Pretty much any developer or engineer uses professional tools at work: code editors, graphic designers, word processors, and so on. But designing UIs for these kinds of tools is quite a different beast from the UI design involved with software and applications intended for “everyday” audiences.

In this article, we undertake a high-level analysis on some of those differences, and examine some do’s and don’t’s for designing developer tool interfaces.

Weights & Biases is coming up with some awesome developer tools for AI practitioners! In this episode, Lukas Biewald describes how these tools were a direct result of pain points that he uncovered while working as an AI intern at OpenAI. He also shares his vision for the future of machine learning tooling and where he would like to see people level up tool-wise.

The W3C is standardizing the Server-Timing API, which means it’ll be getting easier and easier to push server-side metrics in to our dev tools.

Ole Michaelis takes us through plugging (pun intended) it all together with Phoenix. It’s almost too easy!

In an attempt to raise developer awareness of web security matters (TLS, CSP, XSS, etc.), Craig Francis proposes that browsers should add a "security" tab to their developer tools.

First, he made an interactive demo of how the tab might work. Here's a sneak peek:

Then, he opened tickets for:

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari
• Internet Explorer

You may be wondering why this isn't just a plugin/extension. Craig addresses that:

it probably won't work so well as a 3rd party extension, as the point is to raise awareness of the features

Indeed, anybody who seeks out and installs a security-related extension is probably well aware of the issues. I think this is a good idea that could be effective if the browser vendors adopt it. It'd even be useful for us already-security-aware developers to have all the information we need in one handy tab.

What is Craig asking from the community?

Ideas and suggestions welcome... but if you can also tell your favourite browser that you want this, then hopefully it might get implemented

You may have heard that the Smithsonian recently released millions of images in to the public domain. Well, it turns out they also have an open access API and a GitHub repo with over 11 million metadata records in JSON format. I’m sure some cool uses and mashups could make use of this data and images.

This is your one-stop resource for developer tools, with a wrap up of what was hot in 2018 and what to be on the lookout for in 2019. We’ve analyzed over one million data points to bring you these rankings 😱

We’re honored to be included in both the Best Podcasts and Best Newsletters sections. 🥳

Nick is joined by Josh Goldberg & Dimitri Mitropoulos to discuss SquiggleConf, a new conference focused on web dev tooling. We explore the motivations behind creating a conference dedicated to developer tools, the challenges of organizing both conferences and local meetups, and strategies for building engaged tech communities.

We also discuss the importance of developer tooling, the pandemic’s impact on tech events, and share insights on encouraging new speakers and creating inclusive environments & more!

Tim Fisken explains the problem with soft deletion, a simple measure of software dependency freshness is proposed, a deep-dive on sound design in software, a web app with over 80 handy developer tools built in & Luke Plant reminds us that programming mantras are proverbs, not laws.

The title of this post is “Why I Love Go”, I saw it shared by Rob Pike (one of the founding team for Go). In the post David Yach talks about how productive interns can be with Go, writing substantial prototypes in a short period of time. That’s one of the reasons I like to use it for OSS container/networking projects and developer tools too.

Let’s say you’re on the go and you land on a particularly impressive website. You’d love to peak underneath the covers, but getting at the developer tools on a phone is a pain.

Instead: bookmark this site, copy/paste the URL, and voilá! 💁‍♀️

Julia Evans lays out her process for taking API responses in her browser’s dev tools and using them in her own programs/scripts:

1. look in developer tools for a promising JSON response
2. copy as cURL
3. remove irrelevant headers
4. translate it into Python

Some of you might be wondering – can you always do this?

The answer is sort of yes – browsers aren’t magic! All the information browsers send to your backend is just HTTP requests. So if I copy all of the HTTP headers that my browser is sending, I think there’s literally no way for the backend to tell that the request isn’t sent by my browser and is actually being sent by a random Python program.

Jean Yang:

Should you move to serverless? Is GraphQL the answer to your API woes? Should you follow the latest DevOps playbook to increase your system reliability? In the world of tech tools, there’s a lot of buzz. But it doesn’t always reflect the daily reality of programmers.

