Welcome to the DevTools.fm Download, a weekly newsletter by the hosts of Devtools.fm. In this newsletter we share interesting tidbits we've discovered over the week as well as an overview of this week's episode.

A note, after this week we’re going to be taking a break for the rest of the year. It’s been such an amazing year for DevTools.fm and we thank all of our guests and listeners for making it happen. Y’all are amazing and we appreciate every one of you! Have a fantastic rest of the year and we’ll catch you in January.

Sponsor

We'd like to thank Raycast for sponsoring this week's episode. If you haven't checked out Raycast it's a super powered mac spotlight replacement with a lot of bundled utilities like window management, clipboard history, scheduling, and more! They've got an excellent react based API where you can write your own extensions and a store to share them.

Raycast also has a Pro plan where you can leverage AI to get summaries, translations, and more!

Weekly Discoveries

• Boshen announced the general availability of Oxlint, a rust based linter for JavaScript. This comes out of the Oxc project, which is a suite of rust based tooling for the JavaScript ecosystem. This is a different initiative than Biome which we covered back in episode 70 but still a really exciting project to watch!

• Slightly older news here, but still something we wanted to call out is that Stately announced the v5 release of XState earlier this month. We chatted with David back in episode 41 and this marks a major milestone for the xstate team! This work has been a long time coming and the new simplified API is a huge improvement over the v4 version. We’re really excited about this release and hope you’ll check it out!

• Another big update in the web world is the date-fns library hitting v3. This release is rewritten in TypeScript, has better bundle splitting, ESM support, and more. Great job to the team!

That's all the highlights for this week! If you'd like us to include something for next time feel free to drop us a line at hosts@devtools.fm.

Episode 79: Brian Douglas — Open Sauced

Before chatting with Brian about opensauced.pizza we went pretty deep in his history of working at GitHub. Brian was the first advocate on the DevRel team at GitHub back in 2018. It was fascinating to hear his experiences around the time GitHub actions was being built out and how that feature was a strong contributing factor to the acquisition by Microsoft. We talked a bit about how GitHub’s messaging has become more AI centric and the implications that has on the platform as a whole.

Brian initially created OpenSauce as a side project to help aggregate visibility into PRs open across different projects while he was working at Netlify. He demoed that first version at GitHub Universe which is how he ultimately ended up joining GitHub. Once he joined though, he found out someone was working on something similar and decided to set it aside. As large product organizations are wont to do the project was killed and after 5 years at GitHub Brian took a sabbatical before deciding to go full time on it. OpenSauced provides a better insights into the lifecycle of work happening on GitHub across an organization or across many repos. It’s an interesting product that fills a real gap in GitHub functionality and is worth checking out! Check out the episode for more of our conversation with Brian.

https://devtools.fm/episodes/79

Welcome to the DevTools.fm Download, a weekly newsletter by the hosts of Devtools.fm. In this newsletter we share interesting tidbits we've discovered over the week as well as an overview of this week's episode.

It’s been a little while since our last edition due to some holiday travel, so this edition will be a slightly different format where we just review the last three episodes.

Sponsor

We'd like to thank Raycast for sponsoring this week's episode. If you haven't checked out Raycast it's a super powered mac spotlight replacement with a lot of bundled utilities like window management, clipboard history, scheduling, and more! They've got an excellent react based API where you can write your own extensions and a store to share them.

Raycast also has a Pro plan where you can leverage AI to get summaries, translations, and more!

Episode 76: Matteo Collina — Platformatic

Published on 11/26/2023

In this episode we chat w/ Matteo Collina about this open source background, his contributes to Node.js, and his work on his startup Platformatic. Matteo created fastify, pino, mercurius, avvio, and fast-json-stringify (among others). He’s on the Node.js TSC (technical steering committee) and the board of the OpenJS Foundation.

