Front-End Fire

On this week’s episode, a new software licensing term has emerged in the development world: Fair Source Software (FSS). 

The error and exception tracking software company Sentry added some legal protections to their Codecov product last year (they are a business trying to earn money, after all), which technically meant it was no longer open source. In order to keep sharing its code with the community, Sentry created a new “Fair Source” licensing category that shares similar values to open source, but also allows companies to enforce non-compete clauses to protect its business interests.

In other news, even though the React Native framework is already 10 years old, the team just launched v0.75. While this isn’t a major release, it lays the groundwork for v1 by reporting that the “new architecture” required for support of new React 18+ features like Suspense, synchronous layouts, and concurrent rendering is now stable.

News:

• Paige - React Native reaches 0.75
• TJ - Fair Source Software (FSS) license

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Origins Crisp Citrus Hand Cream
• TJ - Risky Business Podcast

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

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AI is the main topic of conversation for this week’s episode. Between continued advancements in the technology and governments trying to put safeguards in place to prevent a Terminator-style future, there’s plenty going on.

OpenAI has introduced a new feature of its API called “structured outputs,” which essentially lets developers pass in a valid JSON schema that guarantees the model will always generate responses that adhere to it. No omission of required keys, no extra values you weren’t expecting, no need for strongly worded prompts to achieve consistent formatting.

On the flip side, the European Union has introduced the first legislation to develop safe and trustworthy AI within its borders. This legislation includes a 4 tier risk classification system for all AI products ranging from minimal risk to unacceptable risk, and a 3+ year timeline for companies developing AI products to comply with these new regulations.

The React core team announces the changes to Suspense will delay the release of React 19 for a bit longer than originally planned, but should ultimately lead to a better end user experience for devs and library authors alike.

And the news rounds out with a game of “guess the CSS usage statistics” compiled by Chrome’s anonymous usage statistics. Ever wondered what percentage of websites are styling scrollbars, or how many set height? Not to mention the amount of CSS properties we’ve never heard of before: font-synthesis-small-caps, anyone?

News:

• Paige - EU rolls out first-ever legal framework for AI
• Jack - OpenAI Structured Outputs
• TJ - Chrome CSS usage statistics

Bonus News:

• React 19 release delayed

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Deadpool & Wolverine movie
• Jack - Facebook Marketplace
• TJ - The Lord of the Rings film series

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
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This week’s episode kicks off with an announcement that Node 22.6 has experimental TypeScript support! 

What you might not realize unless you read the fine print though, is that this isn’t the sort of TS support you might assume. Instead, the feature strips type annotations from .ts files, allowing them to run without transforming TS-specific syntax.

Tauri, a competitor to Electron for building cross-platform desktop apps, just released a stable release candidate of Tauri 2. Tauri promises lower memory usage and CPU usage by taking advantage of a system’s native webview on the frontend and using Rust on the backend.

A new acronym is sweeping the JavaScript world: e18e - or Ecosystem Performance. E18e is focused on improving JS package performance, by removing redundant dependencies in old packages or replacing them with more modern alternatives, improving the performance of widely used packages, and building modern alternatives to outdated packages.

News:

• Paige - e18e initiative
• Jack - Node 22.6 with experimental TypeScript support
• TJ - Tauri 2.0 RC

Bonus News:

• Courts rule Google is a monopolist in the search world

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Charisma towels from CostCo
• Jack - The Old Man TV series and Bad Sisters TV series
• TJ - A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder TV series

Google is making headline news once again as it reverses course on a decision to block third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. After years of testing, planning, and delays, Google scrapped a plan to turn off third-party cookie tracking by default like Safari and Firefox already do.

In other news, the annual CSS Working Group meeting wrapped up recently, and some of the exciting features the group will be focusing on this year include: the if() statement for conditional styling, cross document view transitions without the need for a JavaScript library, and (perhaps the most anticipated feature) cleaner, easier CSS anchor positioning. 

Vercel introduces feature flags in Next.js and SvelteKit with Vercel’s Flags SDK. The Flags SDK works with any feature flag provider, and sits between the application and the source of the flags to help devs follow best practices for using feature flags, while keeping websites fast.

And finally, Reddit has doubled down on blocking search engine crawlers from surfacing new posts and comments in recent weeks, and as of now, Google is the only mainstream search engine that’s made a deal that will allow it to index new search results when users search for posts on Reddit.

News:

• Paige - Exciting new CSS features coming out of this year’s CSSWG meeting
• Jack - Feature Flag Support from Vercel
• TJ - Chrome’s is no longer removing third-party cookies

Bonus News:

• Reddit is now blocking all non-Google search engines and AI bots
• All the video talks from React Conf 2024 are available

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Apple Watch SE
• Jack - 3D printing (Autodesk Fusion 360 program)
• TJ - 2024 Paris Olympics

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
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Web development survey results season is upon us, so this week’s episode covers two of the newly released survey results: the State of React survey 2023 and Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024.

Just over 13,000 developers filled out the State of React survey, and the results were quite interesting. React devs are fans of component libraries like MUI (Material UI) and shadc/n, state management libraries like Zustand, and data fetching libraries like TanStack Query. They gripe about well-known Hook footguns like useEffect(), useMemo(), and useCallback(). And features like React Server Components and the use() Hook are still largely untested by the community, although many devs have heard of them.

The more all encompassing development survey from Stack Overflow received 65,000 responses this year, providing some very cool insights about the larger developer world beyond the bounds of React.

It’s fascinating to watch the trends starting to catch on or die down in the web development space year over year, and we highly encourage everyone to take a look at the survey results. There will probably be some surprise in store.

News:

• State of React Survey 2023
• Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - NeilMed Sinus Rinse Kit
• Jack - Logitech Spotlight Presentation Remote
• TJ - Electric fly swatter

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
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Popular web framework Astro is making lots of headlines this week, between new experimental feature Server Islands, and achieving “official deployment partner” status with Netlify, it’s been a whirlwind.

But in addition to Astro’s big news, Expo, arguably the most popular framework for building React Native apps, has been endorsed by the React Native team as the recommended way to build apps.

Also, Vitest 2.0, the fastest growing test framework, has introduced a new experimental feature called “Browser Mode”, which allows users to run tests in the browser natively, providing access to browser globals like window and document.

