Richard MacManus

It’s early days for decentralized social networks, despite the recent bump in Mastodon users due to Elon Musk buying Twitter. But if you’re a developer looking for the next big thing, what better time to experiment with a platform? The “fediverse” — a group of federated websites and applications that interconnect with each other — … Read more

The Reactathon conference was held outdoors in San Francisco this week. One of the highlights was a quick-fire presentation by Shawn Swyx Wang, continuing his thesis that we’re in the third age of JavaScript. He began blogging about this in 2020, the year he pinpoints as the start of “the third age.” This year, the … Read more

If the metaverse is to become a reality, there will need to be development and content creation tools for it. There will also need to be a standard definition for “the metaverse” (currently an amorphous term that refers to a 3D internet) and, following that, a set of open standards that developers and platform companies … Read more

One story has dominated the headlines this week: Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. But what does it mean from a developer point of view? The Twitter development team put up a blog post this week claiming that its mission “to build an open developer platform that serves the public conversation” has not changed after the … Read more

After the news broke that Elon Musk’s offer to acquire Twitter had been accepted, many Twitter users began to reignite their old Mastodon, Tumblr and other social media accounts. There was also talk amongst the Twitterati about resurrecting their blogs and putting their faith back into RSS (Really Simple Syndication). But for those of you … Read more

In the latest This Week in Development, I wrote about a new web comic called “Contra Chrome,” a Creative Commons remix of a comic Google published when it launched the Chrome web browser in 2008. The author of “Contra Chrome,” Leah Elliott, describes herself as a “digital-rights activist” and in her comic she takes aim at … Read more

Infura is a blockchain development platform that is part of a suite of products owned by Consensys, a leading tool provider in the Web3 ecosystem. To use cloud computing terminology, Infura can be thought of as “blockchain-as-a-service,” because it abstracts away the difficulties of dealing with a blockchain network. By using Infura, or a competing … Read more

For those of us old enough to remember Web 2.0 in its heyday, one of the classic “texts” of that era was the Chrome comic book, which was released in September 2008 at the same time the first version of the Chrome browser was launched. As a tech blogger at the time, I was lucky … Read more

RapidAPI, an API management company that became a Silicon Valley unicorn (worth over $1 billion) after its most recent venture capital round last month, has announced “a major multiyear partnership” with Formula 1 team Scuderia AlphaTauri. RapidAPI says the partnership will enable Scuderia AlphaTauri, whose current drivers are Pierre Gasly and Yuki Tsunoda, “to centralize … Read more

In my previous column about NFTs (non-fungible tokens), I discussed the current leading standard for this technology: ERC-721. That’s the one most digital collectibles use — everything from CryptoKitties to the Bored Ape Yacht Club. But I also mentioned an emerging standard, ERC-1155, which has become the go-to standard for NFTs within blockchain games. To … Read more

Composability has become a new buzzword in the Web3 world. “An application is composable if it can be used as a building block for another application,” wrote a Web3 infrastructure company called Syndica. In another definition, a16z VC Chris Dixon defined composability as “the ability to mix and match software components like lego bricks.” If … Read more

The API management industry is undergoing another transformation, with GraphQL increasingly seen as an emerging industry standard — not only for traditional Web 2.0 businesses, like Shopify, but also for new Web3 protocols like The Graph. While REST (Representational State Transfer) is still by far the leading format for offering APIs, some in the industry … Read more

NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) have taken the internet world by storm over the past year or two. When we think of NFTs today, we mostly think of the digital cartoons that have saturated our social media screens — apes, punks and everything in-between. There have also been massive NFT art sales, epitomized by this era’s answer … Read more

One of the forgotten technologies of this era of the internet is RSS (Really Simple Syndication), an open syndication protocol that helped define the Web 2.0 era. From the early 2000s, RSS enabled anyone to publish their thoughts to the web, via blogging, and made it relatively easy for people to subscribe to those thoughts, … Read more

One of the stumbling blocks of developing a decentralized application (dApp) is the complexity of querying and using data from a blockchain and other “off-chain” solutions. With dApps, and particularly those running on the Ethereum blockchain, not all of the data is stored on the blockchain. There are often decentralized storage networks involved, like the … Read more