devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development

This week we're joined by Dana Lawson, CTO at Netlify. We talk about her journey from the US Army to leading engineering teams at companies like GitHub, New Relic, and now Netlify. We discuss Netlify's evolution from JAMstack to AI-powered developer tools, including Agent Runners and their MCP server. We also explore the concept of "Agent Experience" (AX) as a new paradigm alongside UX and DX, and how hiring practices are evolving in the age of AI.
Netlify: https://www.netlify.com/
Agent Experience Hub: https://www.netlify.com/agent-experience/
agentexperience.ax: https://agentexperience.ax/
Agent Runners: https://www.netlify.com/platform/agent-runners/
Netlify MCP Server: https://docs.netlify.com/build/build-with-ai/netlify-mcp-server/
Dana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dglawson/
Dana's LeadDev Profile: https://leaddev.com/community/dana-lawson
Dana's UXDX Profile: https://uxdx.com/profile/dana-lawson/

This week we're joined by Fabian Hiller, the creator of Valibot, Standard Schema, and Formish. We talk about the birth of Valibot, the collaboration between all the schema libraries on Standard Schema, and the new Formish library. We also discuss the future of developer tools and AI integration.
GitHub: https://github.com/fabian-hiller
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/fabianhiller.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabianhiller/
Valibot — https://valibot.dev/
Standard Schema — https://standardschema.dev/
Formisch — https://formisch.dev/

This week we're joined by Salma Alam-Naylor, the Head of Developer Education at Nordcraft. Salma shares her journey from music teacher to developer, her discovery of the developer education space in 2020, and the challenges and opportunities she's faced in her role. We discuss the importance of visual editors in web development, the illusion of complexity in development, and the future of web development. Salma also introduces Nordcraft, a visual web framework that allows you to build websites with a GUI.
https://whitep4nth3r.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/whitep4nth3r/?originalSubdomain=uk
https://github.com/whitep4nth3r
https://nordcraft.com/

This week we're joined by Peter van Hardenberg (PVH), director of the Ink and Switch research lab and co-author of the seminal Local First Software paper.Peter shares the origin story of local-first software, from his realization on a San Francisco train to his work at Heroku and beyond.We dive deep into Automerge, Ink and Switch's local-first sync engine built on CRDTs (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types), exploring how it enables real-time collaboration while keeping data on your computer.We discuss the technical challenges of building distributed systems, the philosophy behind local-first software, and how projects like Key Hive are pushing the boundaries of decentralized data access.Peter also shares his vision for the future of computing, where software ownership and interoperability become fundamental principles rather than afterthoughts.
https://www.pvh.ca
https://www.inkandswitch.com
https://automerge.org
https://github.com/automerge/automerge
https://github.com/pvh

This week we have Jeppe Reinhold, a core contributor to Storybook working at Chromatic. Jeppe shares how Storybook has evolved from a slow, complex tool to a fast, modern development environment through major architectural changes like Vite integration, ESM migration, and dependency reduction. We talk about the Component Story Format evolution, framework agnosticism challenges, local testing improvements with vitest integration, and how Storybook is integrating with AI and LLMs through MCP servers to help coding agents understand and use component libraries.
https://reinhold.is/
https://bsky.app/profile/reinhold.is
https://storybook.js.org/