Richard MacManus

This month Matt Welsh, a former professor of computer science at Harvard, spoke at a virtual meetup of the Chicago Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), explaining his thesis that ChatGPI and GitHub Copilot represent the beginning of the end of programming. Welsh thinks programming is on the cusp of changing from a job that humans … Read more

In a documentary two years ago about the JavaScript framework Vue.js, it was described as a kind of indie alternative in the JavaScript ecosystem, compared to the two leading frameworks — Facebook’s React and Google’s Angular. “It just feels less corporate […] more grassroots,” is how one of the talking heads described it. In comparison … Read more

The last time I wrote about Foursquare was over ten years ago, when it was just a location check-in app for consumers. At that point, July 2012, it was trying to take on Yelp in the consumer recommendations market. Several pivots later and Foursquare is now squarely an enterprise service. It markets itself as “the … Read more

TensorFlow.js is a JavaScript library for training and deploying Machine Learning (ML) models in the browser and on Node.js. It was launched by Google nearly five years ago, but its popularity has increased in recent years thanks to the practice of using ML in programming — part of the generative AI trend engulfing the technology industry … Read more

Netlify is acquiring one of its main competitors, the Jamstack framework and platform company Gatsby. I spoke to Netlify’s co-founder and CEO Matt Biilmann about the deal, why he was interested in the struggling Gatsby, and what it means for the future of Jamstack — the web development trend his own company pioneered and Gatsby … Read more

Anil Dash is someone I’ve known for a long time, to paraphrase Kara Swisher’s line at the beginning of almost all of her podcasts. I remember sitting down with him at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, in 2007, to get his advice on growing my tech blogging business, ReadWriteWeb. At the time, Dash … Read more

Robert Nishihara is the co-founder and CEO of Anyscale, the company behind the open source platform, Ray — the distributed machine learning framework being used by ChatGPT and other highly-scaled products, such as Uber. I spoke to Nishihara to find out how ordinary companies can take advantage of AI technology and how Ray fits into … Read more

Last January, there were over 18,000 monthly active developers in the Web3 ecosystem, according to the crypto VC firm Electric Capital. The firm has just released a follow-up report, which states there are 23,343 monthly developers as of December 2022. That number had gone over the 26,000 mark during June of 2022, but the “70%+ … Read more

According to Ion Stoica, co-founder of Databricks and Anyscale, and also a senior professor of computer science at Berkeley, 2023 will be the year of “distributed AI frameworks.” Needless to say, he has already had a hand in creating such a tool, in the form of Anyscale’s open source Ray platform. Among other uses, Ray … Read more

When Figma sold itself to Adobe last year, in one sense it was a triumph for web standards. Figma was built on WebGL, JavaScript and (latterly) WebAssembly. It was another sign of the continued strength of web technologies, which in many cases are now just as powerful as native apps. However, there are still several … Read more

Blaine Cook joined Odeo, Ev Williams’ startup, in 2005. Along with his fellow developer, Rabble (a.k.a. Evan Henshaw-Plath), Cook was one of the founding engineers of Twitter in 2006. That same year, Twitter was spun off into its own company, led by its original creator Jack Dorsey. But then, in April 2008, Cook — described … Read more

Last week I presented my top internet technologies of the year. This week I’m going to review the top stories of the year. Believe it or not, there isn’t a lot of overlap. A newsworthy story in the tech industry often isn’t about the best technology. It could be hype or controversy that makes it … Read more

Tipping points that change the course of internet technology are not rare, but they also don’t come around often. I think we’ve seen two massive tipping points in 2022: generative AI, which has leapt to the forefront of internet culture this year, and the beginnings of a movement away from centralized social media and onto … Read more