Turso goes all-in on the edge

Today’s issue: Prizz nation gets a speed boost, invisible UI details make our hearts happy, and the JavaScript musical that has audiences foaming at the mouth.

Welcome to #204.

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Turso goes all-in on the edge

16 months ago, we wrote about how a startup called ChiselStrike was building a serverless platform that let you create RESTful backends with simple TypeScript definitions.

10 months later, they launched a private beta of Turso — an edge-hosted, distributed DB that lets you bring your data to the edge with their forked version SQLite called libSQL.

That got a lot of folks real excited — because running your app on the edge is great, but it won’t actually be any faster unless your data is on the edge too. And Turso gave us all a pretty easy way to do that.

Fast forward to today, and the team has become much more well-known for Turso than for their OG ChiselStrike platform. So they decided to embrace the wisdom of the crowd by changing their name to Turso and focusing 100% of their efforts on the edge DB platform.

Some might call this selling out, but hey — nobody knew who Stefani Germanotta was until she started making pop hits for the masses and changed her name to Lady Gaga.

So what’s next for the artist formerly known as ChiselStrike Turso? Scaling up. 📈

The private beta only offered a free starter plan, which was pretty generous (9 GB and 3 DBs), but wasn’t robust enough to use in production. So they just launched a new Scaler Plan, which is paid (boo), but does seem to provide enough storage and features to make it usable for big-time production apps (yay).

This release also comes with CLI improvements, a new Turso web UI, and a fully exposed Turso platform API — which lets you integrate it with your own solution. And thankfully, the free tier isn’t going anywhere.

Bottom Line: If we can get everyone’s data running on the edge, it’ll feel like we all live right next door to us-east-1 every time we use the web — but we won’t actually have to move to Virginia 🙏.

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Sleuth will help your team ship software like Netflix and Amazon

Tracking “developer productivity” is stupid for at least two reasons:

1. Developers hate it (pls stop spying on me).
2. It doesn’t work (seeing who closed the most tickets doesn’t help anyone).

That’s why Sleuth is the best. It doesn’t track developer productivity — it only measures team output. And it actually works, because it captures your team’s all-important DORA metrics, to help improve your collective engineering efficiency over time.

Sleuth’s CEO, Dylan Etkin, wrote a great e-book to help you get started: The Ultimate Guide to Going from Zero to One Hundred Deploys a Day. It shares how teams at Amazon, Google, and Netflix went from deploying once a week to hundreds of times a day — and how your team can apply those same principles, no matter what size.

Try Sleuth free for 30 days, and check out the e-book to start improving your team’s efficiency today.

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CSS’s currentColor property (that we mostly all know and love) allows you to use the current color of an element as the value for another property. This is useful for things like borders, outlines, and box shadows. But did you know that you can adjust the transparency dynamically?

body {
  font-family: sans-serif;
  color: lightpink;
  background-color: black;
}

div {
  padding: 16px;
  border-style: solid;
  border-color: color-mix(in srgb, transparent 60%, currentColor);
}

The color-mix function in CSS returns a new color value by mixing two colors together by a given percentage. The first argument is the color space, the second is the percentage, and the third is the color to mix with. Combined with currentColor, it is very useful.

You can checkout a demo here

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1. Rauno Freiberg wrote a great article on the Invisible Details of Interaction Design. TLDR, John Mayer was right: “Your brain doesn’t know it, but your heart can tell.”

2. Prisma 5.0 just came out with some perf upgrades that make it “significantly faster,” especially in serverless environments. Get hyped, Prizz Nation.

3. On the Chrome blog, Yuriko Hirota wrote A case study on scroll-driven animations performance — which compares a new set of scroll-driven platform APIs vs. the classic JavaScript scroll animation techniques. I bet I know who wins.

4. Zero created an easy way to integrate 3rd-party API credentials into your project. Their SDK is available for TypeScript, Rust, Python, and Go. [sponsored]

5. Wasp is a Rails-like framework for React, Node.js and Prisma that just had a big launch week, where they announced a bunch of new features. Still waiting for Ant-Man launch week.

6. Mary Branscombe wrote an article called Beyond Browsers: The Longterm Future of JavaScript Standards. As someone who defines time exclusively by the bi-weekly newsletter issues I write, it was interesting to think about the future (beyond next Monday) for a change.

7. Material Web Components (Google’s UI toolkit) just launched its v1.0 beta.

8. Remotion just launched v4.0 of its tool for creating videos with React code. We’re currently using it to produce our full-length motion picture musical, Cats: but JavaScript. It was supposed to come out the same day as Barbie and Oppenheimer, but the studios didn’t think #Pussbarheimer would catch on.