Two topics that stood out to me as notable was our conversation around open source maintainer burnout (which is a common theme in our conversations with folks who do any significant amount of OSS work) and the challenge of CJS and ESM conversion in the Node.js ecosystem. Matteo has a very unique perspective on both. It was also incredibly interesting to hear more about fastify (an express.js replacement) and how Matteo is building his company Platformic around it.

https://devtools.fm/episodes/76

Episode 77: Yagiz Nizipli — Node.js Performance

Published on 12/3/2023

In this episode we chat with Yagiz Nizipli, another member of Node’s TSC, who focuses heavily on runtime performance. One of Yagiz’s first large contributions to Node was optimizing the performance of its URL parser. Something interesting we learned in talking about this is that node core supports WASM modules (though from our understanding none of node core as of this recording was written using WASM). Yagiz’s first pass at writing the URL parser was in WASM but he realized that the overhead of WASM made it less competitive than just writing it plain (but highly optimized) JavaScript.

Other interesting topics we covered were the challenges of writing accurate benchmarks for performance, the impact of new runtimes on Node and it’s story around performance, and what it’s like as a contributor to node.

https://devtools.fm/episodes/77

Episode 78: Jess Martin — DXOS

Published 12/10/2023

In this week’s episode we talk to Jess Martin about DXOS, a peer-to-peer, local-first framework for building interoperable apps and his path as an engineer. Jess has an interesting story where in the first half of his career he was focused on building software products with the capabilities that were available at the time and his current focus is discovering or introducing new capabilities that people can use to build even better software products. That focus on expanding the horizon of computing capability is what brought him to DXOS where they’re building a platform where users can own their own data but with modern functionality we’re coming to expect like local-first (can work offline, syncs when it comes online) and real time collaboration. What’s really compelling is that DXOS provides all this rich functionality but in a way that’s non-obtrusive to the developer so it feels simpler while providing rich capabilities. This episode is definitely one to catch as both the tech behind DXOS is fascinating and because Jess is such a fantastic speaker and story teller.

https://devtools.fm/episodes/78

Welcome to eighth edition of the DevTools.fm Download, a weekly newsletter by the hosts of Devtools.fm. In this newsletter we share interesting tidbits we've discovered over the week as well as an overview of this week's episode.

To all of you who are traveling this week we hope you have safe travels. It’s a great time to catch up on our latest episode while your on the plane or in the car!

Sponsor

We'd like to thank Raycast for sponsoring this week's episode. If you haven't checked out Raycast it's a super powered mac spotlight replacement with a lot of bundled utilities like window management, clipboard history, scheduling, and more! They've got an excellent react based API where you can write your own extensions and a store to share them.

Raycast also has a Pro plan where you can leverage AI to get summaries, translations, and more!

Weekly Discoveries

• Our friends over at TLDraw had a crazy week after they demoed makereal, an experiment to integrate OpenAI’s visual integration into a TLDraw canvas. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a way to automatically generate UI by drawing a quick mock on a TLDraw canvas and having OpenAI generate out an html/js/tailwind block that’s interactive on the page.

• The Val.town team have open sourced the extensions they use to provide auto complete, linting, and hover details in Code mirror. If you want a starting point for a light weight typescript based editing experience in the browser you should definitely check out their work.

• Michael Aufreiter published an experiment implementing a block editor with Svelte 5 runes. The code is posted here if you want to jump straight to the details. It’s an incredibly clean implementation and makes us excited for Svelte 5 to land.

• Given all the commotion in the AI space over the weekend, you might be interested in modelfusion, a vendor-neutral typescript library for integrating with AI services for chatbots, agents, etc. It’s a feature rich library providing everything from text generation to text-to-speech, abstracted across AI provider platforms and with solid types provided. Definitely worth checking out if you’re suddenly exploring what other platforms are out there to be leveraged.

That's all the highlights for this week! If you'd like us to include something for next week feel free to drop us a line at hosts@devtools.fm.

Episode 75: Braden Sidoti — Clerk.dev

This week’s episode is with Braden Sidoti, the CTO and co-founder of Clerk. If you haven’t heard of Clerk, it’s a rising star in the authentication space that provides embeddable auth flow UI components (think Stripe Checkout) as well as user management features. It follows a similar theme of our last few episodes of a company providing core application functionality that’s more complex than it seems on the surface.

We chatted about why Clerk covers user management holistically instead of just authentication, how they think about scaling and security, and the challenges of pricing a core functionality SaaS.

