Lighting up a wall with CDN traffic

I have always had a deep fascination with objects that bridge the physical and digital worlds in creative ways. A few years ago, I built a web-connected traffic light as a first exploration into this area and since then I've been wanting to take on a bigger project. I knew I wanted my next project to have something to do with maps, since I love cartography. Given that my job involves building and operating Netlify's globally distributed CDN, I started wondering: could I build a map that shows live CDN traffic?

AI and the creator's funnel

Software generated entirely by AI is not an hypothetical future — it's a reality today. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that this is the largest shift in the history of this industry, unravelling before our eyes at an astonishing pace. As a professional software engineer, I've been closely watching this change and taking my time to gather my thoughts on what this means for my profession and for the world. This is my first shot at putting those into words.

You should know this before choosing Next.js

Picking the technology stack for a project is an important and consequential decision. In the enterprise space in particular, it often involves a multi-year commitment with long-lasting implications on the roadmap of the project, the pace of its development, the quality of the deliverables, and even the ability to assemble and maintain a happy team. The open-source software model is a fundamental answer to this.

Publishing Deno modules on Netlify

Runtimes like Node.js rely on a package manager and a registry to install and distribute modules, but Deno has a different spin. It allows developers to import modules directly from a URL, which can be hosted on a CDN, your own server, or really anywhere on the web. This level of flexibility brings infinite options, so I started looking for the best workflow to release modules in this new paradigm. This article describes the solution I landed on — one that works for solo open-source developers or large development teams in the enterprise world.

Shipping Node.js projects at Netlify

At Netlify, we use a diverse set of technologies, languages and paradigms to build our product. Along with Ruby, Go, Rust and others, we write quite a bit of JavaScript. All flavors of it. My team is responsible for several mission-critical Node.js services: the Netlify CLI, the build system and the serverless function bundler are just a few examples. Despite the sheer number of repositories we maintain, and especially considering that some of them are open-source projects with daily contributions from the community, you might be surprised to learn that our team is relatively small. I lifted the curtain on the tools and processes that we rely on to make this happen.

Running Staticman on Netlify Functions

In 2016, I started working on a tool to fill the gap in user-generated content on (what is now called) the Jamstack: Staticman. Since then, the entire ecosystem has grown by leaps and bounds, offering developers a set of tools and primitives that were mostly unreachable just four years ago.

Smashing Podcast Episode #11

I was a guest on episode #11 of Smashing Magazine's podcast. I had the opportunity to chat with Drew McLellan about Sourcebit and how it can help developers connect any datasource to their JAMstack sites. Have a listen!

Building a web-connected traffic light

Our lives are constantly flooded with information destined from the digital world: the sound of a Slack message on the laptop, a WhatsApp message popping up on the watch, or the email push notifications making our phones buzz incessantly. The screens we surround ourselves with are little black holes that are constantly teasing us with a snippet of information, knowing that we can't avoid getting sucked in to see more.

Custom JSON (de)serialisation in JavaScript

If you write JavaScript applications, you probably find yourself having to read and write data structures to local files or remote APIs, which means you're probably good friends with JSON.stringify and JSON.parse. We should really get to know our friends, so let's talk about something these methods do that you may not be familiar with.

What is an API?

Google Calendar API, Google Maps API, Twitter API, GitHub API, jQuery API, React API, the DOM API. Is everything an API? What is an API and how can it be such an ubiquitous concept, present in such a diverse range of platforms and technologies?

GitHub Pages as a blogging platform

There’s a huge number of platforms to choose from if you’re looking to build a blog. WordPress is a likely first candidate, as these days it powers over 30% of the entire web, but products like Medium, Blogger, or Wix, to name just a few, are also popular and powerful alternatives.

Server-side rendering

Server-side rendering (SSR) is a relatively new addition to the list of web development buzzwords, and that’s not because rendering websites on a server is a new concept – it’s just that until not too long ago, it didn’t make much sense to render them anywhere else.

What is a headless CMS?

I vividly remember the first time I’ve used a CMS. It was the early 2000s and I came across a tool called PHP-Nuke, a content management system that offered an administration interface from where content could be easily created and modified, requiring no technical knowledge whatsoever from the user.

Transforming JavaScript at the edge

One of the greatest challenges of building for the Web is the plethora of devices, operating systems and browser combinations that the product must support. How do you move this universal platform forward whilst retaining compatibility with older setups, which often still represent a significant percentage of the market? At its core, the technology of the Web has evolved quite conservatively over the years – we still have HTTP requests with verbs, headers and body. However, the applications that we build on top of them are as complex as ever, not only on the server, where the complexity of web applications has traditionally lived, but also on the client, with front-end applications handling astonishing amounts of business logic and data access operations.

Taking the guesswork out of web compatibility

The most powerful aspect of the web is also what makes it so challenging to build for: its universality. When you create a website, you’re writing code that needs to be understood by a plethora of browsers on different devices and operating systems. It’s difficult. To make the web evolve in a sane and sustainable way for both users and developers, browser vendors work together to standardize new features, whether it’s a new HTML element, CSS property, or JavaScript API. But different vendors have different priorities, resources, and release cycles — so it’s very unlikely that a new feature will land on all the major browsers at once.