Matteo Collina, Ph.D takes us to school on all things Node, Fastify, and Pino. We start with his journey into the Node community, how he got started in open source, and his experience as a member of Node’s Technical Steering Committee (TSC). We then nerd out about middleware architecture, data structures and logs (yes, logs), and of course, we dive into what makes Fastify so darn fast and how Pino was the precursor project.

Zach Leatherman has been considering sustainability models for Eleventy, so he surveyed the field to see what everyone else in the web framework ecosystem are doing. Check out his post for the raw data and his analysis. Here’s where he stands as of today:

I don’t have the answers. I definitely wouldn’t agree that Eleventy has figured out our sustainable monetization strategy but I do really admire the success that Vue has had solving this exact problem. I do know that I have no interest in Trend 2 (raise investment money) but I’ll continue to keep a keen eye on what other indie-framework folks are doing.

Bryan Braughn has been making good use of his Checkboxland library (which makes it easy to display text and animations on a grid of checkboxes). He’s made games, image transfers, and even videos like the one below. But then, some introspection:

This whole process has been fun but I really ought to stop.

I got nerd sniped, hard. Sure it’s harmless fun, but I’m starting to feel guilty spending months tinkering on these things when I’ve got the tools and skills to put actually useful stuff into the world. I feel like Superman, using his powers to fry an egg.

I understand where he’s coming from, but I also believe experiments like Bryan’s are what make the web great and when they inspire someone else to build something, they are absolutely “actually useful stuff”. Don’t you?

Doug Martin joins Nick to talk to us about building GraphQL backends in TypeScript with NestJS and his project, nestjs-query. We talk about what NestJS is and its built-in support for GraphQL and REST, and then dive into how NestJS-query extends it to generate code for you.

Local development of remote/cloud functions has been various levels of painful ever since the computing trend started its rise, so it makes a lot of sense why Cloudflare would invest in easing that pain. Now they get to say developing with Cloudflare Workers is:

• 🎉 Fun: develop workers easily with detailed logging, file watching and pretty error pages supporting source maps.
• 🔋 Full-featured: supports most Workers features, including KV, Durable Objects, WebSockets, modules and more.
• ⚡ Fully-local: test and develop Workers without an internet connection. Reload code on change quickly.

Muffin fairies, thumb wars, and fruit transit can only mean one thing: Explain it Like I’m 5! We’re also covering the news, discussing the effects of remote work, and agreeing it’s OK to ignore the frontend dev scene for awhile.

kbar is a plug-n-play React component that gives you a super slick UI for free:

With macOS’s Spotlight and Linear’s command+k experience in mind, kbar aims to be a simple abstraction to add a fast and extensible command+k menu to your site.

Adding command+k mode to your web app is the new adding vim mode to your web app.

This is a super cool feature of Lighthouse (use it in PageSpeed Insights or Chrome Canary) that produces a visualization of JavaScript dependencies. Sourcemaps are required to get the per-module breakdown like you see below in GitHub’s results.

Mitch and Andrew from the 1Password team talk with Amal and Nick about the company’s transition to Electron and web technologies, and how the company utilized its existing web stack to shape the future of its desktop experience.

This is part 1 of a 5-part series on learning Astro, a new-kid-on-the-block static site builder that’s capturing the hearts of web developers due to its Bring Your Own Framework (BYOF) approach and Zero Emitted JS (ZEJS?) by default.

Throughout this series, I’ll walk you, step-by-step, through building an Astro-based blog(codenamed: Astro-Ink). You’ll discover more of Astro, its benefits, and super-interesting constructs and patterns that Astro brings to the table.

Russel Goldenberg & Caitlyn Ralph from The Pudding join Amelia & Nick to talk about how they create data-driven, interactive articles, how the team works on both The Pudding’s data journalism articles and Polygraph’s client work. We also dive into how the team works with contractors and how the company manages itself using a Holocratic method.

This is phoboslab’s entry in this year’s JS 13k Games competition. Stunning what you can accomplish with so little. View the source right here and play the game (desktop only) right here.

Migrating off jQuery? So was Sachin Neravath:

Most of the projects use only 15% to 20% or less than 30% of the jquery methods And in most of the cases, I didn’t want to support all the edge cases or legacy browsers. The hardest part was finding the jQuery methods in the existing project and writing the alternative vanilla js methods without making much changes in the codebase. So I wrote this library which automatically finds jquery methods in any particular JavaScript file and generates readable, chainable vanilla js alternatives. This can also be useful if you want to generate your own utility methods similar to jQuery.

