DEV Community: Boris Mann

Fission Fragments May 27th Weekly Links

Boris Mann — Wed, 27 May 2020 23:35:39 +0000

Fission Fragments is our weekly links roundup, that has been on hiatus ... for a while. We're going to get back to weekly, usually Wednesdays, and will be posting in the forum. You can also subscribe by email.

Alcro, an Electron competitor that uses Chrome devtools and websockets

Via @bascule, we found out about Alcro:

Tony “Abolish ICE” Arcieri 🦀

@bascule

Alcro: a Rust library for building desktop apps using web technologies by leveraging an existing installation of Chrome (rather than shipping the entire Chromium/Blink engine for each app like Electron)
github.com/Srinivasa314/a…

18:50 PM - 21 May 2020

2 18

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Tauri Studio - An Electron competitor that uses webview

Found via the bascule Alcro Twitter discussion, Tauri is another project to build native desktop apps with web technologies. It features a Node based CLI and a Rust backend, although the project aims to be polyglot:

Today, Tauri uses Rust for the backend - but in the not too distant future, other backends like Go, Nim, Python, Csharp etc. will be possible. This is because we are maintaining the offical Rust bindings to the webview organisation and plan to let you switch out the backend for your needs. Since our API can be implemented in any language with C interop, full compliance is only a PR away.

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Git LFS with IPFS Support

As part of some ongoing research, @ellttBen found an implementation of Git Large File Storage (LFS) integration with IPFS, sameer/git-lfs-ipfs.

This has given us some good ideas of how to integrate a git-based development workflow with IPFS and Fission.

Binary files of all kinds can be stored with your git repo, but then transparently stored in IPFS, rather than checked in and bloating the size of your repo. This could be particularly interesting for large photos, videos, and in general media files and assets.

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Slack vs Discord vs Discourse: the best tool for your community, Orbit Blog

Our friends at Orbit (you know, makers of the Orbit Model of Developer Engagement, also in our forum) wrote up a giant community platforms blog post that’s a really good summary of pros and cons to help you decide Slack vs Discord vs Discourse.

We’re on Discord and Discourse, and also use it for our private / internal company spaces, too, which isn’t really covered in the Orbit post. We’ll get around to writing up our story at some point!

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Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch, says we need "Yes Code" rather than "No Code"

At the beginning of May, Anil posted No Code is great, but here's why we need Yes Code to LinkedIn.

We believe in a lot of these same concepts at Fission, along with additional step of making it so that users can own their own data, which should make it even easer to hack and remix apps and websites.

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I want to own the database that my apps use, Grant Orndorff

Speaking of things we believe in and owning user data, Grant's post about how he envisions users owning the data of apps they use is very similar to what we're building at Fission. He covers SOLID and Urbit and how they're not quite what he has in mind.

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Fission Updates

Brooke explains her design of UCAN, a user authorization method that doesn't need a backend, that we're implementing at Fission:

User Controlled Authorization Networks (UCANs) are a way of doing authorization where users are fully in control. OAuth is designed for a centralized world, UCAN is the distributed user controlled version.

This week's video chat is with Qri, an open source version control and sharing system for datasets, built on IPFS -- join us Thursday, May 28th, at 9am PDT / 12noon EDT / 1800 CEST.

Fission is building a web native file system, plus tools to build & host apps with user controlled data, encryption, and local first software. This makes it easy for front end devs to build great apps without worrying about backend or deployment.

Experimenting with HLS Video Streaming and IPFS

Boris Mann — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 17:09:39 +0000

We've been running weekly developer lunch & learn sessions over video. I've been downloading the video from Zoom, doing some basic trimming, and then uploading it using Fission, and embedding the IPFS link in our Discourse forum. This works pretty well – Discourse recognizes the video file extension and embeds a video player in the post automatically. I had read a bit about HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and wanted to experiment.

