The Runtime

Rafael Is joined by JT one of the creators of a new shell, called Nushell. They talk about how Nushell blends the ambitions of a shell with those a programming language, and how the team went about building a shell that feels functional and modern, while also feeling familiar to a community with deep muscle memory with existing shells. JT also talks about how they went about “optimizing for fun” and creating a delighting experience from the beginning of the project.

Rafael is Joined by James Long to talk about ActualBudget, a "privacy focused" personal finance application with some unique technical characteristics. They talk about some of the benefits of offline-first applications from a product perspective, and some of the interesting and unexpected things about developing an application that diverges from the standard Server-Client SaaS model. They also go deep into the weeds to talk about absurd-sql, a project where sqlite is implemented using indexedDB instead of the filesystem as a persistence layer.

Rafael is joined by Bartek Iwańczuk, a core member of the deno team, to discuss some of the things that make deno such an exciting tool for development. They talk about why the team placed such an emphasis on conforming to web platform standards, the decision to move away from typescript in internal deno code, and the delicate balance between creating a new system and tech stack, while not alienating users who love npm and the node ecosystem.

Rafael is joined by Mark Henderson and Haadcode to talk about OrbitDB, a distributed database / data mesh for use in peer to peer applications. They talk about what it is like developing in the peer to peer field, talk about developing an oplog CRDT, complain a little bit about safari and browser storage limitations, and discuss how one of the core innovations in developing for p2p applications is finding the capacity to "think in a distributed way".

- https://orbitdb.org/

Rafael is joined by Caleb Porzio to discuss AlpineJs, a rugged minimal javascript UI framework. They get deep into the weeds about walking DOM trees, event listeners, and performance and benchmarking.

Rafael is joined by Rosano to discuss Zero Data Apps, a category of applications designed not to hold customer data, but to manipulate customer data that is under the customer's control.

There are some audio quality issues with this episode. Hopefully they aren't too apparent, but apologies in advance. 

Rafael is joined by Paul Frazee (@pfrazee) to discuss the now-shuttered CTZN peer to peer social network and some of the things it got right and wrong. They also talk about the importance of thinking about governance as we design the systems that govern our lives, and the social contract theory of cloud deployments.

Rafael is joined by Boris Mann to discuss Fission.codes and the Webnative SDK. They talk about the goals behind the webnative platform, and about some of the hard problems that people encounter trying to handle authorization and encryption in decentralized systems, and the ways those are being addressed by fission.

Webnative SDK: https://github.com/fission-suite/webnative

Tailscale: https://tailscale.com/

WireGuard: https://www.wireguard.com/

UCAN (User Controlled Authorization Networks): https://whitepaper.fission.codes/authorization/id-overview

Macaroons (stacked cookies): https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/41892.pdf

Simon Willison: https://simonwillison.net/, https://twitter.com/simonw

James Long: https://twitter.com/jlongster

James Long video on Actual Budget architecture: https://vimeo.com/522581747

Geoffrey Litt: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/

Rosano: https://rosano.ca/en/

Rosano on Zero Data Apps: https://fission.codes/blog/building-zero-data-apps-entrepreneurship-rosano/

Remote Storage API: https://remotestorage.io/

OpenCollective: https://opencollective.com/

#BuildSoftwareTogether: https://twitter.com/hashtag/buildsoftwaretogether

Note: The original upload of this episode contained a section of un-edited audio conversation at the beginning of the episode. It has now been removed.

Rafael is joined by Feross Aboukhadijeh, the author and maintainer of WebTorrent, StandardJS, and hundreds of other open source projects, to talk about his new file-sending app, Wormhole. Feross gets into the weeds about encryption and threat models, and talks about some of the complexities around creating a simple interface accross many different devices and browsers.

Rafael is joined by Ryan Carniato, the Author of SolidJS, a frontend reactive UI library. They discuss some of the similarities and differences between different UI frameworks, and talk about what things SolidJS has taken from react.