Patrick Marchand
After working as a linux and OpenBSD system administrator for a few years, Patrick got back into web development and now works as a full stack freelancer. Though he still dabbles in system administration via devops.
He hails from the province of Québec in Canada and enjoys cooking, foraging and skiing.
Session
Modern web development is intrinsically tied to javascript and frameworks have been pushing us further and further away from the initial model of the internet as a web of documents. In response to this, libraries like htmx and data-star have arisen to demonstrate ways to use hypermedia to create interactive applications.
Hypermedia as the engine of application state (HATEOS) is a driving principle of these new libraries and by allowing the backend to drive the state of the frontend directly without requiring the user to write javascript code, they make it possible to do hypermedia on whatever you like (Otherwise known as the HOWL stack).
That means that with nothing but the OpenBSD base install and a small javascript shim (12kb at the time of writing), we can write realtime hypermedia applications. We will explore the case of a small web application that monitors the state of it's server and offers real time updates of it's metrics.