It was an engaging topic on an excellent service and we hope you enjoy!

https://devtools.fm/episodes/75

Welcome to the seventh edition of the DevTools.fm Download, a weekly newsletter by the hosts of Devtools.fm. In this newsletter we share interesting tidbits we've discovered over the week as well as an overview of this week's episode.

Sponsor

We'd like to thank Raycast for sponsoring this week's episode. If you haven't checked out Raycast it's a super powered mac spotlight replacement with a lot of bundled utilities like window management, clipboard history, scheduling, and more! They've got an excellent react based API where you can write your own extensions and a store to share them.

Raycast also has a Pro plan where you can leverage AI to get summaries, translations, and more!

Weekly Discoveries

• A post by Xe Iaso on Cursorless, a tool to aid programming by voice, showed up on hacker news this week. Cursorless is a VSCode extension that adds marks above characters in code and allows using special terms to target those words or symbols for navigation or editing. Pokey Rule, the creator of cursorless, also gave a talk at strangeloop which is worth checking out.

• Nick Keller created react-datasheet-grid which is an airtable/excel like spreadsheet component for React. If you need a spreadsheet like experience in your app it may be worth checking out!

• Geoffrey Litt who works with Ink and Switch shared a collaborative markdown editor using automerge. Real time collaboration has been a big topic on the podcast and it’s amazing to see how much easier it is to build collaborative tooling with CRDTs these days. Of course, we don’t mean it’s easy, just easier than it has been in the past.

• The builder.io team worked with the Astro team to build out Qwik integration with Astro. Jack Shelton wrote a compelling blog post talking about the benefits of using Qwik with Astro. Qwik’s resumability means that you don’t have to denote Qwik components with special hydration behavior like you would a React/Vue/Svelte component. If you’re interested in trying the integration yourself it’s @quickdev/astro. You can also checkout episode 28 to hear more about Qwik and episode 14 to learn more about Astro.

That's all the highlights for this week! If you'd like us to include something for next week feel free to drop us a line at hosts@devtools.fm.

Episode 74: Isaac Schlueter — NPM and Tier

In this week’s episode we spoke with Isaac Schlueter, best known as the founder of NPM. This episode was particularly special for Andrew and I given how influential Node (and by extension NPM) has been on our careers. It was fascinating chatting w/ Isaac about the early days of node. One point that resonated was how seemingly simple decisions in the early days can have profound impacts later in an ecosystems development. Isaac mentioned how NPM was a basic CRUD app in the beginning and how basic functionality like deleting a package grew to be famously impactful.

As with last week’s episode on Unkey (API keys as a service), we continue to see themes that there’s value in spinning out a business focusing specifically on a pain point that’s deceptively challenging. Isaac helped co-found a company called Tier which is focused on a service to manage pricing. Isaac goes on to describe how complicated pricing infrastructure ends up being as it grows organically in an organization. Instead of built as a first class feature of a product, it tends to be bolted on, tightly coupled to auth systems and implicitly baked into a system in a way that makes it deceptively hard to change. With Tier, the sought to provide an opinionated product built around a pricing strategy that can evolve with both your tech and your business. They even wrote a must-read manifesto called The 5 Pillars of PriceOps which lays out principles of pricing in a similar style to the 12 Factor App.

This episode was entertaining and educational and certainly not one to miss. Give it a listen, let us know what you think, and as always, thanks for listening.

https://devtools.fm/episodes/74

PS: we’ve opened up our discord so if you want to chat with us please drop by!

Welcome to the sixth edition of the DevTools.fm Download, a weekly newsletter by the hosts of Devtools.fm. In this newsletter we share interesting tidbits we've discovered over the week as well as an overview of this week's episode.

Sponsor

There’s no sponsor for this week’s episode but there are plenty of ways you can help us continue delivering conversations with these great guests. If you’re a company who wants to sponsor us feel free to check out our sponsor page. Listeners can also support us by donating via patreon or subscribing to paid, ad-free episodes from apple podcasts or spotify.