Now back to Astro. In 2021, Astro made island architecture a mainstream idea, and Server Islands takes it a step further, making it easy to combine high performance static HTML and dynamic-server generated components.

And the Astro announcements kept coming with Netlify being declared Astro’s official deployment partner. Netlify’s betting on Astro and Server Islands, and will be sponsoring the Astro team with $12,500 each month to keep improving the framework and OSS community. Well done, Astro team!

News:

• Paige - Expo is the recommended way to build React Native apps
• Jack - Astro 4.12 Server Islands and Astro server-islands demo site
• TJ - Netlify is Astro’s “Official Deployment Partner”

Bonus news:

• https://vitest.dev/guide/browser/

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Grafana dashboards
• Jack - Public speaking
• TJ - Mammoth Cave National Park

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

Friend of the podcast (and previous guest host), Jason Lengstorf, joins Jack and Paige today to talk about the latest happenings in the web dev world - and wax poetic at the end about favorite restaurants and fine dining.

First up, is AI model runner ONNX, which Jack’s been digging into recently. ONNX offers many pre-trained models which can run locally or in the browser and integrates well with many different programming languages.

After that is new Lodash library competitor es-toolkit. It’s smaller, faster, relies heavily on native browser APIs, and wants to supplant Lodash for all those useful helper functions so many JS apps still rely heavily on.

Then there’s a new React project framework named react-server that claims to be the easiest way to build React apps with server-side rendering.

Finally, Jason shares his experience with full stack JavaScript SDK Vinxi, which makes it easy for devs to build JavaScript apps and even frameworks.

News:

• Paige - es-toolkit and what’s next for ESLint 
• Jack - ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) AI model runner and React Server
• Jason - Vinxi · Dev Agrawal on LWJ teaching Vinxi · Nikhil on Vinxi at ViteConf

Special Guest:

Jason Lengstorf, host of Learn with Jason and developer-focused media consultant.

• Jason’s X profile @jlengstorf
• Jason’s YouTube channel
• Learn with Jason site
• Jason’s link tree (jason.energy/links)

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Bear TV series
• Jack - Inside Out 2 movie
• Jason - Chef movie and The Chef Show

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

The hosts switch up the regular news format this week in favor of another favorite developer topic: tech gear. All the extras that make web development that little bit nicer.

If you were stranded on a desert island (that only had power and Internet), what tech gear would you bring that you just can’t live without?

Aside from MacBook Pros for all three hosts, there’s a good variety of office chairs, adjustable desks, external monitors, keyboards, mice, headphones, microphones, and even cameras. Many of the recognizable brand names make an appearance like: Apple, Logitech, Elgato, Microsoft, Steelcase, and Shure.

If you’ve ever wanted recommendations from folks actively using these products (and not getting sponsored to endorse them) then this is the episode for you.

And of course, we want to know what you use as well, so join us in the Discord to share your own workspace setups, the gear you can’t live without, and anything else you want to talk about.

News:

• Paige’s picks -
  • Logitech MX Keys S keyboard
  • Tresanti Adjustable Height Desk
  • Camo software to turn any camera phone into a webcam
  • Arzopa 15.6” Portable Monitor 
• Jack’s picks -
  • Logitech Vertical Mouse (Lift)
  • Elgato Prompter
  • Elgato Stream Deck
  • Shure SM7B Microphone
  • Das Keyboard
• TJ’s picks - 
  • Steelcase Leap
  • Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard
  • AirPods Pro
  • Apple Magic Mouse

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Hunger Games movie series
• Jack - Hanging with Jason Lengstorf
• TJ - Harry Potter movie series 

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

In a rare turn of events, it was a slightly quieter week in terms of actual web development news, so the hosts round up some technology-adjacent news and drama to share.

Jack kicks off the show recounting his experience of being one of four developers in a reality show-type scenario that his friend Jason Lengstorf (host of the YouTube show “Learn with Jason”) put together. 

Next up is more drama around how AI companies are training their LLMs. Up and coming AI company Perplexity’s getting some heat for ignoring the robots.txt files on websites banning AI companies from crawling the content to teach their models.

After that, TypeScript 5.5, previously in beta stage (in episode 42), has now reached release candidate stage. It brings with it inferred type predicates, regex syntax checking, and 33% smaller package size.

News:

• Paige - TypeScript 5.5 RC
• Jack - Don’t build another effin’ chatbot - Web Dev Challenge S1E1 (Learn with Jason)
• TJ - Perplexity and robots.txt drama and Apple is the first company charged with violating the EU’s DMA rules

Bonus news:

• window.ai

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Hunting Party book
• Jack - Bridgerton on Netflix
• TJ - The Paris Apartment

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
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• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

Although we’re already halfway through 2024, this week the State of JavaScript survey for 2023 dropped, and the hosts weighed in and discussed the results they found most interesting.

This year the survey provided a lot more write in options instead of predefined lists, which made extrapolating clear answers in many cases more difficult than it otherwise would have been, but there were still some clear winners in terms of usage and popularity among respondents. React and Next.js continued to dominate in the framework wars, Vite was beloved by most everyone, and the new category of AI tools was dominated by ChatGPT. There’s lots of interesting data here to peruse, but also some questions about the accuracy of results with having to normalize so many written responses.  

Another topic of discussion was the new release of htmx 2.0. It’s dropping support for Internet Explorer,  breaking out all the previously built-in extensions from the main project, and (most exciting of all) now offers a dark-mode version of the website.

We get an update on the React Suspense drama that began last week when the React team fundamentally wanted to change how Suspense is handled in React 19, and many library maintainers who rely on Suspense under the hood voiced concerns that it would severely impact how their libraries work. The React team has since backed off changing Suspense, and agreed to find a solution that works better for everyone, and we’ll update you on what that solution might be as soon as we know more.

And finally, Adobe continues to make headlines this year as the US Federal Trade Commission sues it over confusing and hard-to-cancel subscription plans. For a company as big and successful as Adobe, the fact that it uses confusing and obfuscated terms and conditions to penalize users who try to cancel subscriptions is shameful, and the US FTC is taking a stand against it. 

