Richard MacManus

This week I attended FediForum, a two-day virtual event about fediverse technologies. The fediverse is a decentralized network of apps that connect together via the W3C ActivityPub protocol. Its biggest and most well-known app is Mastodon, the microblogging platform that Meta’s Threads is currently in the process of interconnecting with (via ActivityPub). What FediForum showed … Read more

There’s a lot of concern amongst website builders about the impact AI will have on web traffic. And it’s not just AI that web developers have to worry about. Google is phasing out third-party cookies by the end of 2024, social media referrals continue to decline, and mobile application platforms have a checkered history of … Read more

In Netlify’s most recent developer survey, Astro was the fastest growing web framework in both usage and satisfaction. While it still trails behind Next.js, the current dominant framework, Astro has been praised for its simpler approach to web development. Part of the appeal of Astro is that it doesn’t claim to be a swiss army … Read more

Open Web Advocacy (OWA) is a non-profit organization founded by two brothers, Alex and James Moore, who run a web development services company in Australia. They’re up in arms about Apple’s decision to effectively withdraw support for progressive web apps (PWAs) in Europe, as a way to comply with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act … Read more

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the most common method of integrating a pre-trained large language model (LLM) with an external data source; an important factor in creating enterprise AI applications. After all, what’s the point of an organization using an LLM if it can’t utilize its own unique — and probably proprietary — data set? RAG … Read more

Today Google is announcing two new AI models: Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B. Each of the models is released “with pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants.” In a press briefing, Tris Warkentin, the director of Google DeepMind, described the new models as “a new family of state-of-the-art smaller models, which will enable developers to do research and … Read more

Figma’s Dev Mode feature has recently come out of beta, and it’s further evidence that Figma is now targeting developers as much as designers. I caught up with CTO Kris Rasmussen to find out more about how developers are using Figma, and how the company is re-adjusting to life as an independent company after its … Read more

Pixar open sourced its 3D graphics technology Universal Scene Description (USD) back in 2016, a few years after it was created for its own movie-making purposes. USD has since been adopted by industry heavyweights like Apple, Meta and Nvidia. Some have likened USD to the Photoshop format, psd. The hope is that it will eventually … Read more

The JavaScript frameworks Remix and Astro are currently getting a lot of buzz as simpler alternatives to Next.js, the dominant framework of the React era. Of the two upstart frameworks, Remix is more of a direct competitor to Next.js, since they are both based on the React library (Astro is framework-agnostic, so you can use … Read more

The last time I spoke to Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, in October 2022, our focus was headless content management systems — at the time a trending topic in web development. But much has changed since then: JavaScript frameworks have gotten even more complex, Jamstack is no longer a hot buzzword, and (of course) generative AI … Read more

Today and tomorrow, an event for web developers called TheJam.dev is being held virtually by CFE.dev, a community for developers founded by Brian Rinaldi. Rinaldi opened the event by noting that web development has changed dramatically over the past four years — he cited generative AI tools, but also the changes in Next.js and the … Read more

Locofy is a tool for frontend developers that converts designs to code, primarily via a Figma plugin. The company, based out of Singapore, has just announced a new product called Locofy Lightning, which is built on a stack that includes a custom technology called a “Large Design Model” (LDM). According to the company, the LDM … Read more

PostgreSQL (typically called Postgres) is a popular free and open source relational database. It’s attracted a lot of extensions and third-party tools over the years, which has inspired a company called Tembo to build a “Postgres as a Platform” service — a kind of marketplace for Postgres extensions and other tools. The goal is to … Read more

The AI search engine Perplexity has been getting a lot of buzz recently as an alternative to ChatGPT. Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity provides citations by default for the information it delivers. That single feature has become crucial in generative AI, given the ongoing hallucination issue with this technology. Accordingly, Perplexity has become a surprisingly strong player … Read more