Journalism

In my previous column about NFTs (non-fungible tokens), I discussed the current leading standard for this technology: ERC-721. That’s the one most digital collectibles use — everything from CryptoKitties to the Bored Ape Yacht Club. But I also mentioned an emerging standard, ERC-1155, which has become the go-to standard for NFTs within blockchain games. To … Read more

Composability has become a new buzzword in the Web3 world. “An application is composable if it can be used as a building block for another application,” wrote a Web3 infrastructure company called Syndica. In another definition, a16z VC Chris Dixon defined composability as “the ability to mix and match software components like lego bricks.” If … Read more

The API management industry is undergoing another transformation, with GraphQL increasingly seen as an emerging industry standard — not only for traditional Web 2.0 businesses, like Shopify, but also for new Web3 protocols like The Graph. While REST (Representational State Transfer) is still by far the leading format for offering APIs, some in the industry … Read more

NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) have taken the internet world by storm over the past year or two. When we think of NFTs today, we mostly think of the digital cartoons that have saturated our social media screens — apes, punks and everything in-between. There have also been massive NFT art sales, epitomized by this era’s answer … Read more

One of the forgotten technologies of this era of the internet is RSS (Really Simple Syndication), an open syndication protocol that helped define the Web 2.0 era. From the early 2000s, RSS enabled anyone to publish their thoughts to the web, via blogging, and made it relatively easy for people to subscribe to those thoughts, … Read more

One of the stumbling blocks of developing a decentralized application (dApp) is the complexity of querying and using data from a blockchain and other “off-chain” solutions. With dApps, and particularly those running on the Ethereum blockchain, not all of the data is stored on the blockchain. There are often decentralized storage networks involved, like the … Read more

The grandly-named Internet Computer is, at first glance, something between a blockchain and a decentralized cloud provider. It’s run by the DFINITY Foundation, a Swiss not-for-profit organization. Since launching last May, Dfinity has made some big claims about what the Internet Computer is capable of in the emerging Web3 world — it’s being pitched as … Read more

One of the interesting developer trends in Web3 is the emergence of Rust as a way to program blockchains. Rust, of course, is a popular programming language that has a wide range of uses — it’s been the most-loved language in Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey for the last six years. So its uses in … Read more

Despite the developer ecosystem for Web3 being a tiny proportion of the larger web developer ecosystem, it appears to be fast-growing — so it makes sense to try and pinpoint what the Web3 tech stack is made up of. We know it includes blockchain for decentralization and cryptocurrency wallets as a form of identity. You … Read more

There are at least 18,000 active developers in the Web3 ecosystem, according to a report from crypto VC firm Electric Capital (available to download on GitHub). This is the number of developers who commit code into open source crypto and Web3 projects at least once a month. The total number of Web3 developers is likely … Read more

At last week’s CES, Nvidia announced that its metaverse platform Omniverse has come out of beta and will be available free to individuals. When I wrote about Omniverse last August, it was positioned as an enterprise tool to help design and manufacturing companies create “digital twins.” But when Facebook pivoted to the metaverse in late … Read more

As another year draws to a close, it’s time for that most dreaded of online media articles: the predictions post. In my case, predictions about the near future of internet technology from a developer perspective. In the tech world, prediction posts are particularly fraught because things change so quickly — and many times with a … Read more

Last week I presented my top internet technologies of the year. This week I’m going to review the top stories of the year. Believe it or not, there isn’t a lot of overlap. A newsworthy story in the tech industry often isn’t about the best technology. Sometimes it’s hype, other times controversy, and still other … Read more

It’s been a year of extremes for internet technology. On the one hand, you have the mostly unproven hype of “Web3” and Facebook’s pivot to the metaverse. But on the other hand, there have been solid — and at times spectacular — advances on the internet platform. This post is going to celebrate the latter; … Read more

It’s been a year of new buzzwords in the web development community. “Web3” and “metaverse” are two of the most hyped and have been fueling social media discussions. In both cases, it’s unclear what these terms mean in a technical sense — but that doesn’t seem to matter in a bull market. I’ve already examined … Read more