News:

• Paige - htmx 2.0 is released
• Jack - State of JS 2023 results are in
• TJ - The US FTC sues Adobe (Full complaint) 

Bonus news:

• The React team reverses course on proposed Suspense changes and Tkdodo’s summary of the Suspense drama
• Blue Collar Coder video on React Suspense

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Three Body Problem novel
• Jack - Cascadia JS conference
• TJ - Yellow Altra running shoes

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
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• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

Today’s episode covers a slew of hot topics making headlines in the web development and general technology world.

TJ kicks off the show with his firsthand experience of GitHub Copilot Workspace (available to users by invite only). He tested Copilot Workspace with a relatively simple issue in one of his repos, and while the plan Copilot came up with seemed sound, the implementation didn’t end up working. It took Copilot several minutes each time he asked it to try and code a working solution again too, which wasn’t the best experience. While it’s still extremely early days for Copilot Workspace, it still has a ways to go before it will replace developers at this rate.

The next topic is around a talk at Google I/O: the latest in web UI. In the talk, Google DevRel Lead, Una Kravets, highlights some of the best new features out like native scroll driven animations and view transitions, the introduction of the popover API and anchor positioning in CSS, and CSS container queries and nesting and layout, typography, and color improvements. Her talk is accompanied by slick visual demos and is definitely worth a watch.

Next up is some new drama in the React world: the React team is solidly considering fundamentally changing the way Suspense works in React 19, and the general React public is not happy about it. Hopefully their concerns are heard before it gets finalized.

And there’s a bit of bonus news as well: Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) unveiled “Apple Intelligence”, Apple’s answer to AI, which will include Siri interfacing with Chat GPT 4o when it doesn’t know the answer, custom, AI-generated emojis, and the new Safari 18 beta version. Jack also recommends a cool CSS browser extension called Design GUI for managing colors in CSS variables.

News:

• Paige - The latest in Web UI (Google I/O ‘24) talk
• Jack - React Suspense drama in React 19
• TJ - GitHub Copilot Workspace

Bonus news:

• Safari 18 Beta is out
• Apple unveils Apple Intelligence its answer to AI
• Design GUI CSS browser extension

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Substack newsletters
• Jack - Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire movie 
• TJ - A Brief History of Intelligence book

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
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Vanilla JS author Chris Ferdinandi joins the podcast this week to talk about how having ADHD has affected his career in web development.

Chris shares his own diagnosis of ADHD as a child, then proceeds to discuss how it can be both a positive and a negative depending on the situation and how different individuals can have ADHD to varying degrees. 

He covers strategies he’s developed over the years to be most effective at his job; things like sending follow up emails after meetings with lists of deliverables or blocking off chunks of time on the calendar during the workday for focus work like coding. And he also makes recommendations for coworkers or managers of neurodivergent folks on how to support them so they can do their best work. Finally, he offers advice for listeners who may relate to many of the symptoms described during the show, and what they can do if they want to learn more about getting diagnosed.

It’s a very enlightening episode, and fascinating to hear about the progress being made in the field of ADHD as well as the growing destigmatization around the diagnosis: many listeners may even pick up tips to help them manage their own work days better after listening in.

Special Guest(s):

• Chris Ferdinandi, author of the Vanilla JS series, training program, and podcast, and web development teacher, content creator, and consultant. 

Main Topic:

• The challenges and advantages of being a web developer with ADHD

Relevant Links:

• Chris on Twitter @ChrisFerdinandi
• Chris’s website Go Make Things
• Chris’s other website ADHD ftw!
• Chris on GitHub

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Paris Apartment novel
• Jack - Staying above the Tech Twitter drama
• TJ - AI tools to help writing like ChatGPT
• Chris - Gardening and web components

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
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This is a rapid fire episode of news topics today because (as always) there’s plenty going on in the front-end development world.

Evan You, the creator of the popular Vue.js framework and Vite build tool, is back with a new static site generator named VitePress. VitePress allows users to build fast, content-centric websites with Markdown, a fully customizable theme, and Vue-enhancements for greater interactivity, and it will generate static HTML pages that can be deployed anywhere.

There’s also two new component library frameworks taking a page from the shadcn/ui open source component library: JollyUI and Ark UI. JollyUI provides shadcn/ui compatible, react aria components that you can copy and paste into your apps. They’re accessible, customizable, open source, and look darn good at first glance. Ark UI takes a slightly different approach billing itself as a headless library for building reusable, scalable design systems that work for a wide range of JS frameworks.

And the Angular team is back at it again with the twice a year release of a new major version of Angular. We’re up to v18 now, and Angular is encouraging users to move away from zone.js for change detection. It’s been a staple of Angular for years, but the library came with a number of developer experience and performance downsides and so the Angular team’s been hard at work building new APIs that don’t rely on zone.js and they’re ready for devs to try them out.

In bonus news, Google now offers its Gemini AI in Chrome DevTools to help developers better understand the errors and warnings that pop up in the console, Kyle Shevlin shares a very well written design system retrospective based off his own experiences building cross platform design systems for clients and dev teams, and IBM watsonx brings its own Code Assistant AI tool to the table. A unique twist with Code Assistant is that it offers not only code generation, but also code modernization (i.e. refactoring legacy code or translating code from one language to another).

News:

• Paige - VitePress SSG framework
• Jack - Ark UI 3.0 and JollyUI react aria compatible components
• TJ - Angular 18 is now available

Bonus news:

• Google Gemini AI in Chrome DevTools
• Design System Retrospective article by Kyle Shevlin
• IBM watsonx Code Assistant

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - BUBM double layer cable travel bag
• Jack - Creo Chocolate tour
• TJ - Sharp Tech podcast

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
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• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

Conference season is in full swing this week Vercel showed off the new goods they’ve got for developers to get excited about.

During Vercel Ship, the Next.js 15 RC (release candidate) was officially announced. Next.js 15 includes benefits like: support for React 19 and the React Compiler (Experimental), plus hydration error improvements. It also offers experimental support for partial pre-rendering, a new API to execute code after a response has finished streaming, and new config options for the App and Pages Router. But the biggest thing to note in this release is the change to caching: in Next 15, fetch requests, GET route handlers, and client navigation are no longer cached by default (a confusing default in Next.js, which caused a lot of confusion for devs why they were seeing the new data in local dev, but not in prod). Next has reversed course on this aggressive caching, and now requires teams that need it to opt in instead of having to opt out.

Not to be outdone, Google search rolled out AI overviews to all Chrome users with its latest browser update. While initial reviews of the AI’s accuracy and truthfulness are mixed, it’s a strong indicator that the AI hype train continues to go strong, and every major tech company must have an AI offering to compete. What’s less clear is how Google will monetize this offering, how SEO and website traffic will fare now that users may never need to leave the Google search engine to get the answers they seek, and if this will cause a decline in the amount of time and energy people put into writing articles and posting useful information if no one besides the LLM training models will consume it. It’s a brave new world we’re facing, and it will be interesting to see who survives and how it continues to evolve.

Last but not least, the team behind the popular JavaScript framework Solid.js debuts the meta framework SolidStart 1.0. The thinking behind SolidStart is that it integrates multiple separate packages to provide complete functionality, but each of these pieces can be replaced with a user’s own custom implementation if desired. Out of the box, SolidStart is built on Vinxi (a Vite + Nitro-based bundler and runtime), the Seroval serializer, and the Solid Router. It offers all the things we’ve come to expect from a good meta framework: file-based routing, streaming, server functions and actions, data pre-loading, API routes, and more, and it can be deployed on every platform that has a Nitro preset (25+ platforms and counting).

The Solid team has been good at reading the room: pioneering signals in 2019 and adding server functions in 2022, so there’s a good chance they’ll continue to make smart bets going forward, and we wish SolidStart the best of luck.

News:

• Paige - SolidStart 1.0
• Jack - Next.js 15
• TJ - Google search’s AI overview

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Relax Meditation mobile app
• Jack - Fourth Wing book
• TJ - Apple Vision Pro

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
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We’ve got an exciting episode with our co-host Jack Herrington fresh from his trip to React Conf where the React core team and close collaborators unveiled all the cool things they’ve been working on, including the much anticipated React Compiler and some exciting new features for React Native Expo.

React Compiler is a new Babel-enabled plugin that will allow React apps to handle the memoization and re-rendering of components in an application so that developers won’t have to use the useMemo() and useCallback() hooks themselves. It will essentially save devs from having to think about it (and save them from the foot guns of implementing it incorrectly), and it is completely optional (not built in to React 19) and can be done via incremental adoption across an already existing application.

In related news, Vercel (the creators of Next.js, the most popular React framework in the world) announced they had raised $250m in funding, and the company is currently valued at $3.25b. Just wow! While we can only assume some of that funding will go towards continuing to improve Next.js and their core business of web hosting, they also said they’ll continue to invest heavily in their v0 generative UI system, which currently generates copy-and-paste friendly React code using shadcn/ui and Tailwind CSS that people can use in their projects.

Another popular JavaScript framework, Astro, made a splash as well with its release of Astro 4.8. In addition to the usual performance enhancements and bug fixes, it added experimental support for Astro Actions with niceties like full type-safety, a single global action file that any client component can access, automatically parsing form request objects using a Zod schema, and progressive enhancement on forms.

Finally, the news wraps up with some new features that came out in the Safari 17.5 release.

News:

• Paige - Astro Actions in v4.8
• Jack - React Compiler, React Compiler Playground, Jack’s in-depth video of React Compiler
• TJ - Vercel raises $250m; valued at $3.25b

Bonus News:

• TJ - Safari 17.5

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Parks and Recreation TV series
• Jack - How to ADHD book
• TJ - NYT games

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
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• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

On this episode of Front-End Fire we welcomed special guest Jason Lengstorf to chat about the news with us. We opened with a follow-up discussion of the let versus const debate from last week. Jack made a video (see below for link), and we had a bit of fun talking about the controversy.

After that we introduced Effect, a library that dubs itself the missing standard library for TypeScript. Effect just had its first stable release, so we discussed what the library does, what sort of apps it works well in, and how in the world they raised over 2 million dollars in VC money.

Finally, Jason walked us through his latest creative venture: 4 Web Devs 1 App. The concept, as the name implies, is getting four web developers together to build apps using the same technology. The behind the scenes though involves a full production team, over four terrabytes of files per video, and a ton of logistics.

News:

• Jack - const vs. let
• TJ - Effect 3.0
• Jason - 4 Web Devs 1 App

Special Guest: Jason Lengstorf host of Learn with Jason and developer-focused media consultant.

• Jason’s X profile @jlengstorf
• Jason’s YouTube channel
• Learn with Jason site
• Jason’s link tree (jason.energy/links)

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Jack - Lightroom
• TJ - Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years
• Jason - Node.js

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This week we’re all about beta releases and technical previews of AI that will make us even more productive coders.

Since the release of React 18, just over 2 years ago, the React team’s been hard at work, and at the end of April, React 19 beta dropped on npm. This new version brings Server Components and Server Actions out from behind the canary channel, stating they are now stable and will not break between major versions going forward. In addition to this, v19 introduces Actions: hooks for supporting asynchronous functions in transitions like form submission, designed to handle pending, error and optimistic updates in the UI automatically. There’s also a new use API, which can use Suspense to wait for promises to resolve (or contexts to be available) before rendering, and it can be done conditionally (something that hooks cannot). Additionally, React 19 offers better hydration errors, support for documentation metadata, stylesheets, asynchronous scripts, preloading resources, and custom elements. It’s a lot to take in, but there are upgrade guides and code mods to help developers itching to get started trying out this latest version of React.

Not to be outdone, TypeScript also released v5.5 beta as well! Highlights for this new release include: inferred type predicates (good for when you filter null values out of an array but TypeScript yells because it doesn’t realize you have), regular expression syntax checking (it can’t tell you if your regex will actually catch what you want it to, but will tell you if your expression is invalid), and type imports in JSDoc.

And GitHub expands on the capabilities of Copilot with the announcement of GitHub Copilot Workspaces: a Copilot-native development environment. Within Copilot Workspaces, developers can brainstorm, plan, build, test, and run code in natural language. Inside of a GitHub repo or issue, devs can tell Copilot agents to formulate a plan to fix the error or build a new feature, Copilot Workspaces offers a plan based on its understanding of the entire codebase, issue replies, and more, and everything from its plan to the code is entirely editable. Once a user likes the plan, they can run the code directly in Copilot Workspace and tweak until happy with the final result. It’s a lofty goal to be sure (and won’t be perfect right off the bat), but in a few years time this could be the new way we all code.