As the founder of a developer tools startup, I’ve talked with hundreds, if not thousands, of software developers over the last few years in the course of routine user research. The common theme in these conversations, even bigger than the need for the product we were building, was an overarching need that is currently underserved: building for real developers, or what I like to call the 99% Developers.

Good stuff to be reminded of. That reminds me: You are not Google/Amazon/LinkedIn.

We have a BIG show for you today. We’re talking about the future of the Mac. Coming off of Apple’s “One more thing.” event to launch the Apple M1 chip and M1 powered Macs, we have a two part show giving you the perspective of Apple as well as a Mac app developer on the future of the Mac.

Part 1 features Tim Triemstra from Apple. Tim is the Product Marketing Manager for Developer Technologies. He’s been at Apple for 15 years and the team he manages is responsible for developer tools and technologies including Xcode, Swift Playgrounds, the Swift language, and UNIX tools.

Part 2 features Ken Case from The Omni Group. Ken is the Founder and CEO of The Omni Group and they’re well known for their Omni Productivity Suite including OmniFocus, OmniPlan, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner – all of which are developed for iOS & Mac.

YC touches so many companies that it is in effect an index on the entire early stage venture capital industry, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average for public stocks.

Lots to ponder in this post. Developer tools, AI, education, and health care are all trending right now in YC investment while hardware and fintech sectors are slowing.

KBall and Suz interview Ashi Krishnan, visual poet and senior software engineer at GitHub. Topics include how Ashi got into programming, her upcoming talk at React Amsterdam, code bootcamps, and developer tools.

From installing Mac’s command line developer tools (Xcode), Homebrew, Git, npm, to your code editor — Michael Uloth walks you through all the steps and details to get a new Mac ready for web development.

This guide is a good start and purposely leaves out items that aren’t strictly required for web development. If you’re into automation and tweaking things, then thoughtbot/laptop is another route to consider. It automates most of Michael’s steps and can also be customized to install only exactly what you want.

If you haven’t yet, you should watch this. It’s 8 minutes long and packed with insights from Sataya himself on why Microsoft bought GitHub.

We are all in on open source and that’s what really brings us together with GitHub — and we’re going to operate as an open platform for any language, any framework, whether it’s the cloud or on the client.

Nat Friedman, who’s going to be the CEO of GitHub post close, came to Microsoft from Xamarin — he’s someone who’s a veteran of open source and he’s going to lead the company.

We’re going to operate GitHub as an open platform, and most developers are going to judge us by our recent actions and our actions going forward — and we will have to earn the trust everyday. We’re very committed to it.

At the core, Microsoft is a developer tools company. This is something that comes very natural to us. Earning the trust of our customers by our actions everyday is what we live by.

The most important thing is that it’s not just about Azure. We welcome every cloud provider to integrate with GitHub in order to be able to reach the GitHub community — and give GitHub members a choice of any cloud, as well as any client, mobile platform, or IoT platform.

This is a spectacular project by Diana Smith:

Rules I have for myself:

1. All elements must be typed out by hand
2. Only Atom text editor and Chrome Developer Tools allowed.
3. SVG use is limited, and all shapes can only use hand-plotted coordinates and bezier curves - without the aid of any graphics editor.

The results are stunning, to say the least. I won’t embed the image here, because it won’t do it justice. You have to click through and see it for yourself.

Dmitri Shuralyov joined the show to talk about being a full time contributor to open source, developing developer tools, and other interesting Go projects and news.

How can we open-source consumer products? Why should we?

In this essay I want to define what open products are, explain why I think they’re important, and suggest what’s needed in order to make more of them.

I define an open product as “a technology product that happens to be open-source.” The best example is Reddit.com: a major web property, and oh yeah by the way here’s almost all of its source code. Whoa!

Open products like Reddit.com are pretty clearly distinguished from closed products like Google.com or Facebook.com, but they also stand in contrast to open-source projects. An open-source project is designed for me to download and install on my own servers. Sure, a few people run their own instance of Reddit, but that’s not its driving use case.

It’s a fuzzy boundary, the line between open-source projects and open products. To firm it up, we’d look at the number of installations of a given project, and the audience size for each installation. Drupal is an open-source project and not an open product, because there are many, many instances of it. WordPress is fuzzier: how much WordPress traffic is handled by WordPress.com? I don’t know. We can also look at intentions. I’m not sure how many instances of rstat.us there are, but I do know that project leaders want it to be federated, not centralized. Same with Diaspora. I think of an open product as a commons, a single central instance shared by all. Email is federated. Gmail is a product.

Open products are also distinguished from open platforms. I think of operating systems and web browsers as platforms, and apps on those platforms as products. So Firefox (src) is an open platform, as are Ubuntu (src), Fedora, Android (src), etc. (Chrome doesn’t count because it’s closed; Chromium would count if people used it directly.) We’ve got great open platforms for the same reason we’ve got great open-source projects: they’re built by developers for developers.

Not surprisingly, a number of existing open products are web apps used by developers. Prime examples these days would be Travis CI (src), Sentry (src), and ReadTheDocs (src), along with venerable old SourceForge (a.k.a. Allura). There are also examples of developer-focused companies with partially-open products, such as Balanced Payments (src) and Bountysource (src).

The open products I’m most interested in, however, are top-level, consumer-facing web and mobile products that stand on their own as consumer products first, and—almost as an afterthought—happen to be almost fully open-source to boot. We know that openness is the best model for building developer tools and platforms. That’s old news. The question today is, how much else can we bring under the banner of openness? Besides Reddit, the two best examples of consumer-facing open products I’ve found are NewsBlur (src) and Trovebox (src). My own entry is Gittip (src). If we include older desktop apps, then we’ve also got things like Audacity (src), GIMP (src), and VLC (src).

Open products respect the hacker ethic, without forcing it on others.

For me, openness is not an absolute good, not an end in itself. Rather, it helps maximize personal freedom and autonomy amidst ginormous social systems. I value the luxuries of modern society, and I value the freedom to explore and tinker with society as I see fit, to feel like I’m helping run it, and not being run over by it. I doubt that more than a few percent of Reddit users know or would care that it is open-source, but to me that’s the beauty of it: this deeply respects the hacker ethic, without ideologically forcing it on others.

Open Product Business Models

The truth is that open-source consumer software sucks compared to proprietary competitors: GIMP vs. Photoshop. Audacity vs. Pro Tools. Trovebox vs. Instagram. Why? Money. Free software altruism isn’t enough to fully offset economic necessity, therefore the best of our collective energy goes into
proprietary software, since that’s where the money is right now. How do we start to shift this?

Whereas open-source projects get funded as a side-effect of other business models, an open product needs its own business model. As with proprietary software, the two basic options are:

• advertising--selling users' attention to others

• fees--requiring money from users

How to fund open products parallels the conversation about funding digital content, where creators like Amanda Palmer, Hank Green and even The Changelog are pointing to a third way: asking users for money. Companies like Kickstarter, Flattr, CentUp, and Patreon, as well as my own company, Gittip, are building platforms to enable new business models to emerge based on what we might call "soft fees"—something between paywalls and traditional charitable donations:

• soft fees--asking users for money

Open products use a mix of these models. SourceForge sells ads. Reddit sells ads and subscriptions. Travis sells ads and asks for money. Sentry sells subscriptions, along with Newsblur and Trovebox. Gittip charges fees and asks for money. ReadTheDocs asks for money, as do Audacity, GIMP, and VLC.

My hunch is that soft fees are the best fit for open products, but it remains to be seen whether soft-fee models can scale as well as the advertising models of Google and Facebook, or the hard-fee models of Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe. One potential approach is Jeff Lindsay’s “autosustainable
services,” where the product makes more or less urgent requests for money based on real-time operating costs:

The above screenshot is a mockup of autosustainable services, from a talk by Jeff Lindsay (@progrium).

The challenge that soft-fee business models face is cultural: we’re not used to asking each other for money–and, conversely, we’re not used to giving our money away–except as “charity.” We’re accustomed to thinking of charities as optional extras in an economy where the real work gets done in hard-fee and advertising-based businesses. I prefer “soft fee” to “donation,” because I want to stake out a new territory where giving money is more normal. This isn’t charity. This is a new kind of business.

