The Collective #886
On not using copilot * Composable SVG Shaders * Electrobun
Olá, creative makers! 👋
It's Monday, and we're starting the week with a mix of thoughtful insights and creative tools to kick things off right!
Trevor Lasn unpacks the ongoing battle over JavaScript's trademark, exploring how industry legends Ryan Dahl and Brendan Eich are challenging Oracle's hold and what it could mean for open-source evolution. Meanwhile, Tom MacWright raises some thought-provoking questions about whether tools like Copilot are helping or hindering creativity and problem-solving in coding.
If you've ever struggled with cookies, April King has a great breakdown of why handling them across browsers and servers feels like a minefield. And on the creative side, Shu's SVG filter tool brings shader-like effects to HTML elements.
Wishing you all a creative week!
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Trevor I. Lasn delves into the JavaScript trademark dispute, exploring how Ryan Dahl and Brendan Eich are challenging Oracle's control over the name and what this means for open-source software's evolution.
Tom MacWright reflects on why he doesn’t use coding assistants like Copilot daily, questioning their role in accelerating complexity, reshaping productivity, eroding skills, and turning programming into an exercise in managing rather than creating.
April King unpacks the complexities and inconsistencies of cookie handling across browsers, programming languages, and servers, highlighting the challenges in aligning standards with real-world behavior.
This article explores the difference between dependencies and devDependencies in JavaScript apps, offering practical, idealistic, and pragmatic approaches to managing them while highlighting their impact on security, performance, and development workflows.
Daniel Mangum explores how Bluesky's AT Protocol enables unconventional use cases, like hosting websites via blobs, showcasing the flexibility and extensibility of decentralized protocols while highlighting potential implications for content security and application design.
Franco Fernando breaks down the 8 classic fallacies of distributed systems, offering practical insights every engineer should know to avoid costly design pitfalls.
📽️ Cap
A lightweight, open-source alternative to Loom, making screen recording effortless with fast sharing, easy editing, and a privacy-first approach.
Shu’s experimental tool uses SVG filters to create shader-like effects for HTML elements, featuring creative transformations like rotation and waves. Optimized for Chrome, with the source code available on GitHub.
Montagu Slab is a slab-serif display typeface designed by Florian Karsten. The typeface draws inspiration from 19th-century classic designs and it is available as a variable font with weight and optical size axes.
🤖 Mastra
Mastra is an open-source TypeScript AI framework that simplifies building and productionizing AI features. It offers workflow orchestration, drop-in integrations with over 50 SaaS providers, and tools like vector database support for RAG, making it ideal for creating conversational agents, task automation, and advanced AI workflows in a modern JS/TS stack.
🖥️ Electrobun
Electrobun aims to be a complete solution-in-a-box for building, updating, and shipping ultra fast, tiny, and cross-platform desktop applications written in TypeScript.
A single dataset, 100 unique visualizations—this project highlights the versatility and storytelling potential of data visualization, demonstrating how diverse and insightful visuals can emerge from limited data properties.
🔍 JSON.pub
A lightweight, privacy-focused tool for visualizing JSON and other data formats (XML, base64, binary) entirely client-side. No tracking, no servers—just a clean, secure solution for raw data on any device.
A cool experiment where you can enter some text which will then appear as cracked glass image that you can download.
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Video Vault
Animation Spotlight
by Constantin Calcatinge
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Demo Corner
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❓Did you know that…
…the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V, and Ctrl+Z trace their origins to the Apple Lisa in 1983? While Xerox PARC introduced the concepts of Cut, Copy, Paste, and Undo in the 1970s, Apple’s Larry Tesler created these intuitive shortcuts, inspired by symbols like "X" for cutting, "C" for copying, and "V" for pasting (an insertion caret). They’ve since become universal across modern operating systems!
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