News:

• Paige - React 19 beta
• Jack - TypeScript 5.5 beta
• TJ - GitHub Copilot Workspace

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Kevin Can F**k Himself TV series
• Jack - Depth of Field project
• TJ - Let me be lightning talk from Ryan Florence

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

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There’s rarely a dull moment in the web development world and this week is no exception to that rule. 

The episode kicks off with an update on Shopify’s meta framework Hydrogen, which is now built on top of the open source framework, Remix, which Shopify acquired back in October of 2022. Hydrogen now has full Vite support and integration with the Vite plugins ecosystem, an overhaul of its SEO (now powered by Remix), full page caching, and a decrease in the CLI bundle size of 60%. Listeners may wonder why Shopify continues to develop both Hydrogen and Remix, and the general thought is that Hydrogen is targeted specifically to bigger ecommerce companies that need modern routing, data fetching, SSR, and easy to work with Shopify APIs.

Node.js also released its latest version this month, and we’ve already reached v22. Amongst the improvements this version boasts, the most exciting one is probably the support for ESM through an experimental flag,which will eventually become the default. Long live ESM.

In a surprising reversal of course, Vercel announced it’s reverting all edge rendering back to Node.js. Vercel first acknowledges it had too many different “Edge” products, which made it hard for developers to keep straight, but then also it became apparent that even when running a site itself “on the edge”, if the site needed to access a database, it most likely had to go back to a region farther away to fetch the data. Turns out, using Vercel’s original Node.js runtime resulted in faster startups, cheaper costs, and better security than edge functions. Who knew?? 

Today’s episode winds down with a few extra interesting bits of news: the FTC has announced a new rule to ban non compete agreements in the US, and a new feature from the popular React component collection shadcn called “Lift Mode”. “Lift Mode” essentially lets users pick and choose what code to copy from one of shadcn’s “blocks” (pre-made collections of components) for use in their own project. Pretty cool!

News:

• Paige - Shopify’s Hydrogen gets Remix(ed)
• Jack - Vercel moves away from Edge computing
• TJ - Node.js 22

Bonus News:

• Lift Mode in shadcn
• FTC announced a new rule that bans noncompete agreements

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Shogun TV miniseries
• Jack - 3 in 1 charging stand for Apple iPhone, watch, and AirPods
• TJ - Interview with a Senior JS Dev on YT

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The episode starts off with news about Figma’s new Code Connect feature. Code Connect is the bridge between a design system’s component code and Figma, so when viewing components in Figma’s Dev Mode, they’ll have the same real world code that the design system relies on, and Code Connect can also map properties from code to Figma, enabling dynamic and correct snippets. The catch? This sweet new feature is only available to users who are on Figma’s Organization and Enterprise plans.

We continue the news with the release of Next.js 14.2, which has moved Next’s Turbopack (the speedier successor to Webpack) into the release candidate stage with 99.8% of integration tests passing, and all Next.js examples working with it. Other improvements include tree-shaking, optimized CSS, better caching, and improved readability of error messages and stack traces in local development.

The Google Chrome team is back with new updates packed into Chrome v124. There’s two new APIs for handling HTML when a declarative shadow DOM is included in the(primarily used for encapsulation and component-based development). A new websocket stream API designed to make it easier for web sockets to handle a large volume of incoming messages without getting overwhelmed. And the view transitions API gets two new helper functions as well: view transition momentum and document render blocking. After its breakout year last year, the view transitions API seems to have some unstoppable forward momentum.

And to wrap it up, we have another newcomer to the JavaScript package management games: VLT. There’s not a lot to share about VLT so far (there’s a waitlist sign up now for early access), but it’s helmed by some folks who played key roles in the creation of npm, Node.js and the GitHub CLI, and backed by some very big names in the JS world. It’s early days yet, but we’ll keep you posted as more details around VLT emerge. 

News:

• Paige - Chrome 124 updates
• Jack - Figma releases Code Connect
• TJ -  Next.js 14.2

Bonus News:

• VLT enters the JS package management fray

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Hamilton Beach crock pot
• Jack - Civil War movie and Fallout TV series
• TJ - Spring weather and Blues Starnote

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The group dives into the week’s news right away, starting off with a new open source project from Google called Jpegli. Jpepgli is a new JPEG coding library, which claims to compress images up to 35% smaller while also being able to deliver JPEGs in even higher quality than what is currently available today. The GitHub repo the article links to still looks to be in the early stages of development, but this could be a new solution for JPEGs, which traditionally can take quite a bit to load in the browser depending on their size and resolution.

The next topic for discussion is a company called Val Town that’s raised $5.5M in funding. The premise is that users can write small snippets of code in Val Town’s online platform and Val Town will run them in serverless functions and do things like send HTTP requests, run scheduled cron jobs, send emails, and users of the platform can see the “vals” and comment on them, like them, etc. It remains to be seen how much traction this will generate in the web development world, but it seems like an interesting concept lowering the barrier to entry for folks who aren’t coding professionals.

Jack shares his new declarative routing library for Next.js as another interesting bit of news for the week. Type safe routing in packages like React Router and Tanstack Router are becoming the preferred method of writing routes, but it’s still a very manual process without a lot of autocompletion and input validation that we’ve come to expect in TypeScript code today, and the Declarative Routing library aims to bring that same level of comfort and coding niceties to routes in Next.js. It’s also OSS, so if you’re interested in contributing to open source, check it out!

Finally, Cloudflare made the announcement that they’ve acquired OSS platform PartyKit. PartyKit, started by former Cloudflare employee Sunil Pai, is focused on making real-time, collaborative, multiplayer functionality within apps easy. It handles that aspect through the use of Cloudflare Durable Objects and Cloudflare Workers, so that developers can focus on the logic that makes their apps unique, and it seems like a well-made match to bring PartyKit under the official Cloudflare umbrella. The future roadmap is focused on integrations with popular frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular, so expect to hear more about this in the future.

News:

• Paige - Google introduces Jpegli, a new JPEG coding library
• Jack - Jack Herrington’s declarative routing library
• TJ - Val Town Raises $5.5M 

Bonus News:

• Cloudflare acquires PartyKit

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Fallout TV series
• Jack - Photography
• TJ - The Guest List

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, reach out to us via email or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

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Signals have been around in the JavaScript world as early as 2010 when Knockout.js first introduced them, but the past few years they’ve been picking up steam among JS frameworks as a way to effectively manage application state so that developers can focus on the business logic parts of their apps. Now there’s a proposal to make Signals part of the native JavaScript ecosystem, and it’s being backed by some well-known frameworks like Angular, Svelte, Vue, and more. 

