Kodsnack 366 - No servers involved, Beaker with Paul Frazee

Kodsnack

Paul Frazee returns to discuss the evolution of Beaker - the peer-to-peer browser for web hackers. Just released as a public beta, Beaker has gone through a lot of changes since October when we last chatted. Paul tells us about what Beaker is and some of the important concepts, such as feeds, the file system, and starting to create things on top of them.

On the surface, Beaker looks like a standard web browser with some unusual buttons, but just below the UI there’s a lot of peer-to-peer technology, a serverless model of the web where you can just as easily edit, add, and remix as you can browse.

Beaker feels like a tool to make the web open and easily editable - something anyone can pick up and start hacking on without strange hurdles of server setups, package management, hosting fees, and build scripts.

We also talk about the very iterative and open development process of Beaker, and the high value of user testing. Paul talks about some of the many interesting problems left to solve, and the reasons why they’re better solved later.

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Links

• Paul Frazee
• The last episode
• Beaker browser
• Bittorrent
• The hypercore protocol
• Decentralized web summit
• Electron
• Chromium
• IPFS
• RSS
• peersockets
• Documentation for Beaker
• Codepen
• Web components
• Hyperdrive
• Markdown
• Iframe
• Globbing patterns
• JSON-LD - JSON standard for linking data
• RDF
• Microformats
• Append-only log
• Secure scuttlebutt
• Mathias Buus
• Andrew Osheroff
• Devops
• Eventual consistency
• Hashbase
• Unwalled.garden spec
• Ink & switch
• Gateway browser - mobile browser for building the P2P web. Alpha coming soon!

Titles

• A peer-to-peer browser for web hackers
• Bittorrent 2.0
• No servers involved
• Almost an IDE in itself
• Open up the creative side of web development
• Lowering the barrier to hackcess
• Standards all the way down
• Empower userland
• That’s what we’re trying to do: give developers new problems
• New problems of their own choosing
• Pulling it from Denmark
• You don’t need a server for it
• Only superficially like other browsers
• The answer is “maybe”
• Your personal anchor
• Plane wifi is getting pretty good
• What you choose to put in front of people
• Lots of auditability