![]() Hope everyone enjoyed the Oscars last night (watching one twitter clip over and over doesn’t count). But we’ve got something much better for you today (better than the Oscars, not the twitter clip). So buckle up, and welcome to a very special issue, #93.
“This award is the #1 highlight of my professional career.” The OSScars — Part 1Welcome to the 1st annual OSScars — a very real awards show (that we made up) for giving very real awards (also made up) to a few VC-backed OSS startups. Unlike the real Oscars, I’m a physically safe distance away from any of the nominees tonight. Turns out, that’s a feature - not a bug. And the OSScar goes to… Best Performance — Astro. The static site generator of the future raised $7m back in January, and its “more HTML, less JavaScript” approach, super fast Go/WASM compiler, and new build engine (powered by Vite) helped make it a lock for best performance. Best Picture — Replit. Paul Graham’s favorite Best Adapted Screenplay — Remix. In this case, the screenplay they’re adapting is Vercel’s turn-a-popular-React-framework-into-a-devtool-that-makes-money. It’s too early to say exactly how successful this strategy will be, but the critic’s reviews are starting to pour in and it looks promising. Best Supporting Role — Rome Tools. They raised $4.5m last year in order to build an all-in-one tool that’s “designed to replace Babel, ESLint, webpack, Prettier, Jest, and others.” So far, all they’ve got is a Rust version of Prettier — but if they can achieve their vision, this one’s a lock. *Generic orchestra music starts playing* “We’ll be right back with the rest of the 1st annual OSScars after this quick word from our sponsor.”
Just ship it [sponsored] We finally used Retool. And it’s better than we thought.Story time: A month ago, we decided it was time to start paying attention to a few stats — like how many new people subscribed to Bytes, how they found us, etc. So we spent a few hours But then I remembered Retool. We signed up for a free trial — and it took me literally one afternoon to connect to all of our third-party data sources and to set up all the charts, tables, and graphs we could ever want by myself. It’s easily saved us 30+ hours of engineering time. And since our free trial is about to run out, we’re actually going to (gulp) start paying for it. (Truly the highest praise I can give.) Thankfully, startups can apply to receive one year for free — so we’ll try that out first. If you’re interested, check it out.
Remix when we mention their business plan The OSScars — Part 2Best Director — Guillermo Rauch (Vercel). He’s used his big-movie budget of over $313m to put together an Avengers level supporting cast of OSS. He’s also great on screen when he’s seducing us from his kitchen/living room/office into buying cloud hosting during Next.js Conf. Best Animated Feature — Framer. Starring Matthew Perry (we all know the OSScars are a big step up from the Primetime Emmy’s he was winning with Friends), Framer actually delivered on the bold claim that their “animations work like magic.” Best Original Story — Deno. The story of one man whose creation grows more popular and influential than he ever dreamed. But over time that success becomes stifling — he sees the flaws in his creation, but it’s too late to fix them. So what does he do? What any capitalist would. He makes the heart wrenching decision to leave his home, raise $5m, rearrange a few letters, and create a new runtime from scratch — Deno. Classic hero’s journey. Best Documentary Feature — Apollo GraphQL. Everyone loves good documentation, and Apollo channeled their inner Ken Burns to create docs that are well organized, easy to navigate, and perfectly detailed (not too much or too little). They just need to add that sweet Lifetime Achievement Award — Firebase. As we come to the close of tonight’s show, we want to salute one of the pioneers of VC-backed OSS (cue montage sequence). Firebase started back in 2011, raised $7m total, and got acquired by Google 3 years later. You can rest now, old sport. Bottom Line: Some of these companies are already making fat stacks of cash. But once the rest of them realize that they technically have to make money at some point too, just think about how many more hosting platforms we’ll have to choose from! 🔬 Spot the Bug — Sponsored by StreamPasswordless app authentication is the future. And this tutorial shows you how to easily integrate magic links using Stream & Supabase. OK this one’s not a bug, but why does this code work?
Specifically, why does Cool Bits
🔬 Spot the Bug Solution — Sponsored by StreamWhy does this code work?
As mentioned earlier, if you look at The reason is because the
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