Storybook 8 has introduced experimental support for React Server Components. It is noted that server side actions are still only available in Next.js, but it’s great to see RSCs continuing to gain more traction in the world. 

Bun reached v1.1 recently, and while this isn’t usually a big milestone, for Bun it is, because it now supports Windows (and boasts impressive speeds for performance test metrics we’ve come to expect from JS runtimes) and offers a slew of improved Node.js compatibilities. As Bun says itself, it aims to be a drop-in replacement for Node, and if it keeps adding features, support, and speed gains like this, it very well might win that battle. 

Finally, the discussion wraps up with some smaller news stories like Angular and Wiz officially announcing they’ll become one, a lesser known Redux hook that can stand in for complicated useEffect calls, and a crazy, years-long Linux hack that almost made it into the major Linux distributions before it was caught.

News:

• Paige - Proposed signals in JS
• Jack - RSC support in Storybook 8
• TJ - Bun 1.1

Bonus News:

• Redux createListenerMiddleware avoids using useEffect
• It’s official: Angular and Wiz unite
• The crazy XZ hack

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Daylight Uno Table Lamp
• Jack - Govee Warm White LED Strip Lights
• TJ - Open source! And Paige’s asset tracker repo.

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It turns out we had a lot of news to cover in this week’s episode. We kicked it off discussing how RedwoodJS is the latest framework to support React Server Components, and has some pretty nice illustrated docs to help devs get started. Then, there was a rapid fire of interesting topics including a great new article about modern CSS from Mr. CSS Tricks himself, Chris Coyier, a new documentary film on the origin story of Node.js from the team that created the React and Ruby on Rails documentaries as well, and a footnote about a new antitrust case the US Department of Justice has leveraged against Apple. At NG Conf earlier in the week, it was announced Google’s internal framework Wiz might be combining with Angular after the two teams successfully worked together to launch Angular signals primitives for 100% of YouTube’s mobile web traffic to great effect. We can only hope the resulting combined framework is renamed to Wangular. And to round it all out, yet another CSS framework has popped up claiming to have all the answers to the ever pervasive feeling that CSS is hard. Will Nue CSS have the good to back up its claim? We’ll have to wait and see, and give the new Promise.withResolvers a spin in the meantime.

News:

• Paige - Wiz and Angular combine forces
• Jack - RedwoodJS supports RSCs
• TJ - What You Need to Know About Modern CSS, DOJ antitrust case against Apple, and Node.js: The Documentary | An origin story

Bonus News:

• Nue CSS
• Promise.withResolvers() MDN Docs and a helpful explainer tweet from Wes Bos

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Masters of the Air TV series
• Jack - Learning stuff! Like vector DBs
• TJ - Booking tours of the U.S. Capitol and White House through local reps

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, reach out to us via email or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

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CSS-in-JS has been around for years now, but have you tried JS-from-CSS? This week we talk about the new alternative trend sweeping through the web development community: writing only CSS to create a fully styled and typed React component. Two early frontrunners in this race are MistCSS and Stylin, and we’ll keep an eye out for if this new twist on writing JSX components catches on. AnalogJS, the meta-framework for Angular we covered several months ago, announces release 1.0 with all the bells and whistles we’ve come to expect from other meta frameworks: Vite integration, filesystem routing, SSR/SSG, server routes, tRPC support, etc. and plans for future integrations with libraries like Astro, Nx, Vitest and Storybook. Chrome officially replaces the First Input Delay (FID) web vital metric with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) to try to do a better job of evaluating a webpage’s performance beyond just the first user interaction. And to round the episode out, an API that is pure fun to play with on the demo site: Emojispolsion. It’s worth a look just to see how creative the demos get (hint: the very last one is extra far out).

News:

• Paige - AnalogJS 1.0 
• Jack - MistCSS and Stylin 
• TJ - Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a Core Web Vital (check your own site at pagespeed.web.dev) and Chrome Perf Tooling in 2024

Bonus News:

• Emojispolsion API demo site

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - iPhone 15 Pro and Dune: Part Two
• Jack - Downfall: The Case Against Boeing documentary and https://www.ismyplanea737max.com/ 
• TJ - NCAA tournament

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In this episode, we explore the latest in web development with Astro unveiling Astro DB, a fully managed, blazing fast SQL-based database that is “ridiculously easy to use.” Next, you may not know the name, but Speedometer just released version 3.0, which further solidifies its status as the browser benchmark for web app responsiveness. Next up is Pigment CSS, a zero-runtime CSS-in-JS solution from the makers of the Material UI component library that works with Next.js’ app router and React Server Components. And to cap it all off, we’ve got new details about Rolldown, the Rust-based version of Rollup, and Chris Coyier’s honest thoughts about what happened to his CSS Tricks site after it was acquired.

News:

• Paige - Astro DB
• Jack - Pigment CSS
• TJ - Speedometer 3.0 announcement. Run the test yourself.

Bonus News:

• Rolldown - the Rust-based JS bundler is in beta
• Chris Coyier’s take on CSS Tricks

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Elgato Prompter
• Jack - Big Shark movie
• TJ - Dune 2 movie

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, reach out to us via email or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

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Today we discuss Vercel’s latest offering: AI SDK 3.0, which streams React components from LLMs to deliver richer user experiences than text-only chatbots. Then we dive into the world of modern styling as Tailwind CSS drops its latest gem - version 4.0, now open source for community exploration. And then finally we talk about the latest improvements in Safari 17.4. Plus, stay tuned for Elon Musk’s legal saga with OpenAI and the Indian government’s new stance on AI model updates.

News:

• Paige - Tailwind CSS v4 goes open source
• Jack - Vercel’s AI SDK 3.0 with Generative UI support
• TJ - Safari 17.4 upgrades

Bonus News:

• Elon Musk Suing OpenAI
• India requiring government approval for AI model updates

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Springtime is coming
• Jack - Warrior TV series
• TJ - Dune movie

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We discuss JSR, the new package registry from Deno, and whether it can compete with npm. Next, we talk about Parcel’s new support for macros, which is a handy way to embed build-time logic into your code. After that we some get into some BrowserStack legal drama, and wrap up with some BREAKING NEWS about Apple, PWAs, and the EU. Drama!

