Yulia Startsev from Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey team joins Jerod & Feross to talk compilers, going back to get your Master’s, making decisions as a group, process of shepherding a feature through TC39, how Firefox actually works, and LavaMoats. Yes, LavaMoats.

Tanner joins Nick to talk about his projects, react-query and react table, and discuss scratching your own itch in a maintainable way with open source.

Powered by Mediapipe, TensorFlow, and Jeeliz.

Eric Simons and the StackBlitz team recently announced WebContainers which let you run Node.js natively in your browser! This has BIG implications and leaves us with many BIG questions like: how did they do it, why did they do it, and where does it go from here? Tune in! Keyword: BIG

Boring avatars is a tiny JavaScript React library that generates custom, SVG-based, round avatars from any username and color palette.

Cool, but it’d be even cooler if it detached from React so we could all use it. It’d also be nice if you could opt to having the initials overlay the gradient.

Brian LeRoux has been building the web long enough to see many ways we produce HTML come in and go out of fashion. On this episode, he joins Amal & Nick to discuss the past, present, and potential future of rendering patterns on the web. SSR, ISR, & DSR (oh my!)

This week Emma and Adam are joined by Una Kravets to discuss difficult parts of CSS.

The Parcel team is excited to release Parcel 2 beta 3! This release includes a ground up rewrite of our JavaScript compiler in Rust, which improves overall build performance by up to 10x. In addition, this post will cover some other improvements we’ve made to Parcel since our last update, along with our roadmap to a stable Parcel 2 release.

A growing trend in the JS tooling world is to replace bits and pieces with Rust || Go where it makes sense and reap the performance benefits. Congrats to the Parcel team on epic results from this rewriting effort.

For far too long React has encouraged to people to cram their data layer into their view layer. If you learn anything from the Clojure community, this is a flawed approach. I argue that we can do better, and need a data-first frontend revolution, which relegates React to what it does best: diff and render DOM nodes.

Ever wanted a language like JavaScript, but without the warts, with a great type system, and with a lean build toolchain that doesn’t waste your time?

Patrick Ecker from the ReScript Association sits down with Jerod and Feross to tell us all about this “JavaScript-like language you have been waiting for”.

Bash is great, but when it comes to writing scripts, people usually choose a more convenient programming language. JavaScript is a perfect choice, but standard Node.js library requires additional hassle before using. zx package provides useful wrappers around child_process, escapes arguments and gives sensible defaults.

I wouldn’t say JavaScript is a perfect choice for this kind of scripting, but it’s definitely a suitable one (especially if it’s the language you already know well). Here’s what scripting looks like with zx:

#!/usr/bin/env zx

await $`cat package.json | grep name`

let branch = await $`git branch --show-current`
await $`dep deploy --branch=${branch}`

await Promise.all([
  $`sleep 1; echo 1`,
  $`sleep 2; echo 2`,
  $`sleep 3; echo 3`,
])

let name = 'foo bar'
await $`mkdir /tmp/${name}`

Top-level await sure makes things nicer. (Deno supports this out of the box, btw.)

Paul Bakaus from Google Web Creators joins Amal, Nick, & Jerod to talk about this new initiative to promote, educate, and equip people to create on the web.

Along the way we discuss Web Stories, AMP, RSS, Google Reader, and more, of course. Join us: for a more dope web!

The motivation for building Slidev:

I always found myself spending too much time styling and layouting slides when using apps like PowerPoint / Keynote / Google Slides. Whenever I need to share code snippets, I would also need to use other tools to generate the highlighted code as images over and over again.

So as a frontend developer, why not solve it the way that fits better with what I am good at?

Looks slick: themeable, hackable, and you write your slides in Markdown. 👌

This comes from Mike Bostock (D3.js) who knows a thing or two about visualizing data in the browser.

It has a concise and (hopefully) memorable API to foster fluency — and plenty of examples to learn from and copy-paste.

KBall, Amal, and Feross are joined by special guest Jenn Creighton to talk about all things Apollo. How does Apollo fit into the GraphQL ecosystem, what’s the next big thing, and when would you choose to use it?

The gang talks about thier favorite software and hardware as developers. Brian Douglas joins to share his unique and open GitHub Actions flow.

The music you hear is generated in your browser by a randomised algorithm, below you can see the notes and parameters that are currently in use. You can also interact with various parameters and buttons manually. The green autopilot switches change how automatic playback is. Leave them on for a lean-back experience. Buttons labelled ⟳ will generate new patterns. Source Code is on GitHub.

Bangin’

I’m not sure exactly what this is. A playground? A scratch sheet? A script runner? Regardless, it seems to have some potential. An example is worth (at least) 1k words of me trying to explain it to you. So, here’s a canvas that fetches, processes, and displays the weather.

Jerod & Feross learn all about htmx (a pragmatic approach to web frontends) and _hyperscript (an experimental scripting language inspired by HyperTalk) with special guest Carson from Big Sky Software. Thanks to Rajasegar Chandran for requesting this episode!

We did a somewhat deep exploration of Vite on JS Party #168. During that time I shared some tips & tricks for quickly coming up to speed on an open source project. Some of it is JavaScript/Vite-specific, but there are general principles laced in there as well. Maybe it’ll help you read other people’s code more effectively.

You may have heard my little rant about WET form validation logic on the latest episode of The Changelog. Well maybe you didn’t, but Evyatar did. It prompted him to reach out and let me know about Vest, his declarative validation framework:

The idea behind Vest is that your validations can be described as a ‘spec’ or a contract that reflects your form or feature structure. Your validations run in production, and they are framework agnostic - meaning Vest works well with React, Angular, Vue, or even without a framework at all.

I dig the syntax! Here’s a taste:

import vest, { test } from 'vest';

export default vest.create('user_form', (data = {}, currentField) => {
  vest.only(currentField);

  test('username', 'Username is required', () => {
    enforce(data.username).isNotEmpty();
  });

  test('username', 'Username is too short', () => {
    enforce(data.username).longerThanOrEquals(3);
  });
});

Now all we need is a tool that will inspect our server-side logic and generate the equivalent Vest code. 😉

Jerod and Nick discuss the big Deno news, play a ridiculous new game in honor of April Fool’s Day, then give shout outs to some awesome software projects we love.

This week we’re joined by long-time web developer Matt Patterson. Earlier this year Matt wrote an evocative article for A List Apart called The Future of Web Software Is HTML-over-WebSockets. In this episode Matt sits down with Jerod to discuss, in-detail, why he believes the future of the web is server-rendered (again) and how Ruby on Rails is well positioned to bring that future to us today.

KBall, Amal, and Nick dive into key dimensions of what makes a developer work environment good – or bad. They discuss systemic factors, individual factors, what you can do about it, and a proposed scoring system for good work environments.

The JavaScript ternary operator is more than just a ‘clever’ hack used by people who prefer brevity to clarity.