Documentary tech content

Most backends require you to stitch together a database, an auth system, file storage, and an API layer. PocketBase ships all of that as a single executable file you can run anywhere.

Built in Go, it uses SQLite under the hood, which means zero external dependencies, trivially simple deployments, and surprisingly strong performance for most workloads. You get a built-in admin UI, real-time subscriptions, and an SDK for JavaScript and Dart out of the box.

It occupies an interesting space, too opinionated for large teams but perfectly sized for indie projects, side projects, and MVPs where you want a real backend without the ops overhead. The fact that it is open source and self-hostable makes it a compelling alternative to Firebase for developers who want to own their data.

In 2016, a developer named Azer Koulu unpublished 273 of his npm packages after a dispute with npm Inc. One of those packages was left-pad, an 11-line utility that pads a string to a given length.

Within hours, React, Babel, and thousands of other projects stopped building worldwide. CI pipelines failed. Deployments broke. The internet noticed.

The incident forced the entire JavaScript ecosystem to reckon with a fundamental question: should a single developer be able to break the internet by deleting 11 lines of code? npm changed its unpublish policy within days. The answer, it turned out, was no, but it took a global outage to get there.

Traditional VPNs are painful to set up and maintain. Tailscale flipped the model, instead of routing everything through a central server, it builds a peer-to-peer mesh network between your devices using WireGuard under the hood. You install it, sign in, and your devices just find each other.

The magic is in how it handles identity. Tailscale uses your existing SSO provider, Google, GitHub, Microsoft, to authenticate devices. The coordination server brokers the initial handshake, but after that, traffic flows directly between peers. The server never sees your data.

It is one of the cleanest examples of making a hard infrastructure problem feel like a consumer product.