Fun Links 2017-05-19

Today all of my links come from one company, which is Zeit. They build software to help developers and designers, with a mission of making cloud computing as easy and accessible as mobile computing.

They have a number of other open source projects and services other than the ones I mention here, so I would recommend checking them out at https://zeit.co

pkg
https://github.com/zeit/pkg
If you have ever wanted to distribute your Node.js application as a binary without sources or run it on a machine without needing Node installed, then Pkg is what you are looking for. It will bundle the runtime and all of your dependencies (and assets too if you want) into a platform specific executable. You can even cross compile for multiple platforms.

Now
https://zeit.co/now
What if deploying your API to production could be done with four keystrokes? With now from Zeit that is possible. Now is a cloud hosting environment geared for microservices. Whether you have a static browser app, a Node.js API or a Docker-based project, you can deploy it very easily using their command line client or desktop application. They have a free plan which allows you to deploy your apps to *.now.sh domains and your source code is exposed as well (meant for open source projects). If you are looking for a way to host your apps easily without having to manage a VM yourself, this is an ideal solution.

Hyper
https://hyper.is/
While text editors based on web technologies are popular right now (Atom, VS Code, etc), Hyper is a terminal application based on the same ideas. Available for Windows, Mac and Linux, this free software comes with a host of plugins available for customization and if you don’t like those, just add some CSS and JS and hack it yourself. Supports tabs, split windows and a number of other features. The Windows version is a bit awkward to use at the moment because some of the keyboard shortcuts for the app itself interfere with key commands to send to the shell itself. But for normal use it is fine. And the macOS version doesn’t suffer the same issues.