Richard MacManus

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) became a trending social media term last week, for all the wrong reasons. When the right-wing microblogging app, Parler, was pulled from the Google and Apple app stores, its users immediately began to search for a browser-based version. Some of them searched specifically for a PWA version, which led to this … Read more

Adobe Flash, the once hugely popular multimedia software platform, was discontinued at the end of 2020 — to a mostly positive reaction across social media and the developer ecosystem. Even though many of us look back fondly at the visual creativity unleashed by Flash in the 1990s, it was clear from the early 2000s that … Read more

As we kick-start 2021 in application and web development, two trends seem destined to continue their rapid growth: serverless and JavaScript development. The outlook for Jamstack, the third trend I covered in last week’s year-in-review post, is less clear — but it too will likely gather momentum. The key driver in internet development now is … Read more

In the kingdom of Cloud Native, the reign of Kubernetes continued throughout 2020. But while there was no challenger to the throne — and the King was sometimes proclaimed to be “boring” — there were some interesting developments further up the royal stack. Serverless, that upstart knight of the realm who hath declared that infrastructure … Read more

Did you know that Amazon leads more than 1,200 open source projects on GitHub? Neither did I until I spoke last week with Matt Asay, the Head of Open Source Strategy and Marketing at Amazon Web Services (AWS). That number, which I got from the Open Source at AWS web page, was confirmed by Asay … Read more

At the two-day Chrome Dev Summit last week, we got a glimpse into Google’s web technology priorities heading into 2021. While much of the event focused on the Chrome browser’s continued improvements to performance, security and privacy — which were positioned as three key pillars — it also became clear that Google is making good … Read more

In the first week of AWS re:Invent 2020, a three-week virtual event by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the database announcements came thick and fast. A common theme soon emerged: AWS really wants to help you migrate off Microsoft and Oracle legacy database systems, and onto its range of “purpose-built” cloud databases. AWS also doubled down … Read more

Honeycomb is sponsoring The New Stack’s coverage of Kubecon+CloudNativeCon North America 2020. In a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon presentation this week, IBM Cloud’s Doug Davis asked: what happened to the promise of cloud computing? The promise for developers, he explained, was that “the complexities of the infrastructure would be abstracted away from us and we could … Read more

At its recent virtual event, Next.js — a leading open source JavaScript framework built on top of the React library — announced that it would be improving what Next.js creator Guillermo Rauch, in his keynote address, called “one of the most important primitives of the web: the image.” Basically, a core tag of the web’s … Read more

Node.js, the open source JavaScript runtime, released its 15th version last week. Now in its 11th year, Node.js is as popular as ever, but in 2020 an upstart competitor has emerged. Deno, an open source JavaScript runtime released in May, was created by none other than Ryan Dahl — the original author of Node.js. Even … Read more

JFrog had its Initial Public Offering (IPO) last month and since that time, its stock price has nearly doubled. Not bad for a software company that is difficult to explain to anyone outside the developer community. Even the company’s name sheds no light on what it actually does. As JFrog co-founder and CEO, Shlomi Ben … Read more

While reading George Dyson’s computer history book Turing’s Cathedral earlier this year, I was struck by how physical the act of programming was back in the 1940s and 50s, when the age of computers began. Take a close look at the lead image of this post, borrowed from Dyson’s book, which shows John von Neumann … Read more

Just over a month ago, I published the first public comments by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg about Jamstack, the emerging web publishing architecture that represents a direct challenge to WordPress (and, more generally, the LAMP stack). Mullenweg told me that Jamstack is “a regression for the vast majority of the people adopting it,” which sparked … Read more

“Developers, developers, developers!” Steve Ballmer bellowed on-stage, his shirt drenched in sweat as he repeatedly chanted the word at a Microsoft conference twenty years ago. He was making the point, in his usual over-excited way, that developers were of central importance to his company. We can chuckle today at that YouTube video of Ballmer, but … Read more