Originally developed by Apple, and now widely supported, HLS doesn't need any special server-side support. A bit more in this freeCodeCamp article:

The most important feature of HLS is its ability to adapt the bitrate of the video to the actual speed of the connection. This optimizes the quality of the experience.

HLS videos are encoded in different renditions at different resolutions and bitrates. This is usually referred to as the bitrate ladder. When a connection gets slower, the protocol automatically adjusts the requested bitrate to the bandwidth available.

– freeCodeCamp: HLS Video Streaming: What it is, and When to Use it

There's an example in the JavaScript implementation of IPFS about using HLS with js-ipfs. The README explains:

The fact that HLS content is just "a bunch of files" makes it a good choice for IPFS (another protocol that works this way is MPEG-DASH, which could certainly be a good choice as well). Furthermore, the hls.js library enables straightforward integration with the HTML5 video element.

"Just a bunch of files" is pretty much how we're thinking about Fission. Fission and any standard IPFS gateway serves up files over HTTP and/or natively with IPFS, without plugins, in any browser. It's really great to get back to what is basically the 2020 equivalent of upload files to the server.

I took the latest video file of Joel talking about Ceramic Network and ran the ffmpeg command from the js-ipfs example. On MacOS, brew install ffmpeg will get you the program.

ffmpeg -i ../YOURVIDEO.mp4 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -start_number 0 -hls_time 5 -hls_list_size 0 -f hls master.m3u8

On my desktop iMac, the progress showed to be encoding at 4x - 5x speed. The video is about an hour, so it took about 20 minutes to complete. The output is 400+ files, which I uploaded with fission up and then noted down the hash of the folder.

Browse the files on IPFS using Fission Drive

Then I went back and edited the streaming.js folder and index.html. The streaming.js file just needs the hash of the folder that contains the HLS-encoded video, which for this video is QmYGs1ksGX3eMiGvxNuvRT6PD7zPKZpHyiUDXKGQoL4R7S. Feel free to use this to experiment with! I kept the master.m3u8 file name so didn't need to change that.

One change I made was to to also include the IPFS script from a CDN in the index.html file (the js-ipfs example assumes you're running things locally and working with js-ipfs from there). Just add this line:

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/ipfs/dist/index.min.js"></script>

You can browse all the files directly using Fission Drive, including the source video that was encoded. Visiting the index page will load the player and HLS stream the video.

Example HLS Video

Here's the source and video embedded via Codepen – hit the HTML button to view source. Note the Fission gateway link to the published version of the streaming.js file, also remotely included:

The video isn't very high quality to begin with, and adding width/height to the video element could constrain it to different sizes.

More about Joel and Ceramic Network on the forum event page »

Conclusion

This is a very manual process, and there are lots of dedicated video encoding services. It was a good experiment to see that anything that is a "bunch of files" can just work over the distributed IPFS network, and easily published and hosted on Fission.

Experimenting with a large, high quality video and testing across different devices and network speeds (and whether or not nearby peers had a copy of the video) would need to be done vs. just embedding the original video to see what the user experience is actually like.

This also leads to some interesting thoughts about distributed encoding. Once an original video is encoded and added to the network by one person, it never needs to be encoded again. From some brief research, ffmpeg is not deterministic, which lead to this thread on Mastodon. This means that different people encoding a video could get different output files, which means different hashes in IPFS.

However, the original video file is unique, so adding metadata to the original source video file for discovery of the unique, permanent hash of an HLS-encoded version could work.

We're currently doing some work on how to do this for images, so that different sizes are automatically available and cached in the network.

Fission is an app & web hosting platform that implements a web native file system powered by IPFS. Build and run locally, fission up to host everywhere. Read our guide to get started and sign up right from the command line.

What colour is your yak? Visualizing developer jargon

Boris Mann — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 18:05:00 +0000

We're creating illustrations for developer concepts, catch phrases, and other jargon. Yak shaving is one of those terms. It's fun to dig into the concepts and learn about their background, teach other people about them, and we get some cool images to use in a number of different ways that aren't just company branding. We have ideas for some new illustrations, we're happy to take other suggestions and have people vote for their favourites.

Bear and Penguin

We had fun last year sourcing the Bear and Penguin illustration for the Berlin Open Source Salon. The inner meaning here is that the bear is the coat of arms for the city of Berlin – the "Berliner Bär". The bear is holding a Club Mate drink, traditional drink of German hackers (although I know at one time the Mozilla Vancouver team imported it for their office fridge, too!). And the penguin is the long time mascot of Linux.

Wizards and Snakes

Since then, we've worked with Bruno Monts, an illustrator based in Brasil, to create a number of other illustrations.

We just released the Haskell Wizards series, written up in our Haskell for Typescript Devs book:

SCREAMING SNAKE CASE was just a pure piece of fun, with the vaporwave stylings pushed to the max. We did a first run of stickers with this image, and can't wait to come up with t-shirts or other swag with this fun image:

Vote for developer jargon to illustrate

We're going to get some more illustrations made, and have a couple of ideas already:

Kebab case wouldn't be vaporwave, but maybe a sort of comic / graphic art – a delicious kebab, dripping sauce.
The Elm programming language is a favourite of ours at Fission, so vote for this one if you want an Elm-y character in the style of the Haskell Wizards
We recently added some definitions for Yak shaving to our forum. It's only about 20 years old – but of course software development has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, so it's a term that's not well known.
Bike shedding and
Pets vs. Cattle are the last two suggestions we have so far.

We're working with Bruno now, and will run the vote for a couple of weeks, and then get at least 2 or 3 of the developer jargon ideas turned into high quality illustrations.

Post header photo by Lieve Ransijn on Unsplash

Fission on the IPFS Community Call

Boris Mann — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 19:34:27 +0000

Thanks to the IPFS team for hosting us on the weekly community call! These community calls happen weekly on Mondays at 1600 UTC.

We presented an intro to what we're building at Fission, including our hosted services, open source contributions, and more.

We've started to use the phrase "web native apps" to describe Fission's app creation platform that decouples storage from apps, with user controlled data, and secure by default. Which is what is expected by users from native mobile apps.

You can watch the video on the IPFS Youtube channel here:

The slides are available on IPFS as a PDF:

Also on Notist

From the final slide, here are all the places where you can find out more and connect with us:

Github: fission-suite
Install Guide & Docs: guide.fission.codes
Technical Whitepaper: whitepaper.fission.codes – this is a work in progress! 🚧 👷‍♀️✍️
Discourse forum: talk.fission.codes
Discord chat: fission.codes/discourse
Twitter: @fissioncodes, team accounts @expede, @bmann, @icidasset, and @dholms on Github

Fission Drive Preview

Boris Mann — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 18:51:41 +0000

We're pleased to present the Preview release of Fission Drive , the web native file system browser that we're including as a base component of the Fission stack.

We've been hosting files, static websites, and client-side apps on Fission since we launched our CLI tool in October of 2019.

Underneath, we use IPFS, but increasingly that's a detail that we don't think most users of our service should have to care about. It's a dependency, just like using MySQL or Redis.

Of course, if you do know what IPFS, great! We want to make it as easy to use as any existing Web2 component, while having capabilities at the protocol level – like file de-duplication, a global CDN, peer-to-peer sync, immutability, and offline support, to name a few– that let us empower all developers to build new and interesting tools.

Fission Drive is the app that we're building to showcase what the entire Fission stack can do, hosted on our own infrastructure.

Steven @icidasset joined the team in December and has been full time since January. He designed and built Fission Drive, as well as our slick new home page, which is also now running on Fission. Next up for Steven is building out web-based passwordless login for Drive, as well as the TypeScript libraries that will let all developers build apps like this.

Drive has a few features to play with, like image previews and support for dark mode. We'll keep the guide docs updated as we add features.

