DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Web3 hype

Hello everyone! I’m Sébastien Dubois, your host. You’re receiving this email because you signed up for DeveloPassion’s Newsletter. Thank you for being here with me ✨

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Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one.

Today, my son Raphaël is officially one month old. Now that he’s born, he can open his eyes and discover the world. He sees us, hears us more clearly, interacts with us, and evolves very quickly. For instance, he started gazing at us a few days ago. Before that, he squinted a lot and did not eye-track. It took him some time to learn to properly use his eyes.

The funny thing is that he was supposed to be born only in a few days (October 21st!). This got me thinking…

I’ve been wondering about the impact that being born prematurely has on his development. If he was still in the womb of his mother, he wouldn’t have experienced all of that. So, in a way, not only is he born earlier, but he gets to experience the world differently a month sooner. Anyhow, this reminds me that I really want to dive into neuroscience one of these days! 😂

Web3 has been all the rage on Twitter recently, to a point where it almost eclipsed the JavaScript noise, which is impressive, to say the least.

I was curious, so I’ve participated in a one-hour workshop about Web3 organized by Orbit.

The workshop was led by The Web 3.0 Girl, who did a great job at explaining the key parts.

First, how Web3 relates to Web 1.0 and 2.0:

Then the core components:

And finally, the core tenets:

Web3 is about decentralization, as well as the free flow of information and value. It’s about moving away from intermediaries that hold/control both our data and applications (e.g., Google and other FAANG like Microsoft, Amazon, etc). It’s about breaking silos and creating more transparent organizations and communities.

Our personal data is currently held by huge corporations as well as dozens of SaaS businesses that aren’t transparent at all and whose incentives are not necessarily aligned with our best interests. We’re using free services, but in exchange we give up our privacy, lose control over our own information, and end up being stuck with vendors that have their own agendas.

One key aspect is that data/information silos limit innovation. While that creates business opportunities for integration solutions like Zapier, it also makes our lives more complicated than necessary and makes our workflows rely on often brittle integration layers.

Interestingly, the SOLID project of Tim Berners Lee that I’ve been following since the early days is actually part of the “Web3 movement”, as it aims to decouple data from the applications that manipulate it.

I’m super enthusiastic about the ideas behind Web3. There’s no doubt that Web3 is not a fad. It’ll have an important impact on the IT industry, the creator economy (e.g., shared ownership, community-oriented creation, the democratization of wealth and success, etc), and the whole world.

I’m by no means an expert, but I’m curious and want to factor in ideas about Web3 into my next projects.

If you don’t know anything about Web3 yet and the potential it holds for the future, then check out the recording of the session. Note that the Miro board that was used is also publicly available.

And here are a few additional links you might find useful:

I did not publish anything new this week, but I want to remind you about best practices around code comments. If you write code, then learn to write great comments:

Also, in case you’ve missed it, here’s a Twitter thread that I shared a while ago about the downsides of microservices:

Here’s a new idea for the newsletter. In this section, I’ll try to share one thing that amazed me recently on the Web. It may be code, it may be a game, it may be an idea.

This week, it’s how people can be creative, even with something as basic as HTML checkboxes:

At the moment, I’m mostly reading non-fiction. But I do read fiction on the back burner (~10-20 minutes a day). I enjoy reading many authors, but in recent years the two that I read the most are Stephen King and Dean Koontz.

Currently, I’m reading this one by Dean Koontz:

I stumble on too many interesting things each week. I’m thinking about sending an additional issue of this newsletter from time to time, to share more of my discoveries. Reply to tell me what you think about this idea!

Here are a few links that I found interesting this week: