WebKit switching to Skia for 2D graphics engine

How do the words you're reading right now appear on your screen?

Skia is a graphics engine that powers both Chrome and Android, software running behind the scenes that billions of people around the world interact with but have probably never heard of.

Your web browser is a highly sophisticated yet now quite boring piece of technology. Arc and SigmaOS have been interesting entrants into an otherwise stagnant industry.

We're a long way since 2009 when Sundar Pichai pitched why Chrome should exist and Chrome's success would pave his way to CEO. As Sundar mentions back then, and as covered in this amazing piece by the FT, the JavaScript engine that powers Chrome was written by Lars Bak who worked from home in Denmark (in 2009!) creating V8 the engine that powers Chrome that would then later be the core underlying technology of Node.js - which enables developers to write backend services in JavaScript.

Chrome originally used the WebKit browser engine, but then forked it to create Blink. For a browser engine to render things to your screen it a graphics engine, and Google bought one called Skia which interestingly was also developed outside of Silicon Valley - North Carolina.

Now well over a decade later, WebKit is moving to Skia in a move covered by Igalia.

Igalia is a fascinating company as covered by The New Stack:

"Calling Igalia influential and well respected in the browser development community is almost an understatement. In recent years, a number of senior developers have moved to Igalia from the browser engineering teams at Apple, Firefox, Google and other projects, giving the company expertise in codebases like WebKit, Gecko, Servo, SpiderMonkey, V8, Chromium and Blink; along with excellent connections to those projects, often with commit rights and membership of organizations like Blink API owners (which makes decisions about which developer-facing features become available in Chromium)."

Some really good comments on how this space is shaping up:

Not Boring - Venture Capital and Free Lunch

Packy McCormick had an excellent diagnosis here:

Take the current hype cycle in AI. Venture capitalists are pouring stomach churning amounts of money into foundation model companies. Billions of which will, for all intents and purposes, be lit on fire. The problem is: it’s hard to tell which billions until you put the money up and watch it play out. Venture capital is designed to put those chips on the table and see what happens. 

If history is a guide, most AI companies will go to zero, and a small handful will generate enough returns to carry the rest. Those returns will go to venture funds’ limited partners, the charities, endowments, pensions, and other individuals and institutions who invest in venture funds, who will take that money, reinvest some into the next generation of venture funds, and operate their institutions with the rest. 

Way back in 2007, before he became a VC himself, Marc Andreessen wrote:

The best VCs get to improve society in two ways: by helping new companies take shape and contribute new technologies and medical cures into the world, and by helping universities and foundations execute their missions to educate and improve people’s lives.

The world, for its part, may get AGI in the bargain. 

It is not from the benevolence of the venture capitalist that we expect our AGI, but from their regard to their own self interest.

Martin Klepmann on Local-first Applications

Local-first applications are a secret weapon in making apps feel fast. Humans hate waiting around, so lag or latency is important to get right in every app. This is one of the open secrets to why Linear feels faster than JIRA.

Local-first is also familiar to any mobile developer like myself who more often than not want to save data offline.

So I was intrigued when this local-first web development popped up and Martin Klepmman (most famous for this book, but more relevantly wrote this) was billed as a speaker. You can find his talk here.

In theme for this week where software comes from strange places, it seems this community is lead by a man called James Pearce who sails around the world with his wife on a boat.

What is is going on in Argentina?

Really good article on what paying for anything in a country with hyper-inflation looks like.

React Strict DOM

Big one!

I believe for any sufficiently mature technology UI platform - iOS, Android, Web, macOS, Windows - you should be able to write an application once, and it can render it to those platforms. React Native is the technology I bet on to fulfil those goals. I first encountered Nicolas Gallagher's React Native Web back in 2017 and it looks like he's taken those learnings and comments from the community and created React Strict DOM which is in production at Meta.

Lorenzo who is part of leading Microsoft's React Native efforts wrote out why this is a big deal:

The README pretty much spells out the answer: standard UI code (react components) across web and react-native 🤯
This elevates the old "write once, deploy everywhere" to a whole new level: one approach to code (no div vs view). This truly opens the door to sharing code between web and native: at the Microsoft level, this is A PRETTY BIG DEAL; improving the time-to-market of features across a range of apps on various platforms is 🌟

Things I don’t understand about AI - Elad Gil

Link

This means that people closest to the model and technology - ie AI researchers and infra engineers - were the first people to leave to start new companies based on this technology. The people farther away from the core model world - many product engineers, designers, and PMs, did not become aware of how important AI is until now.

"Just starting"

OpenAI incident

More technically, inference kernels produced incorrect results when used in certain GPU configurations.
https://status.openai.com/incidents/ssg8fh7sfyz3

Feels like we're at a technological reset where the hardware is less abstracted.

Supermaven

Buffer Annual 2023 Report

Link

I’ve followed Buffer for a longtime.

Buffer is a full remote, 4 day workweek company. That’s pretty rare? Do people slack off? How well does it work?

We’ve introduced the expectation of an ownership mindset, rather than an entitlement mindset, to our flexible work practices such as remote work and the 4-day workweek. These practices are designed to enable all of us to do the best work of our careers and to sustain that high level for many years. It's imperative that we take an ownership mindset to this type of flexibility that we've offered for years at Buffer. Put simply, we have to keep earning these benefits. These benefits are not something that individuals should feel entitled to, but rather something that we work hard as a group to achieve outcomes that allow us to keep maintaining this type of incredible working experience. It is important that we all give flexibility in order to get flexibility back. This means making ourselves available at odd hours from time to time to jump on an early morning meeting or late night meeting in order to have the connection and level of collaboration with our team to achieve all of our ambitious goals.

How does pay work?

While I believe around 80 is the right size for us, this is a small number for the revenue we have and the number of active users and paying customers we have. Our revenue (ARR) per employee at the end of 2023 was $233K, a high number compared to most tech companies. It's a testament to how much we achieve with the small team we are. Our above-market salaries reflect that we compensate in line with achieving a high level of performance. Every person really matters, great output from everyone in the team is vital if we're going to pull this all off. Therefore, we will make tough calls if needed where we don't see the level of performance we need to make the whole equation work.

Meta's new LLM-based test generator is a sneak peek to the future of development

Meta recently released a paper called “Automated Unit Test Improvement using Large Language Models at Meta”. It’s a good look at how Big Tech is using AI internally to make development faster and software less buggy. For example, Google is using AI to speed up code reviews.

Link

Apps as an expression of style