Fission Drive in Dark Mode, with an image preview

This preview release supports browsing any public IPFS hash, not just those on Fission. You can use this example hash QmbCLefkFuXbhHBWSW7PWmJzBL7W7e8zm41HK4DGJ1RDwV to see it in action at drive.fission.codes.

Want to add your own files? Follow the install instructions for the Fission CLI to easily upload using fission up.

You can subscribe to keep up to date with Fission Drive and other product updates.

Screaming Snake Case

Boris Mann — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 20:24:20 +0000

Did you know that different programming languages and certain developer preferences have led to different standards in naming functions, variables, constants, and other programming terms?

Camel case (wikipedia) – or should I say, camelCase – is probably the best known programming naming convention, in either PascalCase (initial capital) or dromedaryCase versions.

While researching, we were delighted to learn about kebab-case -being-a-thing, and you can find a bunch more letter cases on Wikipedia.

But we're here to tell you about snake_case :

The use of underscores as word separators in identifiers in programming languages is old, dating to the late 1960s. It is particularly associated with C, being found in The C Programming Language (1978), and contrasted with PascalCase (a type of camel case). However, the convention traditionally had no specific name: the Python style guide refers to it simply as "lower_case_with_underscores".

Within Usenet the name "snake_case" was first seen in the Ruby community in 2004, used by Gavin Kistner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_case

This, of course, leads us to SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE – all capitals, often used when defining constants.

And now, a vapourwave inspired illustration:

We're a developer focused company, which means we have fun with developer-centric in jokes and illustration. We've made a first run of stickers that you can fill out your postal address on our swag signup page and we'll get some sent to you.

We've got some other programming related illustrations that will get turned into stickers and other artwork lined up, with Haskell -related characters being up next. Haskell also happens to be what we're writing our backend services in.

The artist behind this first set of work is Bruno Monts , a freelance illustrator and designer from Brazil. You can see his portfolio on Behance. Thank you Bruno for your great work!

Stay tuned for more fun developer art!

IPFS on Hackage

Boris Mann — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 21:27:05 +0000

Authored by Daniel

We just published version 1.0.0 of our IPFS package on Hackage 🎉

This library offers a high level API for interacting with IPFS nodes. Most of the functionality was refactored out of our Web API, which provides a convenient HTTP interface for accessing the IPFS network.

The library can communicate with IPFS nodes in two different ways:

Locally: This is done by shelling out to an IPFS daemon that is running on the same machine. This would be the equivalent of running an IPFS command in your terminal.
Remotely: This is done by communicating with a node's HTTP interface. This could either be a node running on the same machine or on another machine.

The package is not currently fully featured, but the base functionality is present: add, get, pin, and dag put (for building IPLD structures). The existing code provides helpful building blocks for adding additional functionality.

Check out the code on GitHub. Let us know what features would be helpful for you and any issues that you might run into along the way!

When you're ready to start building, head over to Hackage and grab the library.

IPFS Storage Adapter for Ghost Blog with Heroku Deploy

Boris Mann — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 00:51:05 +0000

Back in May, as part of putting the Fission blog on Ghost, I packaged it up to be a one-click deploy on Heroku. We've gone one step further and gotten an IPFS Storage Adapter completed, and upgraded to Ghost v3.x.

This one-click deploy is possible because our IPFS Heroku Add-on is in beta! 🙌 🎉

Our IPFS Heroku Add-on is in beta with a free "test" plan.

This means you can package up apps to be deployed on Heroku that automatically add our add-on. This provisions you a username and API key and your app can use our Web API to read and write to IPFS, manage DNS, and anything else accessible through our API.

Check the Github repo for more details, or go ahead and deploy a new Ghost 3 blog here:

To complete the Ghost deploy, the only configuration you'll need to do is to set the public URL for your blog – e.g. https://boris-ghost-test1.herokuapp.com.

We've set the IPFS gateway to use ours by default, but you can put in any gateway you like. Images are included from this gateway, but of course using the IPFS Companion extension means you can serve the images from your local machine.