News:

• Paige - JSR - Deno’s New JavaScript Package Registry
• Jack - Parcel v2.12 supports macros
• TJ - Deque Systems Sues BrowserStack for Intellectual Property Theft
• Jack - React 19’s useOptimistic hook
• TJ - So what exactly did Apple break in the EU?
• BREAKING NEWS: Apple says iOS 17.4 won’t remove Home Screen web apps in the EU after all 

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - House of Ninjas series on Netflix
• Jack - Dune 2 and Avatar The Last Airbender on Netflix
• TJ - Product launch at work Notecard LoRa
• White House urges developers to dump C and C++

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, reach out to us via email or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

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News:

• Paige - Hono v4 takes aim at full-stack frameworks
• Jack - Storybook 8
• TJ - An update on Apple breaking PWAs in the EU

Bonus News:

• Google cut a deal with Reddit for AI training data
• Node.js unveils its new mascot Rocket Turtle

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Learning watercolor painting and The Fourth Wing novel
• Jack - Drive to Survive season 6
• TJ - Detroit Red Wings

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Special Guest(s):

• Kelvin Omereshone, lead maintainer of Sails.js and creator of The Boring JavaScript Stack

Main Topic:

• The Boring JavaScript Stack

Relevant Links:

• The Boring Stack repo
• The Boring Stack docs
• Kelvin on Twitter
• Kelvin on YouTube
• Kelvin’s website
• Sailsconf keynote announcing The Boring Stack
• Why the name
• Who is Boring for?
• Sails.js
• Sails repo
• Inertia.js
• Sailscasts

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News:

• Paige - Nx Project Crystal
• Jack - Simple Stack Streaming
• TJ - Apple breaking PWAs in the EU

Bonus News:

• Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Mr. & Mrs. Smith TV series
• Jack - The Murderbot Diaries book series
• TJ - Casey Neistat’s video on the Apple Vision Pro

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News:

• Paige - Vite 5.1
• Jack - LLRT and Million Lint
• TJ - Interop 2024 & wpt.fyi

Bonus News:

• React Native visionOS for the Apple Vision Pro
• jQuery 4 beta

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - A Court of Mist and Fury book (sequel to A Court of Thorns and Roses)
• Jack - A Libertarian Walks into a Bear book
• TJ - Only Murders in the Building

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Special Guest(s):

• Rachel Nabors, formerly of React at Meta known for their work on reactnative.dev and react.dev 
• Evan Bacon, Engineering Manager at Expo
• Matt Carroll, Developer Advocate React at Meta

Relevant Links:

• The Two Reacts blog post by Dan Abramov
• Rachel Nabors on Twitter, @rachelnabors
• Evan Bacon on Twitter, @Baconbrix
• Matt Carroll on Twitter, @mattcarrollcode

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News:

• Paige - Code editor Zed goes open source
• Jack - “Hey Code” in VS Code
• TJ - Apple changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the EU
  • Mozilla says Apple’s new browser rules are ‘as painful as possible’ for Firefox

Bonus News:

• Open Props

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Kindle Paperwhite 
• Jack - Oura smart ring
• TJ - One Piece on Netflix

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Million.js:  https://million.dev
Discord: http://million.dev/chat 

Aiden Bai:
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Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidenbai/

Tobiloba Adedeji:
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Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobiloba-adedeji

News:

• Paige - New Web Components features from the W3C
• Jack - Code Hike
• TJ - Apple Vision Pro and Apple Vision Pro drama

Bonus News:

• Bun Shell - experimental shell scripting in JS

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - ColorIt Mandalas coloring book
• Jack - Brothers Sun TV series
• TJ - Lugeing!

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News:

• Paige - ReScript 11.0 - a TS competitor
• Jack - Donut components
  • Matteo Frana: React, where are you going?
  • Cassidy Williams: Kind of annoyed at React
• TJ - OpenAI launches a GPT Store & Netlify’s example

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Fargo TV series and JustThe Recipe.com
• Jack - The Marvels movie
• TJ - Paprika app

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News:

• Paige - Superglue - Rails with React & Redux framework
• Jack - Svelte 5 preview
• TJ - NY Times is Suing OpenAI

Bonus news:

• Knip

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - A Court of Thorns and Roses book
• Jack - What If…? season 2
• TJ - CES 

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News:

• Paige - TanStack Router 1.0
• Jack - Catalyst UI Kit
• TJ - date-fns v3

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Money Heist: Berlin 
• Jack - Personalized art and wine experience
• TJ - Fourth Wing book

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News:

• The Adobe Figma merger fell apart

Predictions:

• Paige - More native JS APIs
• Jack - A return to simpler JS frameworks
• TJ - AI in the whole code base

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Morning Show TV series
• Jack - Twinkly Christmas Lights 
• TJ - Coffee advent calendar from Brew Company

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News:

• Paige - Waku - new minimal React framework designed for RSCs
• Jack - Agile 2
• TJ - Safari 17.2

Bonus News:

• Peach Fuzz is the 2024 color of the year
• Envy HTTP tracing
• Cody AI code assistant

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Twinkly Christmas lights and Slow Horses TV series
• Jack - The Artful Dodger TV series
• TJ - Wheel of Time TV series

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News:

• Paige - XState v5 debuts the “actor model”
• Jack - StyleX
• TJ - Deno Cron

Bonus News:

• VS Code floating editor windows 

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - General good health
• Jack - CO2 detector
• TJ - Twinkly Christmas Lights

Join Us:

Outro: Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, reach out to us via email or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - CSS nesting is supported by all major browsers
• Jack - Streaming components from server actions using the Vercel AI SDK library
• TJ - State of JavaScript 2023 survey

Bonus News:

• The OpenAI debacle (aka Sam Altman’s ousting on Friday and rehiring by Microsoft on Sunday then reinstating at OpenAI by Tuesday)
• Update on the Prettier & Rust saga

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Great British Baking Show series
• Jack - Godzilla Minus One movie
• TJ - Wordle board game

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - GitHub’s bringing Copilot Chat to github.com
• Jack - Next.js Partial Prerendering feature
• TJ - The $20k bounty for Prettier to be written in Rust 

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Blue Eye Samurai on Netflix
• Jack - Hiking
• TJ - iPhone 15 usb c power port

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - Shots.so a full featured device mockup tool
• Jack - Astro 3.5 release
• TJ - The :has selector has landed in Firefox. CSS nesting is now widely supported.
• Jessica - Angular 17 debut

Special Guest:

Jessica Janiuk Senior Software Engineer at Google

• Jessica’s website
• Jessica’s personal GitHub | Jessica’s Google Github
• Jessica’s LinkedIn
• Jessica’s linktree
• New Angular.dev site

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Instant Pot cooker
• Jack - Kinesis Freestyle2 Split-Adjustable keyboard
• TJ - Carrying on special family traditions even as the kids grow up

Jessica - Litter Robot 4 and Petkit Pura Max cat litter boxes

News:

• Paige - Remix announces support for Vite
• Jack - Docusaurus 3.0 
• TJ - v0 update

Bonus news:

• Angular event - https://twitter.com/angular/status/1719025621425369267 
• Stack Overflow is adopting Svelte to enhance their UI - https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/10/31/why-stack-overflow-is-embracing-svelte/ 

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - F1 Racing on Sky TV
• Jack - The Empire Strips Back
• TJ - Major League Baseball playoff and new rules

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - Next.js 14 just dropped
• Jack - React Forget
• TJ - Analog.js and this talk
• Bonus - https://developer.chrome.com/en/blog/hr-in-select/ 

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Archer TV series
• Jack - Kinesis Freestyle2 keyboard
• TJ - GitHub Copilot (again)

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - TanStack Query hits v5
• TJ - Dev Container Support in CodeSandbox

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - ILeftMyStuff.com
• TJ - YouTube TV multiview

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - The React Aria team released a new library of unstyled components
• Jack - Barrel Files
• TJ - WordPress now offers official support for ActivityPub

Bonus news: Node.js 20 has killed dotenv

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Royal Therapy Memory Foam Pillow
• Jack - Godly Design Website
• TJ - Caraway Non-Stick Ceramic Baking Sheet

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - Web components library Lit 3.0 is about to be released
• TJ - Photoshop is now on the web
• Ryan - The future for SolidJS

Special Guest:

Ryan Carniato the creator of SolidJS.

• Ryan’s X profile @RyanCarniato
• Ryan’s YouTube channel
• SolidJS site
• SolidJS on Discord

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Libby app and All Creatures Great and Small book
• TJ - Ember mug
• Ryan - Hiking in Sequoia National Park

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - ChatGPT.js - we knew it was only a matter of time…
• Jack - Latest Nx updates
• TJ - What the State of HTML Survey taught me about HTML

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Dune, the novel
• Jack - Eggrolls
• TJ - Anker USB Outlet and the Lions winning streak

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - The first look at Svelte 5
• Jack - Stylex CSS-in-JS library
• TJ - TypeScript Origins: The Documentary

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Men in Kilts: A Roadtrip with Sam and Graham TV show
• Jack - Foundation on Apple TV
• TJ - Scorpio Races and Libby

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - Vercel Labs presents generative UI tool v0
• Jack - Bun Macros
• TJ - Bun 1.0 is here

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - What We Do in the Shadows TV show
• Jack - Making stuff 🙂
• TJ - Tears of the Kingdom

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - Ruby on Rails creator DHH removing TypeScript from Turbo 8, which supports Hotwire
• Jack - Open Props
• TJ - The end of Rome and start of Biome
• Bonus - https://studio.astro.build 

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Bardcore music
• Jack - New Godzilla movie
• TJ - Detroit Lions

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• https://www.pronextjs.dev/ 

News:

• Paige - Lightning CSS gains wid(er)spread adoption
• Jack - Vercel becomes official hosting partner for Astro 
• TJ - ChatGPT Enterprise is out now 

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
• Jack - Chip War
• TJ - M2 Macbook Pro

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• https://www.pronextjs.dev/ 

News:

• Paige - Lots of Supabase enhancements - Postgres Language Server, new utilities for the CLI, and branching & preview environments for PRs via GitHub
• Jack - Codux
• Fred - Astro 3.0

Special Guest:

Fred K. Schott the co-creator of Astro.

• Fred’s X profile @fks
• Astro site
• Astro blog

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Google Translate and Duolingo
• Jack - Woodworking with Jason Lengstorf
• Fred - Factorio: Space Age game

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

No new Front-end Fire podcast today because we have a very special guest joining us this coming Wednesday, August 30th with a big announcement.

Tune back in for our full episode on Wednesday with our guest!

And don't forget to join us online and subscribe to our show so you never miss an episode.

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - Chrome introduces 4 new CSS features for entry/exit animations
• Jack - Million.js auto mode
• TJ - Bun 1.0 launch event

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - CodePen site
• Jack -  The Weird Al Yankovic Movie
• Jack #2 - Miracle Workers Season 4
• TJ - GitHub Copilot Chat

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - Radix UI themes - an OS component library for React
• Jack - RSC Parser
• TJ - Google announces Project IDX

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Meater BBQ Oven Mitts
• Jack - XP-Pen + Screenbrush
• TJ - Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige - StackOverflow launched Overflow AI
• Jack - HTMX
• TJ - Is Jamstack Officially Finished? 
• Bonus news: Introducing react-tweet

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Roller coasters
• Jack - The Barbie Movie
• TJ - Algolia search

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

News:

• Paige: Dan Abramov is leaving Meta: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1682029195843739649 
• Jack:  GitHub Copilot Chat is now available for enterprise dev teams: https://github.blog/2023-07-20-github-copilot-chat-beta-now-available-for-every-organization/ 
• TJ: Zero-JavaScript page transitions coming to Astro https://twitter.com/astrodotbuild/status/1683514985115426817, https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/view-transitions/ 

What Makes Me Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Witcher Season 3 on Netflix https://www.netflix.com/title/80189685 
• Jack - Star Trek Strange New Worlds on Paramount+ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12327578/ 
• TJ - Pokemon Sleep https://www.pokemon.com/us/app/pokemon-sleep/ 

Join Us:

• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6vRUjYqDuoUsYsku86Lrsw
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord: https://discord.com/invite/ddMZFtTDa5