The Dev Times #74

Halfway through each month, our newsletter for developers: The Dev Times, brings three reads that our own developers found interesting on the web, and two Transloadit updates that may interest you.

OrbStack - a Docker Desktop alternative

The current solutions for managing VMs on your machine are slow, clunky and cumbersome. OrbStack wants to change this, by providing a fast and lightweight alternative to Docker Desktop. The difference in performance is night and day too, with provisioning times going from 45 minutes, to only 17 minutes. Plus, you'll barely even notice it's running, since it uses just 0.1% of your background CPU on Apple Silicon and less than 10 MB of disk space by default. Explore more ›

The AHA Stack

It is a cliché at this point that the JavaScript community loves to create new stacks, but we have to mention the AHA Stack. Using a combination of Astro, HTMX and Alpine.js, AHA opts to send HTML to the client, instead of the SPA JS-heavy approach that has been ubiquitous for a while now. This HTML-first approach aims to strip back some of the complexity that client-side libraries have brought, and return to a simpler time – when JS was sprinkled on top for added interactivity, rather than being the core of your website. Dive in ›

Speed up your linting process with Oxlint

Oxlint is now generally available! If you're not familiar, Oxlint is a JavaScript linter from the Oxc project that is designed to enhance ESLint, rather than replace it. Oxlint can identify erroneous, redundant or confusing code quickly, before you run ESLint – resulting in linting that is fifty to a hundred times faster. These aren't abstract numbers either: Shopify reported that using Oxlint reduced their 75-minute linting run with ESlint to only 10 seconds. Take a look ›

Automatically extract text from PDFs with AI

For a while now, we have offered AI-powered Robots that go beyond the normal capabilities of our Robots. For example, many of you may be familiar with our industrious /image/facedetect Robot that automatically recognizes faces within an image. It is perfect for identifying a face in an image and then cropping it for a user's profile picture. We are proud to announce a new addition to our AI Robots: the /document/ocr Robot! This new Robot can easily extract text from PDFs accurately, making it far easier to scan important documents, such as letters or invoices. Check it out ›

Deprecating our Heroku Addon

As we continue to evolve our services to better serve your needs, we sometimes have to make difficult decisions that help us focus on the areas that deliver the most value to the majority of our customers. Following careful analysis and consideration, we have decided to deprecate our Heroku addon from December 2023 onwards. Learn more ›