Feross Aboukhadijeh

United States United States

I'm the author of open source software with 100+ million downloads per month, including WebTorrent <https://webtorrent.io> and Standard <https://standardjs.com>. I love to build things that make people say "Whoa... I didn't know that was possible!". In the past, I was on the Node.js Foundation Board of Directors and I'm heavily invested in the JavaScript, Web, and Node.js communities. Just for fun, I once ran an impromptu JavaScript conference in Svalbard, the nothern-most human settlement on Earth, with some amazing friends. I'm currently running the Speakeasy JS meetup <https://speakeasyjs.com>. I started in open source in 2013 and devoted most of my 20s to working on it, ultimately becoming a full-time open source maintainer. I have we helped the JavaScript ecosystem by writing hundreds of popular npm packages including buffer (https://github.com/feross/buffer), simple-peer (https://github.com/feross/simple-peer), and StandardJS (https://standardjs.com/).

Community Contributions

Recap of the WebTorrent project – Hacker News

It's so fulfilling to see WebTorrent still popping up on Hacker News after all these years. I started the project in 2013 and devoted most of my 20s to working on it, ultimately becoming a full-time open source maintainer. I started WebTorrent with the goal of extending the BitTorrent protocol to become more web-friendly, allowing any browser to become a peer in the torrent network. Within less than a year of starting the project, I got WebTorrent fully working (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317441). And it worked _well_, beating many native torrent apps in terms of raw download speed and the ability to stream videos within seconds of adding a torrent. WebTorrent never got as much attention as the cryptocurrency projects selling tokens throughout the mid-2010s, even though WebTorrent _actually worked_, and it had more users than almost all of them :) I was never tempted to add a cryptotoken to WebTorrent, despite many well-meaning friends telling me to do it and cash in. Nonetheless, WebTorrent served as an accessible on-ramp to the world of decentralized tech, along with other projects like Dat (https://dat-ecosystem.org/) and Secure Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz/), playing a role in getting people excited about decentralization. But WebTorrent is more than a protocol extension to BitTorrent. We also built a popular desktop torrent client, WebTorrent Desktop (https://webtorrent.io/desktop/), which supports powerful features like instant video streaming. We also built a `webtorrent` JavaScript package (https://socket.dev/npm/package/webtorrent) which implements the full BitTorrent/WebTorrent protocol in JavaScript. This implementation uses TCP, UDP, and/or WebRTC for peer-to-peer transport in any environment – whether Node.js (TCP/UDP), Electron (TCP/UDP/WebRTC), or the web browser (WebRTC). In the browser, the `webtorrent` package uses WebRTC which doesn’t require a browser plugin, extension, or any kind of installation to work. If you’re building a website and want to fetch files from a torrent, you can use `webtorrent` to do that directly client-side, in a decentralized manner. The WebTorrent Workshop (https://webtorrent.github.io/workshop/) is helpful for getting started and teaches you how to download and stream a torrent into an HTML page in just 10 lines of code. Now that WebTorrent is fully supported in nearly all the most popular torrent clients, including uTorrent, dare I say that we succeeded? Not only that, but we helped the JavaScript ecosystem a ton by writing hundreds of npm packages including buffer (https://github.com/feross/buffer), simple-peer (https://github.com/feross/simple-peer), and StandardJS (https://standardjs.com/). It's been a long and winding journey, but I'm glad to have played a role in making WebTorrent happen. Huge shoutouts to all the open source contributors to WebTorrent over the years, but especially Diego R Baquero and Alex Morais who were critical to WebTorrent's success.
Forum / 11-29-2022

Socket CLI

Today, Socket helps tens of thousands of developers to ship faster and spend less time on security busywork by helping them safely find, audit, and manage open source software at scale. Most developers use Socket through our popular GitHub integration – Socket for GitHub – and they love it! But what if you use another source code management system like GitLab or BitBucket? Or what if you want to integrate Socket into custom test or CI scripts? Or what if you just like using the command line? That's why we're so excited to preview a brand new way to use Socket today. Introducing the Socket CLI Preview!
Open source project / 11-17-2022