DevTools Download #9

Welcome to 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.

It’s been a little while since our last edition due to some holiday travel, so this edition will be a slightly different format where we just review the last three episodes.

Sponsor

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Raycast also has a Pro plan where you can leverage AI to get summaries, translations, and more!

Episode 76: Matteo Collina — Platformatic

Published on 11/26/2023

In this episode we chat w/ Matteo Collina about this open source background, his contributes to Node.js, and his work on his startup Platformatic. Matteo created fastify, pino, mercurius, avvio, and fast-json-stringify (among others). He’s on the Node.js TSC (technical steering committee) and the board of the OpenJS Foundation.

Two topics that stood out to me as notable was our conversation around open source maintainer burnout (which is a common theme in our conversations with folks who do any significant amount of OSS work) and the challenge of CJS and ESM conversion in the Node.js ecosystem. Matteo has a very unique perspective on both. It was also incredibly interesting to hear more about fastify (an express.js replacement) and how Matteo is building his company Platformic around it.

https://devtools.fm/episodes/76

Episode 77: Yagiz Nizipli — Node.js Performance

Published on 12/3/2023

In this episode we chat with Yagiz Nizipli, another member of Node’s TSC, who focuses heavily on runtime performance. One of Yagiz’s first large contributions to Node was optimizing the performance of its URL parser. Something interesting we learned in talking about this is that node core supports WASM modules (though from our understanding none of node core as of this recording was written using WASM). Yagiz’s first pass at writing the URL parser was in WASM but he realized that the overhead of WASM made it less competitive than just writing it plain (but highly optimized) JavaScript.

Other interesting topics we covered were the challenges of writing accurate benchmarks for performance, the impact of new runtimes on Node and it’s story around performance, and what it’s like as a contributor to node.

https://devtools.fm/episodes/77

Episode 78: Jess Martin — DXOS

Published 12/10/2023

In this week’s episode we talk to Jess Martin about DXOS, a peer-to-peer, local-first framework for building interoperable apps and his path as an engineer. Jess has an interesting story where in the first half of his career he was focused on building software products with the capabilities that were available at the time and his current focus is discovering or introducing new capabilities that people can use to build even better software products. That focus on expanding the horizon of computing capability is what brought him to DXOS where they’re building a platform where users can own their own data but with modern functionality we’re coming to expect like local-first (can work offline, syncs when it comes online) and real time collaboration. What’s really compelling is that DXOS provides all this rich functionality but in a way that’s non-obtrusive to the developer so it feels simpler while providing rich capabilities. This episode is definitely one to catch as both the tech behind DXOS is fascinating and because Jess is such a fantastic speaker and story teller.

https://devtools.fm/episodes/78