DEV Community: Justin Dorfman

The Future of Content Hosting and Delivery?

Justin Dorfman — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 23:30:14 +0000

If you’ve used jsDelivr, GitHub Pages, Google Fonts, and or unpkg then you’ve used a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

I spent a little over five years working for a CDN (Long Live MaxCDN!) and toward the end, the market was getting super competitive, saturated, and profit margins were becoming extremely thin. We ended up getting acquired by a company that offers more web services than just content delivery which is definitely needed in order to survive in the highly competitive cloud computing market.

MaxCDN’s Network circa 2014

I haven’t worked at a CDN for a while but I still keep tabs on what is happening. When I was still in the game, I never even thought about CDNs that would end up using a blockchain as a way to distribute content on a global scale. That was until I discovered Sia (not the amazing singer-songwriter).

If you haven’t heard of Sia, it’s a decentralized cloud storage platform that leverages blockchain technology to create a data storage marketplace. The creators claim that it’s more robust and more affordable than traditional cloud storage providers but I haven’t checked those claims in a production environment for myself. I’m just going to give them the benefit of the doubt and ask anyone reading this to please comment below if you can share your experience.

One product that uses the Sia network is Skynet is “The decentralized CDN and file sharing platform for devs.” If I was still in the CDN biz this would make me a little worried. Margins are thin enough! Regardless, I’m excited to see a CDN product built outside the box. The last exciting thing I saw in the CDN space was Peer5, which operates a large peer-to-peer (p2p) CDN by leveraging WebRTC and JavaScript.

Sia's Skynet Network (2020)

What I like about Skynet is that they actually show you (a DEVeloper) how to get started right away. Here a simple code sample written in JavaScript to show you how easy it is to upload an image:

const skynet = require('@nebulous/skynet');

(async () => {
 const skylink = await skynet.UploadFile(
   './sia-namebase-gitcoin-hackathon.png',
   skynet.DefaultUploadOptions
 )
 console.log(`Uploaded! 👉 ${skylink}`.replace('sia://', 'https://siasky.net/'))
})()

As you may have noticed, there is no API key required! 🎉 Once it’s uploaded it will give you a URL to your file*:

$ node siaskynet.js 
Uploaded! 👉
https://siasky.net/PACROgvZaKLHOauEy6e9ePm04hBJ1U6DxIjTVq6TeOO-SQ

* supported file types: HTML, PDF, Image, Audio, Video, JSON, Dapp

What do you think?

Could Sia/Skynet be the future of storage platforms and CDNs? Why or why not?

P.S. Sia and Namebase are throwing a virtual hackathon on Gitcoin called Own The Internet. If this type of tech interests you, sign up. It starts from July 29th to Aug 19th, 2020. There is no entry fee, and it’s open to all regardless of whether you are a beginner or a Web3 expert. 👨🏽‍💻👩‍💻

Building a decentralized web is hard. Who's in?

Justin Dorfman — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 16:02:41 +0000

The first web page went live on August 6, 1991. It was dedicated to information on the World Wide Web project. The engineer behind the project was Tim Berners-Lee (who I blew off once) and his vision for the web was for it to be decentralized. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way, so today there is a growing community of people who want to see the next version of the web move in that direction. Many of these folks have created projects around the idea of a decentralized web. Heck, Tim has his own called SOLID, though they haven't tweeted anything since 2017, and their last commit was nine-months ago which does give me some concerns. 😬

I think that's okay though, building a decentralized web is hard. And as someone once said, we should do things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Come to think of it, deploying a completely decentralized web might be harder than getting a man to the moon. 🤔 Only the crazy ones are attempting to.

Enter Web3

While the Web3 ecosystem as some call it isn't the first to revive the idea of a decentralized web (projects like dat://, Matrix, Secure Scuttlebutt, and others have been hard at work for a while), it's sparked a renaissance of sorts in the volume of interest in the subject. But what does Web3 mean?

As one source puts it,

"The decentralized web, also called [Web3] is a vision of the next generation internet as a peer to peer network built around blockchain technology, where users own their own data, data is portable, computing and storage resources are provided by end-users within distributed networks, apps run locally on end-user devices and platforms are decentralized and autonomous."

I remember reading about blockchain a while back, and I just rolled my eyes. My understanding of the Web3 movement at the time was:

"it's just magic internet money, and besides my coins were easily stolen from MTGox, how could this ever get anywhere."

But in the last few years, it's become clear that there's much more to Web3 than just tokens. Some cool Dapps (decentralized apps) are launching like Status (messaging), and Our Zora, are starting to grow, and tools like IPFS and Arweave (check out this neat permanent chess app) are starting to power more of these types of applications.

Tell me more

There are many ways to get started with Web3 development. But what if I told you that you could get learn from Web3 experts for free? There is a six-week online hackathon/incubator program called the Open Web Incubator. There is an investment pool of $100,000 😱 for winning projects that will help build a decentralized web (the kind of web Tim Berners-Lee envisioned 🙌).

Not only that, but you could demo your Dapp (permaweb app in this case) in front of investment firms such as Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Union Square Ventures, and others. Learn more here. 👈

💬 Let's get this discussion going:

What are your thoughts on Web3 and/or blockchain?

