support for Protocol Buffers in Ruby, Sinatra creator Blake Mizerany has created Beefcake. Built to feel like Ruby, Beefcake also supports non-blocking tools like EventMachine.

To create a protocol format, just create a Ruby class that inherits from Beefcake::Message:

require 'beefcake'

class Point < Beefcake::Message
  required :x, :int32, 1
  required :y, :int32, 2
  optional :tag, :string, 3
end

point = Point.new :x => 1, :y => 2
# or
point = Point.new
point.x = 1
point.y = 2

Any Ruby type that respones to << can accept encoding:

s = ""
point.encode(s)
p [:s, s]
# or (because encode returns the string/stream)
p [:s, point.encode("")]
# or
open("point.dat") do |f|
  point.encode(f)
end

# decode
encoded = point.encode("")
decoded = Point.decode(encoded)
p [:point, decoded]

Blake is looking to add .proto file parsing, Enums, and wire types 1,3,5. Want to help out? Submit a patch.

[Source on GitHub]

Now that Felix Geisendörfer launched his node powered site http://transloadit.com, he’s tacked the much needed task of writing a high quality MySQL protocol implementation in pure JavaScript.

Using the high performance networking capabilities of node, and the awesome speed of V8, it’s now feasible to implement binary network protocols without resorting to writing C++ extensions and wrapping blocking APIs in thread pools.

Felix is a great programmer, but could use some help in the form of sponsorship and/or patches. We all win when high quality drivers are written and shared with the community.

Design Goals

• TDD: All code is written using test driven development, code coverage should approach 100%
• Simplicity: The MySQL protocol is easy, a good parser should reflect that
• Efficiency: Use fast algorithms, buffers and as little memory as possible.
• Portability: Should run anywhere node runs
• Completeness: The goal is to support the full MySQL API.
• Compatibility: MySql >= 4.1

Check out the code and more info on his git repo.

UPDATE: Hook.io has changed dramatically since last year and the new project is hosted here: http://github.com/hookio/

A soon to be released service/program by Marak Squires and Tim Smart.

From the README we get some explanation about what it does:

What is a web hook?

A web hook is a listener which triggers an action.

What is a web hook listener?

The listener is the event that gets triggered causing your web hook to be executed.

What is a web hook action?

The action of a web hook will be the events that are triggered when your web hook is executed. The actually events that occur are arbitrary (they can be anything)

What are hook.io’s web hook and action definitions?

Web hooks consist of an arbitrary listener and an arbitrary action. hook.io implements a hook dispatcher and an action dispatcher. these accepts custom hook and action definitions, validate configurations, and delegate events to where they belong.

Custom hook and action definitions might contain some of your business logic, but really they are meant only for routing purposes. If you need to define re-usable logic that can be spread across many definitions you will want to implement a hook.io protocol.

A hook.io “protocol” in it’s simplest form is a CommonJS module. you can create a hook.io protocol that does anything. check out our current protocols and node.js

What would you build a hook.io protocol for?

Really anything. If you wanted to integrate with Flickr, you would create the Flickr.js hook.io protocol. Now every single API method for Flickr can be called from a hook definition or an action definition.

[Source on GitHub]
[Marak Squires]
[Tim Smart]

Rasmus Holm takes a critical look at MCP, Stefan Judis shares a new term he learned from Scott Hanselman, Raf beautifully describes the curse of knowing how, Void is an open source Cursor alternative & React Jam is back for its 6th online game jam.

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Anthony Eden, Founder & CEO of DNSimple, joins the show to talk about the world of managed hosting for DNS and more.

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Google announces an open protocol for AI agent collaboration, Datastar is an Alpine.js / htmx love child, Matthias Endler documents things he finds common in the best programmers, turns out Linus Torvalds built Git in 10 days & Zev is a CLI that helps you remember (or discover) terminal commands using natural language.

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