DevTools Download #2

Welcome to second edition of the DevTools.fm Download, a weekly newsletter by the hosts of Devtools.fm. In this newsletter we share interesting tidbits we've discovered over the week as well as an overview of this week's episode.

Sponsor

We'd like to thank Raycast for sponsoring this week's episode. If you haven't checked out Raycast it's a super powered mac spotlight replacement with a lot of bundled utilities like window management, clipboard history, scheduling, and more! They've got an excellent react based API where you can write your own extensions and a store to share them.

Raycast also has a Pro plan where you can leverage AI to get summaries, translations, and more!

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Weekly Discoveries

• Evan You announced that the vite team is working on a tool called Rolldown which is a rust replacement of rollup. It’s another instance in a long list of tooling that’s moving to a native language.

• The topic of CRDTs has come up a lot on the podcast and last week Jake Lazaroff wrote an excellent interactive introduction to CRDTs. It’s really good. Reminds us a bit of Bartosz Ciechanowski’s interactive articles.

• Speaking of CRDTs, Justin shared DXOS as a tooltip back in episode 64 and Jess Martin gave a demo of what they’re working on. If you’re interested in the local first space this tool is absolutely worth keeping your eye on.

• There were a spate of announcements around AI wearables last week. Axios wrote a timely piece covering some of the players in the market like Humane’s AI Pin, Rewind’s Pendant, and Tab from Avi Schiffmann et al. While not directly part of the developer tooling space, it’s an interesting development that could foreseeably be part of the future of how we work.

• Keeping on the AI topic, a plugin called Cannoli was released for Obsidian which lets you run LLM scripts direction in Obsidian’s canvas files. We’re huge fans of Obsidian and visual workflows in general so this is a fun plugin to explore.

• On the note of nice visual tools, we stumbled upon Fastgen which also looks like a real gem. It’s a beautiful low-code, backend-as-a-service platform that bills itself as a webflow for the backend. Their demo is worth the watch.

That's all the highlights for this week! If you'd like us to include something for next week feel free to drop us a line at [email protected].

Episode 69: Aiden Bai — Million.js

In a nut shell Million.js is an ambitious project that sets out to make React’s virtual dom implementation more efficient by patching it with a block virtual dom. As you can imagine, swapping out a core part of react by adding another library is no simple task and certainly comes with its own tradeoffs. We have to give massive props to Aiden for pulling this off while still in high school.

We had a lot of fun chatting with Aiden about his path to learning how to program, how he got into open source, the trials of a open source side project becoming successful, and the inspiration and implementation of million.

You can listen to the episode here or find it via any of the popular podcasting services. Let us know what you think!