Go ahead and setup your first user, create a new post, and add an image – voila! Interplanetary Ghost Blogging! Here's my sample post.

We're working on adding IPFS support for basic file uploads to a number of other platforms. This is a first step in getting more content natively available in IPFS. Imagine managing your blog's media assets or a gallery page from your desktop, being able to login to any system and have all your photos and files available for you there.

Join our App Ideas forum to suggest other things you'd like to see. Thanks to Mike Taylor @mktlrwho for working on this with us!

Exporting your Facebook photos to Fission

Boris Mann — Sun, 10 Nov 2019 09:01:10 +0000

I wrote this post as a quick weekend HOWTO on the Fission blog because it turned out people were excited to try this on their own. At Fission, we're building developer tools to make it easy to build and deploy serverless apps directly from your desktop. Our first service uses IPFS, a p2p file system, so that files stream directly from your computer.

Facebook has a fairly extensive data export system built in. I decided to export my photos and videos and put them up on Fission.

For now, this is a manual process and involves some command line usage. I'll write this up as an App Idea in our forum and see if we can spend some time making this "one-click".

Jamie Burke

@jamie247

@bmann @FISSIONcodes Please make that one click for me dude

08:32 AM - 09 Nov 2019

0 2

Read the Facebook help article on Accessing & Downloading Your Information for instructions on how to navigate to the right section of your Facebook account.

On a desktop browser, it should be under the triangle in the upper right hand corner, then Settings, then Your Facebook Information, then Download Your Information.

I don't upload much to Facebook and only cross-post my Instagram photos (which are cross-posted to my personal blog), so I clicked Deselect All (says Select All in the screenshot above), and only selected Photos and Videos. I also set Media Quality to "High" (although some people still report that these are still not as large as the originals, which may only be accessible through the API).

You can experiment with including other items. But, be aware that because there aren't any permissions, you may be sharing information you don't want to if you publish the files. Same goes for the photos. I have posted most things on Facebook the assumption that they are "public".

Click the Create File button and go make a coffee. Facebook will notify when your download is ready.

Just over 13 years of Facebook.

To download, you'll need to click on the Download button and enter your Facebook password. You now have a zip file with browse-able HTML files and your photo and video files.

Putting your files online with Fission

You'll need to type a few commands into the command line Terminal on your machine, but everything should just work if you copy-paste.

Install the IPFS Desktop and run it. You've got a graphical interface to explore your local IPFS server, which is running in the background.

On Mac, make sure you've got homebrew installed, then open the Terminal app and install the Fission tools using these commands:

brew tap fission-suite/fission
brew install fission-cli

You can find extended installation instructions in our Fission Guide, and I expect our friends running Linux will have no problem.

Now, you're going to register for Fission.

fission register

Your username will be your subdomain, e.g. boris.fission.name. Pick a password and enter an email address. We are adding support for custom domain names, stay tuned!

Now, you've got a zip file in your Downloads folder from Facebook, called something like "facebook-YOURNAME.zip". Unzip it and you'll have a "facebook-YOURNAME" folder.

Back to the terminal! This is the last step!

The fission up command is going to add all your files to IPFS, through your local IPFS Desktop. Then, Fission's server will get sent the hash that represents the folder, we'll use IPFS to keep a copy of all your files, and update DNS of your subdomain.

The following command will be correct if you're on a Mac and downloaded to the standard downloads folder. Otherwise, just enter the path to where the unzipped Facebook folder is:

fission up ~/Downloads/facebook-YOURNAME/

I only had about 200MB of files, so this happened pretty quickly. Visit YOURNAME.fission.name in your browser and you should see something like this:

Your Facebook photos are online and browse-able! You can see mine at boris.fission.name/Photos/facebook (I put mine in a subfolder, because I already host a bunch of public files on my Fission site).

Technically the files are being served directly from your computer, when you're online and have IPFS Desktop running. The Fission service is also serving those files, and stays online when you're offline. As a next step, you can explore installing the IPFS Companion browser extension which will access IPFS content natively.

