DevTools Download #4

Welcome to fourth 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. This one’s a bit late, but we’ll be back on schedule next week.

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!

Weekly Discoveries

• The Replicache team launched a service called Reflect which is a fully-managed real-time sync engine. The simplest way to explain the difference between them is that Replicache syncs changes across clients leaving you to use whatever backend you want for some light realtime functionality. Reflect is more of a complete package acting as a server for the sync’d data and providing explicit mechanisms for defining changes. It feels a bit closer to PartyKit (which you can learn more about in episode 49).

• Ruffle was on Hacker News last week. It’s a flash player emulator written in Rust. Being of the generation that come up playing flash games and exploring the weird/unique sites that cropped up in that era, we’re really excited to see this project develop.

• Mock Service Worker (MSW) just launched its v2.0 version. For those of you who haven’t used it, MSW lets you mock a server implementation in a service worker for quick API mocking on the client. It’s an incredibly useful tool that Justin uses at Oxide.

• Ominvore was trending on GitHub last week. It’s an open source, read-it-later app that’s fairly full featured! We always enjoy highlighting high quality open source apps and this one is definitely worth checking out.

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 71: Vlad A. Ionescu — Earthly

This week we chat with Vlad about Earthly, a framework that gives highly repeatable containerized builds that works both locally and across different CI providers. Essentially you use Earthly to do all the actual steps of your CI process and then you just use your CI service to run Earthly (or to spin of an Earthly cloud instance). One of the main benefits is being able to easily run the same tasks as CI does, locally. Various CI services allow you to do this, but it’s fairly service specific and often comes with their own caveats. Another benefit is that there’s a lot of infrastructure around Earthly to provide optimized caching across builds for faster execution.

Outside of talking about Earthly, it was also insightful to hear of Vlad’s startup experience and how he applied what he learned at previous startups to Earthly. Originally Earthly was positioned to be a standalone CI/CD service but when they weren’t seeing traction they pivoted into the reusable tooling space with incremental value add services that could be use across cloud providers. Vlad credited how fast they were able to pivot to lessons learned in previous startups where he continued to try to make an original idea work even though it wasn’t generating customer traction.

Don’t miss this week’s episode!

https://devtools.fm/episodes/71