Weekly Discoveries

• In the last few weeks we’ve shared some larger open source projects as we think they’re a good learning resource. Another product in that vein that we stumbled on last week is Grist, an open source spreadsheet engine. It’s conceptually similar to Airtable (see their comparison).

• Honojs has been popping up a lot on our feeds lately. It’s an express like server implementation that runs across JavaScript runtimes meaning you can run it with Node, Bun, Deno, and on cloudflare workers. It’s a great tool that’s seen a lot of improvements recently and we recommend you check it out.

• We love software tools of all kinds but we especially have a soft spot for open source game engines. Bevy, an open source rust based game engine we’ve tooltip’d in the past, released 0.12 last week with some new rendering optimizations and QoL improvements. Worth checking out if you’re considering making a game.

We’re a little light on discoveries this week but if you have recommendations for next week feel free to drop us a line at hosts@devtools.fm.

Episode 73: James Perkins — Unkey

This week we talked with James Perkins about Unkey, an API authentication service. Unkey follows a trend we’ve been covering of undifferentiated but necessary product functionality that can be surprisingly harder to get right than it seems on the surface.

Unkey essentially manages API keys, providing low latency edge based rate limiting, temporary api keys, finite keys, and usage analytics. The low latency authentication is really a key value add here.

We also chatted with James about his time at Clerk and some thoughts on the future direction of Unkey. As always, thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy!

https://devtools.fm/episodes/73

Welcome to fifth edition of the DevTools.fm Download, a weekly newsletter by the hosts of Devtools.fm. In this newsletter we share interesting tidbits we've discovered over the week as well as an overview of this week's episode.

Sponsor

We'd like to thank Raycast for sponsoring this week's episode. If you haven't checked out Raycast it's a super powered mac spotlight replacement with a lot of bundled utilities like window management, clipboard history, scheduling, and more! They've got an excellent react based API where you can write your own extensions and a store to share them.

Raycast also has a Pro plan where you can leverage AI to get summaries, translations, and more!

Weekly Discoveries

• Andrew Walsh created a chrome extension to automatically generate an OpenAPI specification as you browse a site.

• answer.dev, an open source Q&A platform, was trending on GitHub this week. We always love seeing fully fleshed out open source services as they provide a great learning opportunity for folks trying to understand what it takes to build something similar.

• Back in episode 54 we chatted with Charlie Marsh about Ruff, a rust based linter for python. The team just announced that Ruff now does formatting as well. Congrats to the Ruff team on their launch!

• Bernard Kolobara is working on flawless.dev, a durable execution engine where workflows are written in rust and compiled to WASM for execution. We chatted with Shawn Wang back in episode 13 about Temporal which operates in a similar domain.

That's all the highlights for this week! If you'd like us to include something for next week feel free to drop us a line at hosts@devtools.fm.

Episode 72: Dax Raad — SST

This week we chatted with Dax Raad about SST, an infrastructure as code (IaC) framework for simplifying application development on AWS. We discussed how given that Amazon prefers small, independent teams the AWS ecosystem as a whole can be highly fragmented and challenging to integrate. SST abstracts over AWS tooling like CDK and provides simpler, fully typed hooks to help manage infrastructure as well as making it easy to deploy web frameworks like Next.js, Svelte, or Astro.

We chatted in depth about why a product like SST may fit organizations better than a stand alone service like Vercel. One given reason is just consolidated billing. It’s common in larger organizations to have some services already deployed to AWS. Adding an extra layer of tooling to deploy a new Next.js site via SST to an existing AWS account may be cheaper overall and reduce the amount of bills for hosting an organization has to deal with. One interesting point Dax made here is that with a tool like SST you’re slowly introduced to AWS concepts and you learn the platform in a way that is applicable outside of just the usage of SST. With a platform like Vercel, they specifically abstract away that knowledge so that you only have to learn the Vercel platform, but the knowledge isn’t transferable outside of that domain.

Dax also goes into the novel method SST uses for local cloud deployments which we thought was extremely clever. Listen to the episode to find out how they accomplish that and more!

https://devtools.fm/episodes/72

Thanks for reading, we’ll see you next week!

