Richard MacManus

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

“One thing that is clear to me is that React Server Components will destroy React,” said Igor Minar, one of the creators of the Angular framework and now senior director of engineering at Cloudflare. Others, notably frontend cloud company Vercel, think that React Server Components “augment the fundamentals of React.” So who’s right? To quickly … Read more

The rebelling against JavaScript frameworks continues. In the latest Lex Fridman interview, AI app developer Pieter Levels explained that he builds all his apps with vanilla HTML, PHP, a bit of JavaScript via jQuery, and SQLite. No fancy JavaScript frameworks, no modern programming languages, no Wasm. “I’m seeing a revival now,” said Levels, regarding PHP. … Read more

Patrik Backman knows a thing or two about open source software and the impact of the LAMP stack on the early web. He was a co-founder of MariaDB and before that the director of software engineering at MySQL, the original “M” in the LAMP stack — although many argue that MariaDB is the “M” these … Read more

React and its virtual DOM paradigm has been at the forefront of frontend development for a decade now, but there’s been a swing towards simplicity and web-native features in more recent frameworks. Astro is a great example; and it also now has the support of Netlify, a leading player in the current web landscape. Last … Read more

Ten years ago, Facebook developer Christopher Chedeau gave a presentation at Oscon (O’Reilly Open Source Convention) about a relatively new JavaScript framework called React. As The New Stack’s Chris Dawson noted at the time, the presentation was fascinating because it explained the concepts behind React — and not just how it worked, but why it … Read more

Four years ago, I wrote about how NoSQL databases were growing fast — in large part due to their compatibility with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). But that was before the generative AI boom that began with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in November 2022. So what has happened to NoSQL databases since ChatGPT … Read more