Journalism

Despite there being no standard definition for “the metaverse,” a raft of startups have emerged to offer specialist services for the 3D internet. One such company is Agora, which offers “real-time communication and live broadcasting features” for interactive apps. Its functionality covers a variety of platforms, but is mainly used at present for 3D web … Read more

One of the more intriguing technologies demonstrated at this week’s Microsoft Build conference was ​​OpenAI Codex, a machine learning model that translates natural language into code “across more than a dozen programming languages.” In a keynote presentation entitled “The Future of AI Development Tools,” Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott said that “Codex lets us … Read more

Cloud computing company Fastly announced last week that it is acquiring Glitch, a popular browser-based app creation tool. Fastly started out as a content delivery network (CDN) in the early 2010s, but nowadays it pitches itself as an “​​edge cloud platform.” So Glitch will be a nice fit with Fastly’s growing suite of cloud tools. … Read more

The programming language Rust has been growing in popularity over the last couple of years. In its latest developer industry report, analyst firm SlashData stated that Rust has “nearly tripled in size in the past 24 months, from just 0.6M developers in Q1 2020 to 2.2M in Q1 2022.” The Rust Foundation recently announced its … Read more

Croquet is an intriguing new browser-based system for creating 3D “microverses,” described as “independent, interconnected web-based spaces and worlds created on the Metaverse.” The technology was developed by David A. Smith, a computer scientist with 30 years of experience in the VR and AR industry — including creating the set visualization software behind James Cameron’s … Read more

Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, was held this week and one of the themes was developing for the “real world.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai used the phrase four times in less than a minute in his opening keynote (with a “real lives” thrown in) while discussing Google’s emerging Augmented Reality (AR) capabilities. He talked … Read more

It’s early days for decentralized social networks, despite the recent bump in Mastodon users due to Elon Musk buying Twitter. But if you’re a developer looking for the next big thing, what better time to experiment with a platform? The “fediverse” — a group of federated websites and applications that interconnect with each other — … Read more

The Reactathon conference was held outdoors in San Francisco this week. One of the highlights was a quick-fire presentation by Shawn Swyx Wang, continuing his thesis that we’re in the third age of JavaScript. He began blogging about this in 2020, the year he pinpoints as the start of “the third age.” This year, the … Read more

If the metaverse is to become a reality, there will need to be development and content creation tools for it. There will also need to be a standard definition for “the metaverse” (currently an amorphous term that refers to a 3D internet) and, following that, a set of open standards that developers and platform companies … Read more

One story has dominated the headlines this week: Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. But what does it mean from a developer point of view? The Twitter development team put up a blog post this week claiming that its mission “to build an open developer platform that serves the public conversation” has not changed after the … Read more

After the news broke that Elon Musk’s offer to acquire Twitter had been accepted, many Twitter users began to reignite their old Mastodon, Tumblr and other social media accounts. There was also talk amongst the Twitterati about resurrecting their blogs and putting their faith back into RSS (Really Simple Syndication). But for those of you … Read more

In the latest This Week in Development, I wrote about a new web comic called “Contra Chrome,” a Creative Commons remix of a comic Google published when it launched the Chrome web browser in 2008. The author of “Contra Chrome,” Leah Elliott, describes herself as a “digital-rights activist” and in her comic she takes aim at … Read more

Infura is a blockchain development platform that is part of a suite of products owned by Consensys, a leading tool provider in the Web3 ecosystem. To use cloud computing terminology, Infura can be thought of as “blockchain-as-a-service,” because it abstracts away the difficulties of dealing with a blockchain network. By using Infura, or a competing … Read more

For those of us old enough to remember Web 2.0 in its heyday, one of the classic “texts” of that era was the Chrome comic book, which was released in September 2008 at the same time the first version of the Chrome browser was launched. As a tech blogger at the time, I was lucky … Read more

RapidAPI, an API management company that became a Silicon Valley unicorn (worth over $1 billion) after its most recent venture capital round last month, has announced “a major multiyear partnership” with Formula 1 team Scuderia AlphaTauri. RapidAPI says the partnership will enable Scuderia AlphaTauri, whose current drivers are Pierre Gasly and Yuki Tsunoda, “to centralize … Read more