Richard MacManus

Can you be a developer without hand-coding? It sounds like a sacrilegious question, like asking can you be a musician without playing an instrument. But with the increasing popularity of the “low-code” movement in the cloud native era — not to mention its “no-code” cousin — we are seeing more and more development work being … Read more

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, thinks the currently trendy JAMstack approach to website management — which decouples the frontend from the backend, and doesn’t require web servers — is a backward step for the web. “JAMstack is a regression for the vast majority of the people adopting it,” Mullenweg told … Read more

What Kubernetes is to containers, AWS Lambda is to serverless. In other words, Lambda is the dominant platform of serverless. There’s one key difference, of course: unlike Kubernetes, Lambda isn’t open source. It’s owned by Amazon Web Services, one of the most powerful technology companies in the world. But that hasn’t stopped an emerging ecosystem … Read more

In the serverless paradigm, the idea is to abstract away the backend so that developers don’t need to deal with it. That’s all well and good when it comes to servers and complex infrastructure like Kubernetes. But up till now, database systems haven’t typically been a part of the serverless playbook. The assumption has been … Read more

This week I talk with Nader Dabit, senior developer advocate at Amazon Web Services (AWS), about the state of serverless technology. Dabit also has a new book out, published by O’Reilly Media, entitled “Full Stack Serverless.” It’s a guide to building full-stack applications using React, AWS, GraphQL and AWS Amplify. AWS is a leading proponent … Read more

Of all the components of the JAMstack model of web development, the content management part is the most immature currently. But in the technology world, where there is immaturity there is opportunity. In the case of JAMstack, the opportunity is to re-imagine the traditional content management system (CMS) with something called a “headless CMS.” To … Read more

Like everything else in the cloud era, the content management system (CMS) is undergoing a transition from monolithic architecture to a more modular approach. Gatsby, a cloud services company for web development, is one of a number of startups trying to rethink content management in this way. For this week’s column, I spoke with Gatsby … Read more

Frontend development is where the excitement is in internet technology in 2020. Why? Because the backend is pretty much sewn up at this point. As Vercel co-founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch put it recently, “the backend has been commoditized by cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes and off-the-shelf APIs.” Rauch thinks the frontend offers the “most interesting new … Read more

Application development has changed radically in the cloud native era; and not just with the rise of containers and Kubernetes for large-scale deployments. Web development is also undergoing a sea change, with the emergence of JAMstack as a significant trend. Just as Docker was the original change agent for the containers revolution, a single company … Read more

“What we really want to do is transform Oracle’s market,” Cockroach Labs co-founder and CEO Spencer Kimball told me in a recent interview. It was part of his explanation for why Cockroach Labs chose to build a relational database system in the middle of the cloud computing era. When the company launched in 2015, NoSQL … Read more

“Companies can no longer ignore the power of connected data for improving the accuracy of data science models and predictions,” Jim Webber, chief scientist of the graph database company Neo4j, told me last week. While that sounds like the usual grand, sweeping statement we get from tech companies, this time there’s a solid case study … Read more

When it comes to data for machine learning (ML) applications, often times a database system just doesn’t cut it. You need something bigger, like a data warehouse or data lake. There’s also an emerging class of specialist AI and big data platforms that are pitching something in-between a development platform and a data warehouse. One … Read more

Website builders are one of the staple products of the internet. From Geocities in 1994, to Blogger in 2004, to Squarespace in 2014, to Gatsby in 2020, these tools continue to occupy a central place on the web. However, one of these things is not like the other… You can draw a straight line between … Read more

The relational database is still the world’s most used category of database, but its popularity trend line has been flat for a number of years now. Meanwhile other, more cloud native, types of database systems are trending upwards. It’s particularly noticeable with NoSQL database systems of varying flavors, like document stores (MongoDB), key-value (Redis), and … Read more