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- DevTools Download #3
Welcome to the third 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!
Also a special shout out to our Patreon subscribers for your continued support. Y’all are the best <3.
Weekly Discoveries
A tool called pkgx was trending on GitHub last week. It’s from Max Howell (the creator of homebrew) and bills itself as a standalone binary that can run anything. We see it as an alternative to something like asdf in that it can help manage executables and environments for different language tooling (though there’s more to it than that). So if you need a tool to help manage versions for node, deno, rust, etc this might be a good one to check out.
Cloudflare announced a service called Sippy last week which helps incrementally migrate from AWS’ S3 to Cloudflare’s R2 bucket storage. R2 has a leg up over S3 in that it doesn’t charge egress fees so it’s a potentially cheaper alternative for storing assets that need to be accessed publicly. Sippy works by allowing you to define a connection between an R2 and S3 bucket. When a request comes into the R2 bucket and the file isn’t there it’ll download it from S3 and copied over to R2 while being sent to the client. It’s a clever strategy on their front and a useful tool for those looking to reduce cloud storage costs without having to do a major migration.
cal.com launched an AI service that you can use to schedule meetings, rearrange your calendar, and more. Our favorite example is just forwarding an email of someone requesting a time to meet and having the service automatically add it to your calendar. We’re continuing to see AI being added as an augmentation layer to existing products and cal’s usage feels like one of the stronger implementations of that strategy.
We’re big fans of Linear and last week they launched a triage feature. When issues are created in a tracker by folks outside the engineering team someone needs to be responsible for figuring out if it’s created in the right place, has the correct priority, etc. Linear has made this an explicit role which goes a long way in helping teams stay on top of inbound work. It’s maybe a small thing but with every release it’s harder for us to imagine wanting to use any other tool for issue tracking.
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 70: Emanuele Stoppa - Biome
This week we chatted with Emanuele about Biome which is an open source fork of the Rome project. For those of you who haven’t heard of Rome it was an ambitious project to bring all the common web tooling like linting, bundling, formatting, etc under one toolchain. It was started by Sebastian, the original creator of Babel, who later created a company around Rome, raised some VC, and hired folks to further the project. For reasons that aren’t public, the company was shuttered and the team was let go. Emanuele and some of the former contributors to Rome then forked off Biome as a continuation of the project.
In this episode we talk in more detail about why Rome/Biome exists, thoughts on the future of plugins, what it takes to build an ecosystem around this kind of tooling, and more. Check it out and let us know what you think!