Dear developers: build on Twitter again (for real this time)

Your first Deno CLI app, Twitter API 2.0, Epic goes to war & Node.js interview questions

No images? Click here

SitePoint Weekly – 18 August, 2020

🍓 The freshest resources, stories, and exclusive content for web developers, designers, and digital creators.

Pointed Advice

🦾 A selection of our latest articles and tutorials

Build a Command Line Weather App in Deno
Nilson Jacques

Have a go at writing your first Deno program. We install the Deno runtime, and create a command-line weather program that will take a city name and return the weather forecast for the next 24 hours.

21 Node.js Interview Questions with Solutions
Paul Orac

Preparing for a job interview is always a daunting task. Paul has compiled 21 Node.js questions for job interviews that cover the simple stuff to more technically advanced topics to help you in the process.

SVG 101: What Is SVG?
Maria Antonietta Perna

Get the bird's-eye view on SVG with our popular guide, which we've just updated our introduction to SVG for 2020. This starting point has been popular with readers, and we're committed to maintaining as much of our widely-used content as we possible.

GreenSock 3 Web Animation: Get to Know GSAP's New Features
Maria Antonietta Perna

GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP) is a powerful JavaScript animation library. In November, GSAP released version 3 — its most significant upgrade to date. We show you how to use the latest features.

Platform Problems

🍕 Web development and technology links from around the web

Vuely Noted
Web development, design, and tooling

The Faintest Notion
Computing, productivity, personal automation, and desktop customization

Log In to Facebook, Sheeple!
Technology news, society, and culture

♾️

After a short delay, the new Twitter API has arrived. It's a complete rebuild, and it focuses on improving the underlying architecture of the API as well as adding new features (conversation threading! poll results! pinned Tweets! spam filtering!)

This is very good news, and Twitter is one of the more interesting platforms to develop on when a sufficiently powerful API is available. And if you're interested in building on Twitter, I encourage you to do it. Hit reply when you've got something for me to look at!

There are issues to consider, though. Jack is certainly a better Twitter CEO than his predecessor and less sociopathic than the other guy at Facebook, but developers may be reticent to jump on his call-to-action straight away. By 2011, Twitter had become a real-time data juggernaut on the back of its incredible ecosystem, which was in turn powered by Twitter's incredible API. 600k developers, 900k apps, and 13 billion API requests a day — these were far more eye-watering numbers a decade ago than they are now. And even then the company was in DevRel-repair mode, to quote a younger me:

Twitter hired Costa in April after the company burned through most if its developer goodwill by telling developers to stop making Twitter clients and revoking UberMedia’s API access for two days. The #devnest event was set up by Costa after the larger Twitter developer conference, Chirp, was discontinued.

Costa must have pulled out a great deal of hair during his tenure in this role — one of the earliest developer relations roles (evangelists in their earlier form aside), I believe, and not one made easy by a culture of consistent developer enablement. Twitter would repeatedly go on to set fire to everything developers made and then shortly thereafter coax them back again, and is perhaps the most notorious Boy Who Cried Wolf in the business.

But it works, because a real-time firehose of humanity's* collective consciousness is too good of an opportunity to pass up. And not just because of the advertising value that can be extracted. Some of the most interesting experiments of the Web 2.0 era took place on the back of the Twitter API.

Only time will tell where we end up this time.

* The hardly-representative sample that uses Twitter, at least.

♾️

You have most likely seen the news that Epic Games has coordinated an assault against monopolistic app store policies by way of courtroom. Last week it baited Apple and Google into pulling Fortnite from their app stores, and after this occurred as planned, immediately filed suits and posted a 1984-themed video clip showing a Fortnite character throwing the seminal hammer (pickaxe, actually, in this case).

You don't need me to tell you that 1984, Fortnite Edition is a dig at the Apple 1984 commercial and a criticism of the company as underdog-turned-rentseeker. There are plenty of pro-monopolists telling you that Apple is still all about the Crazy Ones, really, we promise, and nobody is stupid enough to say that Epic Games is a perfect company. But it's nice to see them throwing resources behind a wild, probably-doomed gamble that applies pressure to create better conditions for all mobile developers, small and large.

And while I don't expect to find many pro-monopolists in this developer-heavy audience, it's important to remember what the platform-building business strategy is all about. It involves making a milkshake that brings all the developers to your yard so that the diversity and quality of choice in apps and services makes your platform a place worth being.

The tired line that Apple should stand to benefit — to the tune of 30% of a company's revenue, in the case that they are all-in on iOS! — because of services provided is lazy PR spin under the most kindhearted interpretation. Developers do Apple the service of building on its platform; it's no surprise that it is hard to recall that reality when you are in a position as fortified as Apple's, but it is the case regardless.

