Richard MacManus

With the emergence of viable WebAssembly-powered web frameworks for Rust developers, it’s worth looking at how often Rust is used for web development currently, what tools these developers are using, and suitable use cases for Rust and Wasm going forward. In the 2024 JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem Report, 35% of Rust developers stated they … Read more

WebAssembly (Wasm) is starting to be used more in web development. In particular, Rust frameworks like Leptos and Sycamore are using Wasm to compile Rust into fast, interactive web apps. Leptos describes itself as a “cutting-edge Rust framework for the modern web.” The project claims to have a web performance second only to vanilla JavaScript … Read more

The year in web development was characterized by a return to simpler ways of building a website or web application. Partly this was a reaction against the increasing complexity of JavaScript frameworks — especially React-based frameworks. Simpler options like Astro and Eleventy (which I use to run Cybercultural, my internet history website) became more popular … Read more

“We build bridges, not walls.” That statement comes from a new non-profit organization that launched yesterday called “A New Social.” I spoke to the two founders, Anuj Ahooja and Ryan Barrett, to discuss where the open web is at now, its potential for massive growth in 2025, and how their new organization plans to help. … Read more

This time last year, I wrote that AI engineering in 2023 was defined by a proliferation of LLMs and an expansion of AI dev tooling. In 2024, those trends continued — but also the market for both LLMs and AI development tools matured considerably. This year, AI got integrated into the core tools of developers … Read more

Google AI Overviews (AIO), where Google’s AI engine attempts to answer your query at the top of a search results page, is now available in more than 100 countries. But for publishers and website operators, it’s still difficult to evaluate the impact of AIO on your business. How often does your website show up in … Read more

When Bluesky passed 20 million users earlier this week, CEO Jay Graber listed twenty facts about the Twitter/X competitor. One of them was this: “Paul, Bluesky’s CTO, built the earliest version of the Bluesky app, and the first client for Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB), a peer-to-peer networking protocol.” Bluesky’s CTO is Paul Frazee and it’s interesting … Read more

In early October 2022, I published one of the worst-timed articles of my career: Developers: Twitter Wants Your Bots. It was an interview with Amir Shevat, then head of the developer platform at Twitter, and it was about how third-party developers were being welcomed back to Twitter’s platform. About three weeks later, Elon Musk acquired … Read more

Decentralized social media is a vibrant developer ecosystem currently, and it’s not just the fediverse leading the charge. Get ready for more dev activity in “the ATmosphere,” the rapidly growing network based on Bluesky’s AT Protocol. In this post, we take a look at the mechanics of the AT Protocol, what developers are doing with … Read more

With all the drama surrounding WordPress over the past several weeks, many developers and IT managers have been looking into alternative open source publishing systems — Ghost, Payload and Drupal are just a few names being discussed. Not only that but there is a sense that despite its current dominance on the web, WordPress is … Read more

What self-driving is to the automobile industry, Solver hopes to be for the programming industry. Solver is the brainchild of Mark Gabel, formally the chief scientist at Viv (an AI assistant company founded by the creators of Siri and then sold to Samsung in 2016). Gabel claims Solver is a paradigm shift in AI-assisted coding, … Read more

When Microsoft’s Edge browser team released WebUI 2.0 in May, a project that aimed to replace React components with native web components, its primary goal was to make Edge faster for end users. The core idea was that adopting a “markup-first architecture” would reduce JavaScript reliance in its product, which would mean less code to … Read more

At Facebook Connect 2024, Meta’s annual developer conference, the company released Llama 3.2, its latest large language model. Meta says its Llama LLMs are open source, although others don’t necessarily agree. In any case, Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox called Llama 3.2 “our most developer focused release yet” and during his developer keynote presentation … Read more

Today a group of open social networking advocates has launched the Social Web Foundation (SWF), “a non-profit organization dedicated to making connections between social platforms with the open standard protocol ActivityPub.” I chatted with one of the three co-founders, Evan Prodromou, about the new organization and what its goals are. The other two founding members … Read more