Nick is excited to explain CVA to us like we’re five (then again like we’re 41).
KBall is excited to share details of his new stack (for the new app he’s building).
Jerod is excited to share some recent news items (but he’s the only one).

And finally, we’re all excited to debate TypeScript vs JSDoc comments!

Nick & KBall sit down with the brilliant Stephen Haberman to discuss all things ORMs! 💻🔍

From the advantages and disadvantages of ORMs in general, to delving into the intricacies of his innovative project Joist, which brings a fresh, idiomatic, ActiveRecord-esque approach to TypeScript. 🚀

So sit back, relax, and let’s dive deep into the world of ORMs with the experts!

Developer slash artist Alex Miller joins Jerod & Amelia to discuss the challenge he faced after deciding to eschew fancy frameworks and libraries in favor of vanilla JS to build an interactive essay called Grid World for the html review.

Dax Raad joins KBall and Nick to chat about SST, a framework that makes it easier to build full-stack applications on AWS. We chat about how the project got started and its goals. Then we discuss OpenNext, an open source, framework-agnostic server less adapter for Next.js.

Adam Argyle joins Amelia and Nick to catch them up on all the goings on within the world of CSS colors. There are a lot more options than you’d expect if you haven’t been keeping up, and Adam’s here to help you avoid the “gray dead zone”!

Feross and his team at Socket recently shipped a wrapper library for the ubiquitous npm package manager’s command-line interface that brings enhanced security when you need it most: before executing any code

Bradly Farias lead this effort, so Jerod & Chris invited him on the show to learn all about it.

The panel dives into a topic that makes most software developers cringe: Professional networking. Starting with a definition - what does it even mean? - they go into hacks they’ve found for getting more comfortable with networking, building your network in person or online, and then using your network to find new job opportunities or consulting work.

Grab a comfy seat and a hot cup of joe, because it’s time for some coffee talk with Nick & KBall! Special guest Thomas Eckert joins the party and brings a bunch of questions for us to discuss.

Who wins in a fist fight: Tailwind CSS people or “real” CSS people? Is Agile overrated? What’s the longest bug you’ve ever chased? How about some underrated libraries/packages that people should know about? And more!

Jerod & the gang catch you up on what’s new and poppin’ in the web development world. We go deep on GitHub Copilot X and the latest AI advancements, take a bathroom break while Nick talks about TypeScript 5 & continue the debate about the future of React.

Node core committer Erick Wendel joins Jerod & KBall to talk us through how he created his own JS runtime using V8, Libuv & more. Along the way we learn from his learnings, wrap our heads around the differences between Node, Bun & Deno, and talk about creating awesome content for developers… whether they like it or not!

Dan Abramov & Joe Savona from the React Team join Jerod & Nick for a wide-ranging discussion about React’s place in the frontend ecosystem. We cover everything from React competing with React, their responses to SPA fatigue and recent criticisms, to Server Components and the future of the framework.

Zach Leatherman returns to the show to discuss his progress over the last year since going full-time on Eleventy, including Eleventy 2.0, the release of WebC, and the state of static site generators.

KBall and Nick interview one of the leaders of the Tauri project about this next generation app bundling toolkit: the security, size, and performance features that make it special (and dare we say, better than Electron?), and what’s coming next.

Andy Jiang and Deno’s content team are really speaking my language lately:

Sites take time to build these days. A large Next.js 11 site will take several minutes to build. This is wasted time in the development cycle. Build tools like Vite or Turbopack highlight their ability to get this number down.

But the deeper question hasn’t been considered:

Why do we even need a build step?

Akshay Khot:

Although Hotwire (an approach to building web apps without much JS by sending HTML instead of JSON over the wire.) is closely tied to Ruby on Rails, you might be surprised to know that you don’t really need Rails to learn, play, and experiment with Hotwire. In this article, I will show you how a simple static website can use Turbo Drive and Frames to make it more dynamic and responsive.

We’ve been using the predecessor to Hotwire’s Turbo Drive on this very website (an Elixir app) for 7 (!) years now, so I’m convinced there are valid uses of Hotwire outside of its usual Rails context.

Una & Adam from The CSS Podcast defend their Frontend Feud title against challengers David & Shaw from the keyframers. Let’s get it on!

Amal sits down for a one-on-one with Alex Russell, Microsoft Partner on the Edge team, and former Web Standards Tech Lead for Chrome, whose recent post, The Market for Lemons, stirred up a BIG conversation in the web development community.

Have we really lost a decade in potential progress? What happened? Where do we go from here?

The panel dives into the current hot topic that is Generative AI. They start by defining it (a surprisingly difficult topic), then go into experiences they’ve had, how to get started working with it as a developer, and where they think it will and will not be useful in the near future.

A quick look at the history of building web apps, followed by a discussion of htmx and how it compares to both modern and traditional ways of building.

What’s old is new cool again. Here’s Andy Jiang, writing on Deno’s blog:

In the past 10 years, the median size for a desktop webpage has gone from 468 KB to 2284 KB, a 388.3% increase. For mobile, this jump is even more staggering — 145 KB to 2010 KB — a whopping 1288.1% increase.

That’s a lot of weight to ship over a network, especially for mobile. As a result, users experience terrible UX, slow loading times, and a lack of interactivity until everything is rendered. But all that code is necessary to make our sites work the way we want.

This is the problem with being a frontend dev today. What started out fun for frontend developers, building shit-hot sites with all the bells and whistles, has kinda turned into not fun. We’re now fighting different browsers to support, slow networks to ship code over, and intermittent, mobile connections. Supporting all these permutations is a giant headache.

How do we square this circle? By heading back to the server (Swiss basement not required).

He goes on to talk about isomorphic JavaScript frameworks and Deno’s offerings in this space. But hey, you don’t need all that fancy stuff to do SSR. All you need is a programming language that can render HTML (this is almost all languages) and a server…

A deep dive into Qwik, how it makes your apps fast by default, and the carefully calibrated amount of “magic” that makes it uniquely powerful.

Fred K. Schott joins the party again to discuss all the new and fun changes in Astro 2. Nick and KBall dig in on what’s new, what’s exciting, and what to expect from the framework built around content.

Jerod & the gang analyze the State of JS 2022 survey results, play a wicked game of HeadLIES & share some Pro Tips to help you live your best dev life.

In this post, I will show you some advanced usage patterns for working with Playwright in order to take a screenshot of a specific element and modify the contents of the image, either before taking the screenshot or after, using image preprocessing tools.

KBall and Chris dive into the current JavaScript trends towards smaller frameworks, compiled JavaScript, and why Chris believes “this time is different” with regards to developers caring about network speed and reducing JS sent over the wire.