The Dev Times #42

Halfway through each month, our newsletter for developers: The Dev Times, brings three reads that our own developers found interesting on the web, and two Transloadit updates that may interest you.

My current HTML boilerplate

When creating a new website, it's common practice to copy the HTML structure from an existing site or start off with boilerplate. While this can be a great way to save time, it also makes it easy to miss out on understanding the finer details and any choices that have been made. Web developer Manuel Matuzovic was recently tasked with documenting the HTML structure of a website and he was kind enough to share the results! Read the post ›

Node.js 16 now available

In less than a month, the team behind Node has delivered Node.js version 16. This release brings an upgrade to the V8 JavaScript engine, prebuilt binaries for Apple Silicon, and other additional stable APIs. On top of that, a new Timers Promises API was implemented, providing alternative timer functions that return Promise objects, thus eliminating the need to use util.promisify. Check it out ›

How Facebook encodes your videos

To deal with the staggering amount of video traffic coming their way each day, Facebook has had to develop a sophisticated video encoding system. It combines a benefit-cost model and a machine learning model in order to prioritize advanced encoding for highly-viewed videos. This article breaks down the benefits of Facebook's encoding system while sharing key details on how it works. Read more ›

Convert Markdown to HTML and PDF

Markdown is the formatting powerhouse behind all of our content here at Transloadit, so it should come as no surprise that we're big fans of the format. We are excited to announce that we have expanded its use capabilities within our service. You can now convert Markdown to HTML or PDF using our /document/convert Robot! The article specifically covers converting to PDF, but this new functionality opens the way for a slew of new processing options to the Markdown format. Check it out ›

Let's Build - Spinning Vinyl GIF Generator

Our newest team member Joseph recently published his first blog in which he wrote about using the Transloadit API to merge album artwork with an overlay to create a GIF of a spinning vinyl record. He explores practices such as combining our Python SDK with external libraries, integrating multiple Templates, and using FFmpeg, so be sure to check this one out! Read the blog ›