Top 5 AI Engineering Trends of 2024

This time last year, I wrote that AI engineering in 2023 was defined by a proliferation of LLMs and an expansion of AI dev tooling. In 2024, those trends continued — but also the market for both LLMs and AI development tools matured considerably. This year, AI got integrated into the core tools of developers … Read more

How Bluesky Was Influenced by Scuttlebutt, a P2P Protocol

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

Developers: Mastodon and Bluesky Want Your Twitter Bots

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

Bluesky’s AT Protocol: Pros and Cons for Developers

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

How Microsoft Edge Is Replacing React With Web Components

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

Llama Stack Released To Help Developers Build ‘Agentic Apps’

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

Social Web Foundation Launched – How In Is W3C on Fediverse?

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

Frontend Schism: Will React Server Components Destroy React?

“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

Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’

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

Beyond React: How Astro and Its Server Islands Work

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

After a Decade of React, Is Frontend a Post-React World Now?

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