Tipping points that change the course of internet technology are not rare, but they also don’t come around often. I think we’ve seen two massive tipping points in 2022: generative AI, which has leapt to the forefront of internet culture this year, and the beginnings of a movement away from centralized social media and onto … Read more

While Web3 has been overtaken in the tech news flow by the rise of decentralized social media, the long-running effort to strengthen dApp infrastructure continues. Somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft has now joined the Web3 revolution, albeit in a low-profile way. Donovan Brown, a partner program manager on the Azure incubation team at Microsoft, told The New … Read more

“It’s happening,” blogged Evan Prodromou, whose pioneering work inspired the ActivityPub protocol on which Mastodon runs. “I have not been this excited about federated social networks since we published ActivityPub,” he wrote. “The shift has started.” He’s referring, of course, to the migration of hundreds of thousands of users from Twitter, a centralized social media … Read more

Dr. Joe Fitzsimons, a physicist academic turned startup entrepreneur, believes that developing software using quantum computing is equivalent to programming computers in the 1940s or developing for Arpanet in the 60s. In other words, it’s still early. But his company, Horizon Quantum Computing, is about to launch a software development platform that will, he says, … Read more

Do we want to stay on a social network that shows such callous disregard for its own people? That is the question many of us have been asking as news hit this morning that half of Twitter’s employees have been unceremoniously sacked. Twitter, the company, styles itself as a platform for “public conversation.” Even if … Read more

Ever since the $20 billion Figma acquisition in September, there has been increasing interest in the cloud IDE market. The thinking is, if even design tools can become web-native, then surely it is high time for developers to move to fully web-based tooling. After all, even Photoshop — once thought to be incapable of shifting … Read more

Sizzy is pitched as a “browser for web developers,” and its creator, a Macedonian developer, known simply as Kitze, is hoping to turn it into a thriving business. Currently, the product is available on a 14-day free trial, but after that, you’ll need to sign up for a monthly subscription ($15 per month for an … Read more

Headless content management systems have turned the traditionally staid CMS market on its head over the past few years. In a headless CMS, the frontend (aka the head; meaning presentation and publishing) is decoupled from the backend (the content) and managed outside of the core system. WordPress vendors like WP Engine now put headless offerings … Read more

“It reminds me of the feeling when Netscape first added JavaScript to the web.” So says Matthew Hodgson, the creator of the Matrix network and now building a web-based metaverse client called Third Room. He thinks he and his team have cracked the solution to creating user-generated content (UGC) for the metaverse. Last August I … Read more

Aurora is a popular name for tech projects, it seems. Following on from Amazon Aurora and Twitter Aurora, Google’s Aurora project is a collaboration between its Chrome browser team and open source web frameworks such as Next.js, Nuxt and Angular. It was announced last June, and at the recent Infobip Shift developer conference we received … Read more

Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is one of a number of 3D development engines competing in the thriving online gaming sector — not to mention the nascent metaverse market. Unlike its more well-known counterparts, Unity and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, O3DE is open source. It began as an Amazon product with a typically terrible Amazon name … Read more

“StackBlitz is very much the development analogy of what Figma did for design,” StackBlitz co-founder and CEO Eric Simons told me in an interview. Today, StackBlitz is announcing a new GitHub integration product called Codeflow, along with what Simons says is a “strategic investment from Figma,” which began just weeks before Figma was acquired by … Read more

It’s been over two years now since Twitter resurrected its developer API as “version 2” and optimistically welcomed back all the third-party developers it had rug-pulled at the end of Web 2.0. To find out what progress Twitter has made with its API v2, I caught up with Amir Shevat, Head of Product for the … Read more