DevTools Download #6

UnKey with James Perkins

AuthorAuthor

Andrew Lisowski & Justin Bennett
November 06, 2023

Welcome to the sixth 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.

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Weekly Discoveries

  • In the last few weeks we’ve shared some larger open source projects as we think they’re a good learning resource. Another product in that vein that we stumbled on last week is Grist, an open source spreadsheet engine. It’s conceptually similar to Airtable (see their comparison).

  • Honojs has been popping up a lot on our feeds lately. It’s an express like server implementation that runs across JavaScript runtimes meaning you can run it with Node, Bun, Deno, and on cloudflare workers. It’s a great tool that’s seen a lot of improvements recently and we recommend you check it out.

  • We love software tools of all kinds but we especially have a soft spot for open source game engines. Bevy, an open source rust based game engine we’ve tooltip’d in the past, released 0.12 last week with some new rendering optimizations and QoL improvements. Worth checking out if you’re considering making a game.

We’re a little light on discoveries this week but if you have recommendations for next week feel free to drop us a line at [email protected].

Episode 73: James Perkins — Unkey

This week we talked with James Perkins about Unkey, an API authentication service. Unkey follows a trend we’ve been covering of undifferentiated but necessary product functionality that can be surprisingly harder to get right than it seems on the surface.

Unkey essentially manages API keys, providing low latency edge based rate limiting, temporary api keys, finite keys, and usage analytics. The low latency authentication is really a key value add here.

We also chatted with James about his time at Clerk and some thoughts on the future direction of Unkey. As always, thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy!