- DevtoolsFM Download
- Posts
- DevTools Download #5
Welcome to fifth 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!
Weekly Discoveries
Andrew Walsh created a chrome extension to automatically generate an OpenAPI specification as you browse a site.
answer.dev, an open source Q&A platform, was trending on GitHub this week. We always love seeing fully fleshed out open source services as they provide a great learning opportunity for folks trying to understand what it takes to build something similar.
Back in episode 54 we chatted with Charlie Marsh about Ruff, a rust based linter for python. The team just announced that Ruff now does formatting as well. Congrats to the Ruff team on their launch!
Bernard Kolobara is working on flawless.dev, a durable execution engine where workflows are written in rust and compiled to WASM for execution. We chatted with Shawn Wang back in episode 13 about Temporal which operates in a similar domain.
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 72: Dax Raad — SST
This week we chatted with Dax Raad about SST, an infrastructure as code (IaC) framework for simplifying application development on AWS. We discussed how given that Amazon prefers small, independent teams the AWS ecosystem as a whole can be highly fragmented and challenging to integrate. SST abstracts over AWS tooling like CDK and provides simpler, fully typed hooks to help manage infrastructure as well as making it easy to deploy web frameworks like Next.js, Svelte, or Astro.
We chatted in depth about why a product like SST may fit organizations better than a stand alone service like Vercel. One given reason is just consolidated billing. It’s common in larger organizations to have some services already deployed to AWS. Adding an extra layer of tooling to deploy a new Next.js site via SST to an existing AWS account may be cheaper overall and reduce the amount of bills for hosting an organization has to deal with. One interesting point Dax made here is that with a tool like SST you’re slowly introduced to AWS concepts and you learn the platform in a way that is applicable outside of just the usage of SST. With a platform like Vercel, they specifically abstract away that knowledge so that you only have to learn the Vercel platform, but the knowledge isn’t transferable outside of that domain.
Dax also goes into the novel method SST uses for local cloud deployments which we thought was extremely clever. Listen to the episode to find out how they accomplish that and more!
Thanks for reading, we’ll see you next week!