Brandon Bayer:

The central thesis is that most apps don’t need a REST or GraphQL API. Blitz brings back the simplicity of server rendered frameworks like Ruby on Rails while preserving everything we love about React.

Additionally, Blitz is bringing other Rails goodness that’s missing in the React ecosystem like file structure and routing conventions, a really nice console REPL, intelligent code-scaffolding, and a fine-tuned out-of-the-box setup with Prettier, Typescript, ESlint, Jest, Cypress, etc.

The framework ‘wars’ continue right alongside the monolith-vs-microservices debate. For more on the principles behind Blitz, check out the manifesto.

Jerod and KBall are joined by Micro Frontends in Action author Michael Geers to discuss (you guessed it) micro frontend architecture. We ask: what is the concept? How is it similar/different to micro services? Who is it best fitted for? How do you put it in practice? And much more.

Even with the proliferation of modern UI tools like React, Vue, etc. you still have times when dealing directly with the DOM is a must. When that time comes, this site will help you get things done with explanations and code samples for common tasks.

So you just access the GraphQL data in your application like so:

const App = () => (
  <div>
    {query.me.name}
    {query.users({ limit: 10 }).map(user => (
      <div key={user.id}>{user.name}</div>
    ))}
  </div>
)

And behind the scenes gqless generates the queries for you like so:

query App {
  me { name }
  users(limit: 10) {
    id
    name
  }
}

With most of us working from home for the first time (or for a long time), we thought it’d be a good idea to share our experiences and opinions on how to manage it. We discuss how to optimize your location, your schedule, your communications, and the rest of you life during these stressful times.

Export as a video or animated gif. Try it here.

Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub, board member at Netlify) joins the party and brings his new, opinionated, full-stack, serverless web app framework with him. Will Redwood help usher in the future Tom predicted back in 2018? We discuss that and a whole lot more on this must-listen episode.

Sometimes it’s nice to avoid the news sites but still stay up-to-date with the spread. You can display world-wide data or specify a country of interest.

The philosophy behind Backstage is simple: Don’t expose your engineers to the full complexity of your infrastructure tooling. Engineers should be shipping code — not figuring out a whole new toolset every time they want to implement the basics. Backstage allows you add “stuff” (tooling, services, features, etc.) by adding a plugin, instead of building a new tool. This saves you work and avoids the need of your team to learn how to use and support yet another tool.

Read all about how Spotify uses this internally in this blog post.

Chris Manson:

A great beginners guide to ASTs, what they are and how to make use of them in your day-to-day lives as a developer! This workshop was originally planned to be in-person at EmberConf but now it’s free for everyone to try out 🎉

We sit down with Tobias Koppers of webpack fame to talk about his life as a full-time maintainer of one of the most highly used (4 million+ dependent repos!) and influential tools in all of the web.

Things we ask Tobias include: how he got here, how he pays himself, has he ever gotten a raise, what his typical day is like, how he decides what to work on, if he pays attention to the competition, and if he’s ever suffered from burnout.

This is a well-reasoned piece that includes Svelte’s advantages, disadvantages, and drawbacks today.

Is using bleeding edge tech risky and foolish? How much blood are we talking about? My experience tells me Svelte is a safe choice, more leading edge than bleeding. However I’m more risk tolerant than most people, I have a lot of experience with JS frameworks, and our team is motivated, so we can deal with rough edges.

This week we’re talking about building technical courses! From video courses to written courses, we’ll give you our tips for building an effective and memorable course.

Want great developer experience and easy scaling? Redwood is here! Built on React, GraphQL, and Prisma, Redwood works with the components and development workflow you love, but with simple conventions and helpers to make your experience even better.

We’re having Tom Preston-Werner on JS Party tomorrow for a deep-dive on Redwood.

This is an ultra-simplified example of all the major pieces of a modern compiler written in easy to read JavaScript. Reading through the guided code will help you learn about how most compilers work from end to end.

Clocks in under 1,000 lines of code.

Two great tastes that taste great together.

All styles are generated from Tailwind CSS source and not hard-coded, which makes it easy to keep this module up-to-date with latest changes in Tailwind CSS itself.

Dustin Schau joins the party to talk about the state of Gatsby and the changes and improvements to it in the last year. We talk about what Gatsby delivers to the front end and how it does it quickly with improvements to the build system. Dustin also fields our questions and talks about Gatsby Cloud and where things are going.

KBall interviews Brian Leroux in a wide-ranging discussion covering “Progressive Bundling” with native ES Modules, building infrastructure as code, and what the future of JamStack and serverless deployment might look like.

It includes a compiler, linter, formatter, bundler, testing framework and more. It aims to be a comprehensive tool for anything related to the processing of JavaScript source code.

Rome aims to be a replacement for many existing JavaScript tools. We will, however, offer integrations for components in other tools. For example, using the Rome compiler as a plugin for another bundler.

This comes out of Facebook’s React Native team. It’s MIT licensed and was started by Sebastian McKenzie, who also authored Babel and Yarn.

For macOS and Linux. Built with Tauri Studio.

Divya leads a deep discussion with Jerod, KBall, and Nick on what’s stagnating in browsers. What has remained the same in browser tech over the last 20 years that remains a pain point in working with browsers? For example - Focus in browsers hasn’t changed much in 20 years. Why is that and how do we go about making all the stale things in browser tech better?

This code attempts to learn over time the makeup of the background of a video such that I can attempt to remove any humans from the scene. This is all happening in real time, in the browser, using TensorFlow.js

Impressive results for an experiment. Try the live demo on Codepen and/or Glitch.

Why build another JavaScript build tool? The current build tools for the web are at least an order of magnitude slower than they should be. I’m hoping that this project serves as an “existence proof” that our JavaScript tooling can be much, much faster.

According to the author, esbuild is fast because..

1. it’s written in Go
2. much of the work is done in parallel
3. it takes very few passes and avoids data transformations
4. it was coded with performance in mind

Supports too many languages to list here, but all of the usual suspects are there. Maybe you’re hoping for a web-based demo? No 🎲

Do not run the Web UI on a port open to public traffic! Doing so would allow remote code execution on your machine.

Caleb Porzio is the creator & maintainer of Livewire, AlpineJS, and more. His latest open source endeavor was announced as “sponsorware”, which means it lived in a private repo (only available to Caleb’s GitHub Sponsors) until he hit a set sponsorship threshold, at which point it was open sourced.

On this episode, we talk through this sponsorware experiment in-depth. We learn how he dreamt it up, how it went (spoiler: very well), and how he had to change his mindset on 2 things in order to make sustainability possible.