Your favorite web dev podcasts join forces for a super collab that’ll knock you frontend off! Amelia joins Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from ShopTalk Show while Divya teams up with Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski from Syntax. Let the FEUDing begin!

This week we’re bringing JS Party to The Changelog — Nick Nisi and Christopher Hiller had an awesome conversation with Luis Villa, co-founder and General Counsel at Tidelift. They discuss GitHub Copilot and the implications of an AI pair programmer and fair use from a legal perspective.

Amal, KBall, and Nick welcome David Khourshid to the show to talk about his project, XState. XState brings state management to a new level using finite state machines and is compatible with your stack. We talk about how the idea came to fruition, its practical uses, and where it’s going.

What Vercel has enabled teams to do with Next.js is next level, and it’s truly evident when you read stories like this one from Cory Etzkorn on Notion migrating their marketing site to Next.js.

We rebuilt our entire marketing site from scratch, choosing to go with a statically generated architecture over our former purely client-rendered approach. Two months and 109 React components later, we’ve now fully migrated to our framework of choice, Next.js, and couldn’t be happier with our decision. Here’s how we got there.

Ultra is a web framework that leans hard into your browser’s native features. Embrace the future of ES Modules, Import Maps, and Web Streams. All while supporting some of the non-standards that many normal people love for some reason (JSX and TypeScript).

Big news from Deno today.

Today we are releasing Deploy Beta 2. This is the second in a series of beta releases that will be made over the coming months. Each release will add features and refine the programming model. The releases will culminate in a General Availability announcement that we estimate will happen in Q4 2021.

Over the past eight months, we have been quietly designing this hosted service to supplement workflows with the open source Deno CLI. Deploy does not run on AWS Lambda nor does it use Cloudflare Workers; this is a new system with a unique design. We encourage people to look past the rough initial UI and explore this new JavaScript runtime.

What’s next: A general availability (GA) release is expected Q4 2021.

Routing might be implemented in a number of ways: it’s sometimes code running on a server that maps a path to files on disk, or logic in a single-page app that waits for changes to the current location and creates a corresponding piece of DOM to display.

Buggy routing (and breaking your browser’s Back button) has been the achilles heel of SPAs since forver. Hopefully better tooling like this URLPattern proposal will help developers better handle the need.

I like what I see from the linked write-up. The feature is disabled by default in every major browser, but there’s a polyfill you can use in the meantime.

Ahmad Awais joins Amal, Amelia, and Jerod to discuss scripting, automation, and building CLIs with Node! We hear Ahmad’s back story, learn the ABC’s of mastering Node automation tooling, and share automation wins from all of our lives (and Twitter too).

This is an excellent post that takes you along on the author’s journey to build a simple, collaborative (desktop-like interactions and realtime collaborations, such as Notion, Discord, Figma, etc.) todo app:

With the help of many great tools, we’ve successfully built a fast, collaborative todo app. More importantly, we’ve worked out a reasonably simple approach to building similar web apps. As the user base and feature set grow, this approach shall scale well in both performance and complexity.

Both the resulting frontend and backend code are open source and you’ll likely learn about some new tools (like Replicache) along the way.

Henrik Fricke:

Indiepen lets you embed HTML, CSS, and JS code examples on a website. We built it because we wanted to embed code examples on our blog, but many existing solutions set cookies, have a ton of features or just come with a bad performance.

😎 No cookies, no tracking, no external requests
⚡️ Small footprint with less than 20 KB
❤️ Features built for everyone

Congrats, Henrik, on shipping your first open source project! 👏

Luis Villa of Tidelift joins the show to discuss GitHub Copilot and the implications of an AI pair programmer from a legal perspective.

Where by “on the web” James means “in the browser”:

SQL is a great way to build apps. Especially small local web apps. Key/value stores may have their place in large distributed systems, but wow wouldn’t it be great if we could use SQLite on the web?

I’m excited to announce absurd-sql which makes this possible. absurd-sql is a filesystem backend for sql.js that allows SQLite to read/write from IndexedDB in small blocks, just like it would a disk. I ported my app to use and you can try it here.

A very cool project that was inspired by phiresky’s Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages.