Console DevTools

In this episode, we speak with Matt Butcher, CEO at Fermyon. We discuss the four use cases for WebAssembly, why Wasm’s sandboxed approach is so secure, whether there's any danger retrofitting other use cases onto a language that was originally designed for the web, and how limitations like the lack of full networking support are going to be resolved.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

• OpenStack
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Helm
• The Illustrated Children's Guide to Kubernetes
• Microsoft
• SingleStore
• Shopify
• VMware
• Fermyon Spin
• Fermyon Cloud
• Wizer
• wasm-opt
• MacBook Pro
• Dell Ultrawide Monitor
• iPad

ABOUT MATT BUTCHER

Matt Butcher is the CEO of Fermyon. He is also a software engineer, tech author, speaker, and ex-professor. Formerly a principal software development engineer for Microsoft, he led a team of engineers that built open-source tools for cloud-native computing. They were responsible for Helm, Draft, OAM, Brigade, Krustlet, CNAB, Porter, Duffle, the VS Code Kubernetes Extension, and many others. Together with a team of 10 people from Deis Labs at Microsoft, he started Fermyon, a lighter, faster, and truly serverless cloud, architected to compile and ship code as Wasm binaries.

Highlights:

[Matt Butcher]: When Luke wrote his first blog post and said, “This is for a web browser,” it was built to not be particularly web-browser specific. It really just defined a machine code format in a way to execute that format. That was what kind of drew us to it as a technology. In the core WebAssembly 1.0 specification, there's nothing in there that binds you to a web browser environment, it’s just a straight-up runtime definition. So it was fairly easy to sort of pluck out a WebAssembly runtime and drop it somewhere else. In fact, there are several different WebAssembly runtimes that are not based on the browser at all. — [0:13:36 - 0:14:13]

[Matt Butcher]: If I were thinking about writing a new database, a new high-performance, multithreaded database, WebAssembly would not be the format I would target for this, right? Because there, you want to be able to do a lot of low-level management. Every little microsecond that you can tease out of IO and process manipulation is valuable. So I don't think we'll see those kinds of highly, highly IO-intensive tasks really land in WebAssembly for years because it's going to take the ecosystem a long time to really tune up and be fine-grained enough to deal with those things without compromising on security. It is possible that maybe never will we really want to write the kind of high-performance databases or high-performance number-crunching computing kinds of systems in WebAssembly. — [0:27:57 - 0:28:44]

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

Or by email: [email protected]

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

In this episode, we speak with Kurt Mackey, CEO of Fly.io. We discuss what it's like running physical servers in data centers around the world, why they didn't build on top of the cloud, and what the philosophy is behind the focus on pure compute, networking, and storage primitives. Kurt sheds light on the regions where Fly.io is most popular, why they’re adding GPUs, and the technology that makes it all work behind the scenes.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

• Ars Technica
• Y Combinator
• MongoHQ
• ServerCentral (now Deft)
• MiamiNAP
• AWS
• The Everything Store
• Vercel
• Simon Willison
• Django dataset
• ChatGPT
• Nvidia
• Firecracker VM
• Nomad
• Phoenix
• LiteFS
• SQLite
• Hacker News
• Elixir
• Deno Fresh
• Remix
• M2 MacBook Air
• Nvidia A100 GPU
  

ABOUT KURT MACKEY

Kurt Mackey is the CEO of Fly.io, a company that deploys app servers close to your users for running full-stack applications and databases all over the world without any DevOps. He began his career as a tech writer for Ars Technica and learned about databases while building a small retail PHP app. He went to Y Combinator in 2011 where he joined a company called MongoHQ (now Compose) that hosted Mongo databases which he sold to IBM, before turning his attention to building Fly.io.

Highlights:

[Kurt Mackey]: The original thesis for this company was there's not really any good CDNs for developers. If you could crack that, it'd be very cool. The first thing we needed was servers in a bunch of places and a way to route traffic to them. What we wanted was AnyCast, which is kind of a part of the core internet routing technology. What it does is it offloads getting a packet to probably the closest server, to the internet backbones almost. You couldn't actually do AnyCast on top of the public cloud at that point. I think you can on top of AWS now. So we were sort of forced to figure out how to get our IPs, we were sort of forced into physical servers for that reason. For a couple of years, it felt like we got deeply unlucky because we had to do physical servers. You’d talk to investors, and they'd be like, “Why aren’t you just running on the public cloud and then saving money later?” Then last year, that flipped. Now, we're very interesting because we don't run on the public clouds.

— [0:11:14 - 0:12:03]

[Kurt Mackey]: I think there's another thing that we've probably all reckoned with since 2011; a lot of the abstractions were wrong. As the front end got more powerful, I think we tried a lot of different things for— and what we ended up doing was inflicting this weird distributed systems problem on frontend developers. So I think that, in some ways, we just have the luxury of ignoring a lot of things that people have been trying to figure out for 10 years because we probably think that's wrong at this point. So we happen to be doing well at a time when server-side rendering is all the rage in a front-end community, which is perfect for us and nobody really cares about shipping static files around in the same way. I think it's just evolutionary. We kind of have a different idea of what's right now and can do simpler th...

In this episode we speak to Connor Hicks, Founder of Suborbital, a serverless platform powered by WebAssembly. We discuss how WebAssembly works, when you’d use AssemblyScript rather than other languages which compile to WASM, the use cases for deploying WebAssembly on the backend, and how the dev, test, build, deploy, and observability cycle works when creating code in WebAssembly.

About Connor Hicks

Connor Hicks is based in Ottawa, Canada, and is the founder of Suborbital Software Systems. Connor works primarily on security and distributed systems projects including the Suborbital family of open source projects, and formerly led research and development at 1Password. Connor is a strong believer in building security and privacy into the core of all software, and is exploring the next iteration of web service development with technologies like WebAssembly.

Other things mentioned:

• Suborbital
• WebAssembly
• One password
• Wordpress
• Bytecode Alliance
• wasmtime
• Rust
• Go
• Shopify
• Cargo
• Trunk
• TinyGo
• Swift
• OpenTelemetry
• Hashicorp Nomad
• GoReleaser
• Caddy
• Elgato
• VS Code
• Discord
• Notion
• Firefox
• Miro

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/cohix

Or by email: [email protected]

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev
Recorded: 2022-04-11.

In this episode we speak to Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a platform for globally distributed applications. We discuss the meaning of “developer experience”, how complexity is managed to help developers get started quickly but still be able to scale multiple systems, the role of monorepos and monolithic application architectures, and how to think about globally deployed serverless databases.

About Guillermo Rauch

Guillermo Rauch is CEO of Vercel. Before starting Vercel in November 2015, Guillermo was the CTO and co-founder of LearnBoost and Cloudup, acquired by Automattic in 2013. He is the creator of several popular Node.js open source libraries like Socket.io, Mongoose and Slackin. Prior to Node.js, he was a core developer of the MooTools frontend toolkit. Passionate about open source as an education medium, he is a former mentor of an Open Source Engineering class organized and pioneered by Stanford, with students from Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UPenn, Columbia and others.

Other things mentioned:

• Vercel
• NextJS
• Turbo Repo
• Copilot
• Neovim
• Edge functions
• SvelteKit
• MacBook Pro M1
• Notion
• Slack
• GitHub

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/rauchg

Or by email: [email protected]

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev
Recorded: 2022-04-27.

In this episode we speak to Michelle Lim and Zach Lloyd, both of Warp, a terminal designed to make developer workflows more productive. We discuss the historical significance of physical terminals, terminal emulators, pseudo-terminals and the shell. We also explore why Rust is a better technology choice than Electron for building a new terminal, why GPU acceleration matters, how it works with the macOS Metal APIs, and discuss the challenges garbage collection brings to high performance UIs.

Get early access to Warp with this special invite code: https://app.warp.dev/download/r/1CNSLE

About Michelle Lim & Zach Lloyd

Zach Lloyd is the founder and CEO of Warp, a Rust-based terminal for developers. Michelle is a software engineer who joined early on. Prior to Warp Zach co-founded SelfMade, was CTO at Time Inc., and ran the Google Sheets team at Google. Michelle graduated from Yale and previously worked at Robinhood, Slack, and Facebook.

Other things mentioned:

• iTerm
• VT100
• tmux
• Fish
• SSH
• bash
• GitHub Actions
• Rust
• Electron
• Garbage collection
• OpenAl
• Metal
• Xcode
• OpenAi Codex
• Retool
• Keyron
• CLion
• Logitech Ergo K8060

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/michlimlim

https://twitter.com/zachlloydtweets/

Or by email: [email protected]

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Recorded: 2021-11-02.