DevTools.fm Download #8

Welcome to eighth 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.

To all of you who are traveling this week we hope you have safe travels. It’s a great time to catch up on our latest episode while your on the plane or in the car!

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

• Our friends over at TLDraw had a crazy week after they demoed makereal, an experiment to integrate OpenAI’s visual integration into a TLDraw canvas. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a way to automatically generate UI by drawing a quick mock on a TLDraw canvas and having OpenAI generate out an html/js/tailwind block that’s interactive on the page.

• The Val.town team have open sourced the extensions they use to provide auto complete, linting, and hover details in Code mirror. If you want a starting point for a light weight typescript based editing experience in the browser you should definitely check out their work.

• Michael Aufreiter published an experiment implementing a block editor with Svelte 5 runes. The code is posted here if you want to jump straight to the details. It’s an incredibly clean implementation and makes us excited for Svelte 5 to land.

• Given all the commotion in the AI space over the weekend, you might be interested in modelfusion, a vendor-neutral typescript library for integrating with AI services for chatbots, agents, etc. It’s a feature rich library providing everything from text generation to text-to-speech, abstracted across AI provider platforms and with solid types provided. Definitely worth checking out if you’re suddenly exploring what other platforms are out there to be leveraged.

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 75: Braden Sidoti — Clerk.dev

This week’s episode is with Braden Sidoti, the CTO and co-founder of Clerk. If you haven’t heard of Clerk, it’s a rising star in the authentication space that provides embeddable auth flow UI components (think Stripe Checkout) as well as user management features. It follows a similar theme of our last few episodes of a company providing core application functionality that’s more complex than it seems on the surface.

We chatted about why Clerk covers user management holistically instead of just authentication, how they think about scaling and security, and the challenges of pricing a core functionality SaaS.

It was an engaging topic on an excellent service and we hope you enjoy!

https://devtools.fm/episodes/75