Olivier Forget

I am going to try writing monthly updates on the progress of Dropserver development. Regardless of whether I have anything significant to share, I’ll post about the past month’s work. I’ll look at my commits and my notes (I take copious notes, arranged chronologically and in threads, but that’s the subject of a different post) and summarize what I worked on. Since this is the first such post it will cover all the work I’ve done from my last release in mid April until the end of June 2023.

One of the bigger challenges of developing Dropserver has been to somehow make it safe to run the user’s application code. In this long-ago post I relayed how I tried a number of different approaches, all of them being too difficult to make work until Deno arrived. Naturally that was not the end of the story. But first… Why Is Sandboxing Important in Dropserver? The goal of Dropserver is to make it possible for regular users to run server-side code of their choosing.

Inspired by Simon Willison’s post on making a Secret Santa app as a Datasette plugin I decided to write a minimalist Secret Santa app for Dropserver. Dropserver is my attempt at building a platform for hosting my own personal apps. A primary objective of DS is that it should be really easy for a developer, particularly a frontend developer, to write an app that can be hosted by Dropserver. DS accomplishes this by using a JavaScript runtime (Deno) and by providing many of the hard parts of backend apps baked in.

Deno is NodeJS reinvented. I like writing code for Deno, and I depend on it as a sandbox for Dropserver after trying many other approaches. Unfortunately the JavaScript community at large does not seem to be embracing Deno as much as I am. It seems many people are simply sticking with Node for now even though Deno 1.0 has been out since Spring 2020. I posted this on Mastodon last February: Deno’s mindshare in 2021 was in the single-digits and had only improved by one percentage point a year later.

Moxie Marlinspike’s article on web3 has resulted in huge amounts of conversation online about various aspects of the web and decentralization. One aspect that got a lot of attention, and one that I paid particular attention to given my current project is this statement: “People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will.” — Moxie Marlinspike I want to unpack why I think it’s very challenging to get non-technical end-users to run a home server of some sort, yet it’s not something I’d qualify as “will never happen” either.

I’ve been thinking a lot about open source lately, and wondering if there are alternative business models that could make it sustainable. This “app store” idea is one possibility. Motivation I always prefer using an open source application if I can find one that meets my needs. I am uneasy spending money on closed source solutions to any of my problems. It’s not the money that’s the issue. With an open source application I am more confident that there is no ill-intentioned code, and I can believe that even if development stalls, a sufficiently large user base will result in the application getting patches and other needed maintenance work, so that I can continue using it.

Kev Quirk managed to get himself on the front page of the orange site for his post on Dark Mode. The topic even drew 511 comments, some of which seemed to take this as a personal affront to their lifestyle choices. Now you’ve done it. Kev’s post was well researched and I learned a few things from it. Interestingly none of the reasons he cites for using light mode are reasons why I go light.

Last night, during the protests for #BlackLivesMatter, there was an urgent need to spread information to participants and others trying to help. In an effort to get that information out, people reached for tools that they could use quickly and effectively. One of these tools is Carrd, an online website builder that makes single-page websites or very simple multi-page sites. It is run by a solo founder-developer. Carrd is great. If you want to put a single-page or other simple website online, it gets the job done fast and well.

I was watching news coverage before SpaceX’s launch of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley when I noticed something that took me back to the very end of my aerospace career. Astronauts usually live in Texas near NASA’s JSC, and fly to KSC (or Russia) when it’s time to launch. During the Shuttle era they would fly in T-38s from Texas. For this trip they took one of NASA’s Gulfstreams, though it’s unclear why.

Sometimes it seems like search engines are amazing. And yes, for a lot of questions, they do get us an answer quickly. But other times search engines fail me. For example I might search for pages that talk about two topics together, and I’ll get results for a popular page about the first topic that happens to have a link to a page on the second topic in its navigation menu.