Apple has indeed forgotten. The company's latest response has been to warn Epic that it'll terminate all of its development tools and accounts on Mac and iOS, regardless of their relation to Fortnite, unless it complies. This is significant because Epic Games is also behind Unreal Engine, one of the predominant game engines alongside Unity. Fortnite is already off the App Store — how is this anything other than blackmail and retaliation?

There are some key differences that I'd like you to overlook for simplicity, but this is similar to Apple turfing React out of its platforms over a dispute with Facebook — the ultimate effect is that it would disenfranchise developers en-masse far more than it would affect Facebook, and impede the Apple user's ability to access the expected content and software. This is the kind of decision-making that we've seen undo platforms in the past. Even and especially those that were too big to fail.

It should be noted that Apple has, in the past, shown a capacity to war with one side of a business while proceeding as normal with another. It is surprisingly motivated to retain its 30% of V-Bucks sales via Fortnite for iOS.

Cory Doctorow provides the key reminder about the bargain Apple strikes with its developer community:

Some of the criticism directed at Epic accuses it of similar misdeeds, attracting developers to its platform with timed exclusives — and while you are welcome to take issue with that, the criticism only really shines light on what Epic has done to re-enliven competition in the open PC space which had previously long been dominated by a complacent and sluggish Valve Corporation. Epic's entrance into that market has undeniably made life better for the game developer and the gamer, even if you never use the Epic Games Store or play any Epic game.

As Mark Gurman says, Google Play escapes the worst of the criticism because its similar rules are softened by the ability to use other stores and other payment methods. The comparison being made between Apple and Epic suffers from similar flaws. Apple milks its developers by force, crushes them when they resist, and still pretends to be the quirky, fun-loving, creatively-empowering trillion-dollar tech company.

As always, Ben Thompson has a very good analysis of the situation, and of why the App Store deal has become less fit for purpose over time. Though he faults the specifics of Apple's setup, he's a fan of the one App Store model — I think there's room for the ability to opt-in to side-loading or alternative stores for those of us who believe we have the power user competencies to manage the risks — but it's a good read no matter which side you stand on.

♾️

Mozilla reduced its workforce in key areas last week as 2020 has continued to wander astray of everyone's intentions. This includes all of the writers on the MDN — a resource we all depend on. Simon Mackie, whose fine work is responsible for our books, courses, and all the knowledge contained within Premium, brought this comment from Rachel Andrew to my attention:

Take it from us when we tell you that the expense — whether in time, cost, or pursuing other opportunities — in writing solid technical content is far greater than that needed for the work you'll find on Wikipedia for a much narrower audience. As knowledgable as the expert contributors there may be, it is another kind of content.

How Mozilla gets its house in order is one thing. For MDN specifically, this is a tragedy-of-the-commons sort of situation. It's a great loss, and while we encourage you to contribute what time you can, it's nearly certain that MDN will lose its gold-standard status over time.

There's already been a great deal of discussion about the perils of our increasing over-reliance on the Chromium-WebKit Complex (can we make that a thing?). I won't rehash it here. What I will tell you is that you should use browsers with alternative engines, like Firefox, even if it's just part-time. The health of the web is at stake.

You should support Firefox when you build things at a bare minimum. But if or when you don't, try to have more shame than Sonos, which dares to claim that its lack of browser compatibility is the browser's fault:

♾️

The Roadmap

Founder spotlights, advice for makers from the web, and a place to share your early-stage projects with the rest of the community. Get in touch with us and tell us a bit about your project to be featured.

Meet Polypane, a Browser That Makes You Five Times Faster - Founder Spotlight
Kilian Valkhof

When you open Polypane, you don’t see just a website. You see your website at multiple screen sizes at the same time, just as if you had a bunch of devices on your desk. What’s better, though, is that all these screen sizes are synced: if you interact with one you interact with all of them. And that's just the beginning.

Land in our DMs with those 🔥 links.

Found a link you think would look great in the next issue of SitePoint Weekly? Did you perhaps even create it? Drop it here and we'll take a look.

🥳 Win a $100 Amazon gift voucher

We're keen to get your help. We want to understand our newsletter readers and the technology choices they make, so we can connect you with the most useful resources and content.

We're running our newsletter reader survey for the next two weeks. At the end of that period we'll draw two winners to receive a $100 Amazon gift voucher.

➤ Fill out our newsletter reader survey

Connect with the community

We'll see you in the next edition — in the meantime, connect with us for a chat through our various communities or on social media:

🛳️ If you'd like to share the newslettery love with your friends, we've created a shareable signup page just for them.

Thanks for reading, and for being part of the SitePoint community!

👋

Joel Falconer
Managing Editor