That time I blew off Tim Berners-Lee

Justin Dorfman — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 15:40:59 +0000

As I’m prepping for the next Gitcoin virtual hackathon “Arweave Open Web Incubator” it made me think of that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to walk and talk with the inventor of the open web, Tim Berners-Lee.

The year was 2018, and I was in London for MozFest. The company I was working for at the time sponsored the event, so I got to go to this fancy-schmancy cocktail hour for sponsors and speakers.

I was with my friend Eric, and we were both ready to head off to the next event. He needed to grab his coat or something. I told him I’d be outside and there he was, the father of www standing outside by himself. I composed myself and walked over and introduced myself. We chatted for around a minute, and then he said, “Hey, are you heading over to science fair? We can walk and continue our conversation.” I turned around and looked for Eric, and he wasn’t there. I panicked. I turned back around and without even thinking I responded to him, “I’m waiting for a friend...” In my mind, I was thinking, “what is wrong with you!? Eric will understand, go!”. He replied, “ok, well, it was good talking to you, Justin.”

Eric came down, saying he could find his coat (it was pretty cold). He asked me, “what’s wrong”? When I told him, he said, “why didn’t you go!?” I had no response.

The lesson of the story is your good friends (like Eric) will understand if you ditch them for a once-in-a-lifetime event. =)

What would you have done?

Eric and yours truly in The Tube

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

Awesome hackathon prizes?

Justin Dorfman — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 20:17:55 +0000

I’ve been to so many hackathons I can’t count anymore. When it comes to prizes, I thought I have seen them all¹ until I saw "Zneakers" in my Twitter feed yesterday. 😍

Gitcoin

@gitcoin

#ProtectPrivacy 🔐 Hackathon

Check out the prizes from @ElectricCoinCo!

🥇 1 Grand Prize: $2,000
🥈 2 Runner Up: $500
🎨 Most creative: a pair of Zneakers 🤩
🛍 Rookie of the year: #Zcash Swag bag

Get your hack on 👉 gitcoin.co/issue/zcash/zc…

22:18 PM - 15 Jun 2020

My question to you is, what are some awesome hackathon prizes you’ve seen (or won)?

Oculus Rifts Arduinos, shirts, socks, drones, etc.

Why Does Privacy Matter?

Justin Dorfman — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 16:09:02 +0000

It’s hard to imagine that 2 years ago SSL was optional i.e. browsers didn’t make it abundantly clear that the site you are on is ‘Not Secure’. But with the help of the global developer community and non-profit organizations like Let’s Encrypt, the EFF, and many others, it’s now thankfully taboo to have a site (even personal portfolios) without SSL.

From time to time, you will hear people say things like “I have nothing to hide”, until their personal information has been compromised. This is effectively the approach major tech companies today take, and more people seem to be realizing that this approach to privacy is fundamentally broken.

One part of a solution is building better ways to protect our data and our privacy. As Tim Berners-Lee recently said the internet should be a universal right. The same goes for privacy. Privacy protects journalists and whistleblowers, it protects activists and dissidents, all of whom are key to defending democracy.

To be sure, I don’t think blockchain is the key to protecting privacy, but it has a large community of enthusiasts who care about these topics and we’re proud to have them involved in our Protect Privacy hackathon. We have to start somewhere to protect these rights and take control of our data, financial or otherwise, and we’re hopeful this attempt to get more people involved in this conversation, with 11 organizations, including The Tor Project on board, will help. There are over $50,000 in prizes and we’d love to get your feedback on them and have you involved! Let’s find better ways to preserve, protect, and use our data.

If you have any questions, join us here. Or just let us know below 💬 - why does privacy matter to you?

Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash

Check your settings, save mad loot

Justin Dorfman — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 15:21:54 +0000

Photo by Christine Roy

TL;DR

I co-founded and have been leading the BootstrapCDN project since 2012. I have made many mistakes, here is one I hope others can learn from. “Set and forget” web services can be a blessing and a curse. No matter what service you are using so, log in and audit the bill.

Since 2013 we have been using S3 as our object store origin. You see, the beauty of S3 is how reliable/secure it is. That’s the blessing. The curse to that is you rarely have to login.

Late last November, I had to login to check a setting and had some time to kill so decided to check the cost explorer. I always knew our S3 costs where high but never dove into it because it was never an issue. So I decided I see what was happening and digging through the S3 logs, noticed strange query strings (e.g. ?v=1&v=2&v=3...&v=5409) which was treated as a separate object that couldn't be cached (on the CDN) since it was constantly changing, "Cache Busting" so to speak. I logged into the MaxCDN Control Panel, and disabled “Treat as separate cacheable item”.

This is what 1 simple change did:

Things I learned

At the time I started the investigation, at our scale, a 0.43% non-cache hit ratio equaled 297mm+ requests going back to the origin i.e. S3.
Making changes to a service that serves ~72 billion requests a month is scary but as long as you have a team to help monitor abnormalities, don’t be afraid.
No matter how well things are working, login and audit!