How money flows into a company building open products is one challenge. How it flows out is another. The bulk of most budgets is people, and when a product is closed it’s easy to route the money it brings in to the people who built it. They’re the company’s owners, employees, contractors and suppliers. What happens when half the labor that goes into a product comes from a loose community of so-called volunteers? Surely they should get their share of the money. They have to, if we’re going to make it economically rational to work on open products. As with soft fees, I think we need a redefinition, because “volunteer,” like “donation,” carries a stigma: volunteers are nice, but they don’t do real work. Perhaps we can say “open workers,” or just “contributors”? More important than a shift in terminology is a shift in practice. We need innovation in how we structure our companies to account for open workers as well as employees. (With Gittip, for example, we’re experimenting with bringing contributors on as independent contractors, and then voting on how money is split.)

Open products and companies need to compete with closed products and companies for both customers and talent. If we can find business models for open products that equal and exceed the productivity of current closed models, then we can quietly spread the hacker ethic and make our society more open and humane.

Share your comments on Hacker News

Thanks to The Changelog for the invitation to write this essay, and to those that responded to my request for examples of open products.

This project by Hakim El Hattab is just sick. stroll.js is a collection of CSS list scroll effects. Oh, and of course, pull requests are welcome.

Besides the awesome work from Hakim, a few contributors helped make stroll.js possible as well:

• Paul Irish and Felix Gnass added performance improvements
• Kilian Ciuffolo added the Fly & Fly Reverse effects
• Dave Arel added the Fade effect
• Erick Daniszewski added the Twirl Effect

Also, if you haven’t heard Paul Irish, Boris Smus and Eric Bidelman kicked off the first episode of HTML5Rocks Live - which features stroll.js to show off some of the latest features in Chrome developer tools. The first 20 minutes Paul talks about a brand new feature: the DevTools’ vertical timeline!

Source on GitHub - Demo

Web developers have long enjoyed the “Inspect Element” features of Firebug and WebKit developer tools to poke around inside their pages at runtime. Patrick Richards, a mobile developer from down under, has created DCIntrospect, a library of visual debugging tools for iOS.

Once added to your project, DCIntrospect listens for shortcut keys to toggle view outlines, nudge views on screen, toggle view visibility, print view properties to the console, and more.

To use, be sure you’ve set the DEBUG environment variable. It’s also a good idea to target the simulator explicitly, even though DCIntrospect will work on the device as well.

[window makeKeyAndDisplay]

// always call after makeKeyAndDisplay.
#if TARGET_IPHONE_SIMULATOR
    [[DCIntrospect sharedIntrospector] start];
#endif

Check out the source on GitHub for a full list of keybindings and instructions on how to customize.

We’re on location at Microsoft Build 2025 with Amanda Silver, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division. Amanda leads product, design, user research, and engineering systems for some of the tools you use every day. We discuss the latest AI announcements from Microsoft at Build 2025, how AI is reshaping development tools, what’s next for VS Code, TypeScript, GitHub’s evolution, and even emerging editors like Windsurf that are forking the VS Code ecosystem.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

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.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Kaizen 19 has arrived! Gerhard has been laser-focused on making Jerod’s pipe dream a reality by putting all of his efforts into Pipely. Has it been a big waste of time or has this epic side quest morphed into a main quest?!

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

For the past year, David Crawshaw has intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming, in order to learn about them. He now regularly use LLMs while working and considers their benefits a net-positive on his productivity. David wrote down his experience, which we found both practical and insightful. Hopefully you will too!

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Techno Tim joins Adam to catch up on the state of Homelab for 2025, the state of AI at home and on-prem (AI Homelab) and where that’s heading, building a creator PC, choosing the parts for your build, GPU availability, Windows being user hostile, and why Tim is happy to be using Windows, Mac AND Linux.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Phillip Carter, Principal PM at Honeycomb, joins Justin & Autumn to discuss his work at Microsoft & Honeycomb, building AI infrastructure & more.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

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.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Nick Nisi joins Adam and Jerod to talk about Karaoke, ARC and the business model of web browsers, this WordPress drama, and an epic bonus for Changelog ++ subscribers.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