Join us in our Discord chat forum if you have questions or just come say "hi"!

Open Source Licensing Evolution at Diffusion 2019

Boris Mann — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 02:07:41 +0000

Boris gave this talk at Diffusion 2019 in Berlin.

The slides and links to licenses and other resources are available on Notist »

Commons Based Peer Production

Boris Mann — Thu, 10 Oct 2019 17:14:46 +0000

I was reminded today after speaking to Ted Leung @twleung that he uses the phrase “commons based peer production” rather than “open source”, because:

The problem with the term open source is that everyone means something different when they use it. Some people just mean licensing. Some people think of a particular community’s set of practices. Others think that it means some kind of fuzzy democracy and mob rule.

Which of course is exactly what I was trying to capture in my post from last year on Blockchain & Open Source Definitions.

Researching that phrase further brought me to a bunch more posts from Ted that make for good reading to see what parts of them apply to today.
This early post was where we were all still trying to explain open source as it came out of the shadows a bit, in the shallows of Web 2.0 and open APIs: Explaining Commons Based Peer Production, er, Open Source (2005).

This is not communism, it’s about preserving the freedom/openness of the web at a basic level, since the software in the commons will be available to anyone, and not controlled by a corporation with a profit motive. It’s about fostering innovation by providing a base that can easily adapted or used as a ground for experimentation. We foster innovation by lowering the threshold so that passionate, talented people can get involved right where they can help the most.

The topic of Design and Commons Based Peer Production (2009) is still being wrestled with today:

Can we actually do design using the commonly accepted tools of e-mail, version control, wiki’s and bug trackers? The design process relies very heavily on visual communications. The code (including design and architecture of code) process is predominantly a text based process. It is very difficult to do design efficiently in a distributed setting using the existing stable of tools. This is going to be a challenge not just for designers but for many other problem domains that could benefit from commons-based peer production.

In various open source projects, we talk about “Core Devs”, but we do not talk about “Core Designers”. And maybe we should be. Or maybe, in 2018 where we may be able to have a single “backend” of a blockchain, and multiple front-ends, then benevolent design dictators may be able to more appropriately fund themselves.

Further reading leads me to Yochai Benkler’s Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm (2002), which is where Ted got the phrase “commons based peer production”.

In this paper I explain that while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

Full paper lives on the Yale Law Journal (direct link to PDF). Coase is of course something that is talked about a lot these days with DAOs and fully distributed teams.

A new open source deal for Web3

Boris Mann — Sat, 05 Oct 2019 17:55:56 +0000

I gave the morning keynote at the ETC Summit in Vancouver. Thank you to Bob Summerwill and the entire Ethereum Classic community for the opportunity.

While I do talk about next gen "code" technology a lot, I am increasingly talking about innovation in licensing, principles, and ways of organizing people as crucial "technology".

In this case, we may have new tools like blockchain to use for incentives and trust, but they themselves are built on open source as a foundation.

I wrote about the Ethereum Governance Stack on my blog explaining these layers. This pretty much applies to the Ethereum Classic community as well, just with some different companies and people involved.

Probably my most controversial point of view is that higher level dapp developers should be involved in lower level blockchain infrastructure:

If you're treating the built-on-open-source-contributors global blockchain as something you just pay gas fees to, you don't fully understand the network of code AND people you are involved with.

Dries Buytaert's post on Balancing Makers and Takers is an excellent read about the nature of open source software systems that include commercial entities. It's a must read for an overview of the current state of things, as well as great links to many resources.

There is an excellent explanation of Public Goods and Common Goods that provided a real "ah ha!" moment for me about how different resources are shared or fought over when considering open source code / community.

Getting involved in the evolution of data ethics, licensing, and many other open source adjacent topics is non-optional for blockchain & web3 builders.

Video of my talk is available at the beginning of the ETC Summit Day Two Livestream, which you can view on YouTube »

You can view the full presentation on Notist »