DevTools Download #7

Welcome to the seventh 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

• A post by Xe Iaso on Cursorless, a tool to aid programming by voice, showed up on hacker news this week. Cursorless is a VSCode extension that adds marks above characters in code and allows using special terms to target those words or symbols for navigation or editing. Pokey Rule, the creator of cursorless, also gave a talk at strangeloop which is worth checking out.

• Nick Keller created react-datasheet-grid which is an airtable/excel like spreadsheet component for React. If you need a spreadsheet like experience in your app it may be worth checking out!

• Geoffrey Litt who works with Ink and Switch shared a collaborative markdown editor using automerge. Real time collaboration has been a big topic on the podcast and it’s amazing to see how much easier it is to build collaborative tooling with CRDTs these days. Of course, we don’t mean it’s easy, just easier than it has been in the past.

• The builder.io team worked with the Astro team to build out Qwik integration with Astro. Jack Shelton wrote a compelling blog post talking about the benefits of using Qwik with Astro. Qwik’s resumability means that you don’t have to denote Qwik components with special hydration behavior like you would a React/Vue/Svelte component. If you’re interested in trying the integration yourself it’s @quickdev/astro. You can also checkout episode 28 to hear more about Qwik and episode 14 to learn more about Astro.

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 74: Isaac Schlueter — NPM and Tier

In this week’s episode we spoke with Isaac Schlueter, best known as the founder of NPM. This episode was particularly special for Andrew and I given how influential Node (and by extension NPM) has been on our careers. It was fascinating chatting w/ Isaac about the early days of node. One point that resonated was how seemingly simple decisions in the early days can have profound impacts later in an ecosystems development. Isaac mentioned how NPM was a basic CRUD app in the beginning and how basic functionality like deleting a package grew to be famously impactful.

As with last week’s episode on Unkey (API keys as a service), we continue to see themes that there’s value in spinning out a business focusing specifically on a pain point that’s deceptively challenging. Isaac helped co-found a company called Tier which is focused on a service to manage pricing. Isaac goes on to describe how complicated pricing infrastructure ends up being as it grows organically in an organization. Instead of built as a first class feature of a product, it tends to be bolted on, tightly coupled to auth systems and implicitly baked into a system in a way that makes it deceptively hard to change. With Tier, the sought to provide an opinionated product built around a pricing strategy that can evolve with both your tech and your business. They even wrote a must-read manifesto called The 5 Pillars of PriceOps which lays out principles of pricing in a similar style to the 12 Factor App.

This episode was entertaining and educational and certainly not one to miss. Give it a listen, let us know what you think, and as always, thanks for listening.

https://devtools.fm/episodes/74

PS: we’ve opened up our discord so if you want to chat with us please drop by!