Welcome to fourth edition of the DevTools.fm Download, a weekly newsletter by the hosts of Devtools.fm. In this newsletter we share interesting tidbits we've discovered over the week as well as an overview of this week's episode. This one’s a bit late, but we’ll be back on schedule next week.

Sponsor

We'd like to thank Raycast for sponsoring this week's episode. If you haven't checked out Raycast it's a super powered mac spotlight replacement with a lot of bundled utilities like window management, clipboard history, scheduling, and more! They've got an excellent react based API where you can write your own extensions and a store to share them.

Raycast also has a Pro plan where you can leverage AI to get summaries, translations, and more!

Weekly Discoveries

• The Replicache team launched a service called Reflect which is a fully-managed real-time sync engine. The simplest way to explain the difference between them is that Replicache syncs changes across clients leaving you to use whatever backend you want for some light realtime functionality. Reflect is more of a complete package acting as a server for the sync’d data and providing explicit mechanisms for defining changes. It feels a bit closer to PartyKit (which you can learn more about in episode 49).

• Ruffle was on Hacker News last week. It’s a flash player emulator written in Rust. Being of the generation that come up playing flash games and exploring the weird/unique sites that cropped up in that era, we’re really excited to see this project develop.

• Mock Service Worker (MSW) just launched its v2.0 version. For those of you who haven’t used it, MSW lets you mock a server implementation in a service worker for quick API mocking on the client. It’s an incredibly useful tool that Justin uses at Oxide.

• Ominvore was trending on GitHub last week. It’s an open source, read-it-later app that’s fairly full featured! We always enjoy highlighting high quality open source apps and this one is definitely worth checking out.

That's all the highlights for this week! If you'd like us to include something for next week feel free to drop us a line at hosts@devtools.fm.

Episode 71: Vlad A. Ionescu — Earthly

This week we chat with Vlad about Earthly, a framework that gives highly repeatable containerized builds that works both locally and across different CI providers. Essentially you use Earthly to do all the actual steps of your CI process and then you just use your CI service to run Earthly (or to spin of an Earthly cloud instance). One of the main benefits is being able to easily run the same tasks as CI does, locally. Various CI services allow you to do this, but it’s fairly service specific and often comes with their own caveats. Another benefit is that there’s a lot of infrastructure around Earthly to provide optimized caching across builds for faster execution.

Outside of talking about Earthly, it was also insightful to hear of Vlad’s startup experience and how he applied what he learned at previous startups to Earthly. Originally Earthly was positioned to be a standalone CI/CD service but when they weren’t seeing traction they pivoted into the reusable tooling space with incremental value add services that could be use across cloud providers. Vlad credited how fast they were able to pivot to lessons learned in previous startups where he continued to try to make an original idea work even though it wasn’t generating customer traction.

Don’t miss this week’s episode!

https://devtools.fm/episodes/71

Welcome to the third edition of the DevTools.fm Download, a weekly newsletter by the hosts of Devtools.fm. In this newsletter we share interesting tidbits we've discovered over the week as well as an overview of this week's episode.

Sponsor

We'd like to thank Raycast for sponsoring this week's episode. If you haven't checked out Raycast it's a super powered mac spotlight replacement with a lot of bundled utilities like window management, clipboard history, scheduling, and more! They've got an excellent react based API where you can write your own extensions and a store to share them.

Raycast also has a Pro plan where you can leverage AI to get summaries, translations, and more!

Also a special shout out to our Patreon subscribers for your continued support. Y’all are the best <3.

Weekly Discoveries

• A tool called pkgx was trending on GitHub last week. It’s from Max Howell (the creator of homebrew) and bills itself as a standalone binary that can run anything. We see it as an alternative to something like asdf in that it can help manage executables and environments for different language tooling (though there’s more to it than that). So if you need a tool to help manage versions for node, deno, rust, etc this might be a good one to check out.

• Cloudflare announced a service called Sippy last week which helps incrementally migrate from AWS’ S3 to Cloudflare’s R2 bucket storage. R2 has a leg up over S3 in that it doesn’t charge egress fees so it’s a potentially cheaper alternative for storing assets that need to be accessed publicly. Sippy works by allowing you to define a connection between an R2 and S3 bucket. When a request comes into the R2 bucket and the file isn’t there it’ll download it from S3 and copied over to R2 while being sent to the client. It’s a clever strategy on their front and a useful tool for those looking to reduce cloud storage costs without having to do a major migration.

• cal.com launched an AI service that you can use to schedule meetings, rearrange your calendar, and more. Our favorite example is just forwarding an email of someone requesting a time to meet and having the service automatically add it to your calendar. We’re continuing to see AI being added as an augmentation layer to existing products and cal’s usage feels like one of the stronger implementations of that strategy.

• We’re big fans of Linear and last week they launched a triage feature. When issues are created in a tracker by folks outside the engineering team someone needs to be responsible for figuring out if it’s created in the right place, has the correct priority, etc. Linear has made this an explicit role which goes a long way in helping teams stay on top of inbound work. It’s maybe a small thing but with every release it’s harder for us to imagine wanting to use any other tool for issue tracking.

  That's all the highlights for this week! If you'd like us to include something for next week feel free to drop us a line at hosts@devtools.fm.

Episode 70: Emanuele Stoppa - Biome

This week we chatted with Emanuele about Biome which is an open source fork of the Rome project. For those of you who haven’t heard of Rome it was an ambitious project to bring all the common web tooling like linting, bundling, formatting, etc under one toolchain. It was started by Sebastian, the original creator of Babel, who later created a company around Rome, raised some VC, and hired folks to further the project. For reasons that aren’t public, the company was shuttered and the team was let go. Emanuele and some of the former contributors to Rome then forked off Biome as a continuation of the project.

In this episode we talk in more detail about why Rome/Biome exists, thoughts on the future of plugins, what it takes to build an ecosystem around this kind of tooling, and more. Check it out and let us know what you think!

https://www.devtools.fm/episode/70

Welcome to second edition of the DevTools.fm Download, a weekly newsletter by the hosts of Devtools.fm. In this newsletter we share interesting tidbits we've discovered over the week as well as an overview of this week's episode.

Sponsor

We'd like to thank Raycast for sponsoring this week's episode. If you haven't checked out Raycast it's a super powered mac spotlight replacement with a lot of bundled utilities like window management, clipboard history, scheduling, and more! They've got an excellent react based API where you can write your own extensions and a store to share them.

Raycast also has a Pro plan where you can leverage AI to get summaries, translations, and more!

Also a special shout out to our Patreon subscribers for your continued support. Y’all are the best <3.

Weekly Discoveries

• Evan You announced that the vite team is working on a tool called Rolldown which is a rust replacement of rollup. It’s another instance in a long list of tooling that’s moving to a native language.

• The topic of CRDTs has come up a lot on the podcast and last week Jake Lazaroff wrote an excellent interactive introduction to CRDTs. It’s really good. Reminds us a bit of Bartosz Ciechanowski’s interactive articles.

• Speaking of CRDTs, Justin shared DXOS as a tooltip back in episode 64 and Jess Martin gave a demo of what they’re working on. If you’re interested in the local first space this tool is absolutely worth keeping your eye on.

• There were a spate of announcements around AI wearables last week. Axios wrote a timely piece covering some of the players in the market like Humane’s AI Pin, Rewind’s Pendant, and Tab from Avi Schiffmann et al. While not directly part of the developer tooling space, it’s an interesting development that could foreseeably be part of the future of how we work.

• Keeping on the AI topic, a plugin called Cannoli was released for Obsidian which lets you run LLM scripts direction in Obsidian’s canvas files. We’re huge fans of Obsidian and visual workflows in general so this is a fun plugin to explore.

• On the note of nice visual tools, we stumbled upon Fastgen which also looks like a real gem. It’s a beautiful low-code, backend-as-a-service platform that bills itself as a webflow for the backend. Their demo is worth the watch.

That's all the highlights for this week! If you'd like us to include something for next week feel free to drop us a line at hosts@devtools.fm.

Episode 69: Aiden Bai — Million.js

In a nut shell Million.js is an ambitious project that sets out to make React’s virtual dom implementation more efficient by patching it with a block virtual dom. As you can imagine, swapping out a core part of react by adding another library is no simple task and certainly comes with its own tradeoffs. We have to give massive props to Aiden for pulling this off while still in high school.

We had a lot of fun chatting with Aiden about his path to learning how to program, how he got into open source, the trials of a open source side project becoming successful, and the inspiration and implementation of million.

You can listen to the episode here or find it via any of the popular podcasting services. Let us know what you think!

Welcome to first edition of the DevTools.fm Download, a weekly newsletter by the hosts of Devtools.fm. In this newsletter we share interesting tidbits we've discovered over the week as well as an overview of this week's episode.

Sponsor

We'd like to thank Raycast for sponsoring this week's episode. If you haven't checked out Raycast it's a super powered mac spotlight replacement with a lot of bundled utilities like window management, clipboard history, scheduling, and more! They've got an excellent react based API where you can write your own extensions and a store to share them.

Raycast also has a Pro plan where you can leverage AI to get summaries, translations, and more!

Weekly Discoveries

• Our friends over at PartyKit announced their $2.5M raise. Congrats to Sunil and team! If you want to learn more about PartyKit, head over to episode 49 to hear our interview with Sunil.

• We stumbled upon DevHunt, which is like product hunt but specifically for developer tools. If you're interested in discovering the latest tools or want a less saturated aggregator than product hunt to launch your dev tool on, this might be just the ticket!

• PostHog put out a great article last week on their experience marketing devtools to engineers. If you're trying to get word out about a tool you're building, this is definitely something to check out!

• Deno launched queues functionality to go along side their existing KV storage. It's exciting to see them expand more into the services space with these clean APIs!

• We talk a lot about open source businesses on the podcast and Anh-Tho Chuong, CEO and co-founder of Lago, wrote an excellent post called Open Source does not win by being cheaper. If you've created an open source tool you want to turn into a business or early in that journey we highly recommend giving it a read.

• Cloudflare launched Workers AI which allows you to run some popular AI models on the edge. It's great to see companies continuing to improve access and DX around AI models.

• Our friends over at Drifting in Space have a newsletter called the BrowserTech Digest which is worth subscribing to. The last edition covered Andrew's SyntaxFM interview which is also worth checking out.

That's all the highlights for this week! If you'd like us to include something for next week feel free to drop us a line at hosts@devtools.fm.

Episode 68: Eric Elliott — SudoLang

In this week's episode we talk to Eric Elliott about SudoLang, a programming language designed specifically for interacting with large language models (LLMs).

SudoLang works by providing semi-structured conventions and leaning into LLM’s ability to infer both code like structures and natural language to accomplish some end goal. A SudoLang program usually includes a context section which describes to the LLM its role in the program, an enum-like state structure that defines possible states of the program, and constraints structure that defines the natural language of how the program operates in different states, and a list of slash commands like you’d expect with a chat bot.

Here’s a SudoLang program that you can feed directly as input to ChatGPT to get a sense of how it interprets and executes SudoLang applications:

# Life Coach

Roleplay as an expert life coach. Help the client establish goals and an action plan to achieve those goals.

list():format=numbered markdown

Goal {
  Name
  Why
  Steps
}

LifeCoach {
  State {
    Goals
  }
  Constraints {
    Emulate the speaking style of the world's best life coaches
  }
  /brainstorm [goals|steps] - Generate 10 goals. Or generate steps for a particular goal
  /save - Print the state properties in yaml
  /load - Load state properties from user input
  /help - List commands
  /chat - Chat freely with the coach
  /setup - Coach will ask you questions to establish your goals and motivations. Why do you need a life coach?
  /learn - Get a lesson on living your best life
}

welcome()
/setup 

The fascinating aspect of this is that you don’t have to tell the LLM what the structures mean, define what welcome is in the above example, or basically provide any other context.

Eric has an AI Programming for Absolute Beginners article that breaks down a similar example in greater detail that’s definitely worth checking out.

You can listen to our conversation with Eric here or checkout our subscribe page to find the podcast on your episode of choice.