Before change (October 2017):

After change (January 2018):

In closing

Writing this post wasn’t easy. Admitting to something so stupid opens yourself up to ridicule, but I am 99.57% positive there are others making similar mistakes. No matter what service you are using, login and audit. In the meantime, I'll be finding out why 211mm+ requests are cache misses.🤔

Let's talk about speaking

Justin Dorfman — Sat, 21 Oct 2017 16:45:09 +0000

Note: There are extra line breaks after some nested unordered list. The Dev.to team is looking into it. Oh and Sticker Mule is hiring =)

My first talk was at WordCamp LA in 2011. Ever since then I kept an Evernote of things I have learned over the years. Hopefully, this might help someone. Â¯\_(ãƒ„)_/Â¯

Pros:

Travel the world on someone else’s dime
Meet amazing people
Get into conferences for free
Get out of your comfort zone
Speakers lounge (unlimited food and soft drinks plus connect with other speakers)

Cons:

Practicing
Researching
Self-doubt
Anxiety
Layovers

Tips:

Hire a coach
- Investing in a coach is one of the best things you can do.
- Pro athletes rely on coaches, amateur speakers should too
- Find a coach that will give it to you straight and will give you constructive feedback not just “that’s shit”.
- If you can't afford/find a coach, ask a co-worker or friend who isn't afraid to give you constructive feedback.
There’s no such thing as perfect
- Don't obsess over a transition, design, wording, etc
- Just get it done
Use gifs/meme's sparingly
- Sometimes an animated gif/meme will work great
- If every slide is a gif/meme, it gets old
- Break it up with a real photo
  - Unsplash is great
    - Can be used for commercial and noncommercial purposes.
    - You do not need to ask permission from or provide credit
Research
- Make sure you know exactly what you are talking about
- Give credit on the slide
- Anticipate questions that will be asked
Conference organizers won’t be sitting there with a stop clock
- I use to worry that if I only had 20 min, I would get in trouble.
- Keynotes are carefully timed, a talk with less than 50 people in it won’t.
Expect low attendance (not a bad thing)
- Unless you or the company you work for are well known in the community, expect 2-20 attendees.
- My 2016 OSCON talk had ~10 people in it
- Conferences are very competitive, lots of tracks going on, expo halls with food and swag, etc.
- If more people show up then cool, but set realistic expectations.
- Honestly it doesn't matter how many people are at your talk, it is the quality.
  - 3 of ~10 at OSCON signed up for an OSI account in the expo hall. ðŸ˜ƒ
  - I met Gregor who was 1 of 4 people in the audience at OS Bridge.
    - He introed me to Pia which led to SustainOSS
Practice at meetups
- Just like comedians playing at small clubs before the big show
- Get feedback e.g. were the slides easy to read? etc
Buy an adapter for every type of video in/output
- Don’t assume the conference will provide you one, they usually don't: // Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-449136240571736064-132'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=449136240571736064&theme=dark" }
Turn off all notifications on your laptop and phone
- Phone: DND + silent mode (not vibrate, silent)
- Laptop: Close Slack, Skype, basically the only program(s) that should be open are the ones that you will be using during your talk
Buy a wireless clicker
- Telling someone "next slide please" each time is lame
- Logitech Wireless Presenter R400 Remote Control
  - This is what the pros use, it is the best on the market
  - It has a frickin laser!
Don’t walk over to the projected slide and point
- If you must use a laser, but even that sucks.
- Use actions/transitions to get the audience's attention.
Promote your talk
- Twitter
  - Tweet mentioning the conference and hashtag
  - Pin tweet Example
  - Update your background image example
  - Organizers appreciate it more than you know.
Learn the difference between Standard (4:3) and Widescreen (16:9)
- It’s no fun having to redo your slides to fit the required slide size
Panels are the best
- No practice or too much preparation needed.
Practice every day no matter what
- After breakfast, just get it out of the way.
- Ask friends if you can rehearse for them.
- Practice in the shower. Not joking.
Just be you, don’t mimic TED talks or any other speakers
If your CFP doesn’t get accepted, don’t take it personally.
- In 1992, Tim Berners-Lee's paper was rejected for the Hypertext Conference
- Sometimes they give you discount code to the conference
- There are literally hundreds of similar events, check Lanyrd
Have all your videos/slide decks available publicly so you can link to them when organizers ask.
- If you don't have any, have a friend record you doing a lightning talk at a meetup. They are always looking for people to talk and don't care if you have any experience.
Encourage people to ask questions at the end.
- It could fuck up your flow
- If you don't have an answer, say something like "That's a great question, I honestly don't know the answer".
  - You can also encourage the audience to give their answer/opinion if you want.
If people walk out
- Try not to focus on it too much
- Don't shame them i.e. don't say "thanks for walking out asshole"
- It's almost nothing you did, it just wasn't for them
Avoid live demos
- Even the best can't get them to work 99.99% of the time

Cover Photo by Marcos Luiz

Hi, I'm Justin Dorfman

Justin Dorfman — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 16:21:32 +0000

You can find me on Twitter as @jdorfman

I live in Downtown Los Angeles.

I work for Sticker Mule

I mostly program in these languages: Bash, HTML, JavaScript.

Nice to meet you.