For web automation/testing, Selenium has been the de facto “standard” since forever. It’s simple to get started with and supports almost every programming language.
My problem with it has been: It’s good enough, but nothing more. It doesn’t work that well with modern, Javascript framework heavy sites (Angular, React etc). I’m not saying it doesn’t work– just not too well.

I know a lot of people who use Selenium, but I don’t know a lot of people who enjoy using Selenium. (That’s no knock on the Selenium team. They solved a hard problem for lots of devs over the course of many years. Huge impact!) Playwright on the other hand…

Maggie Johnson-Pint from Stanza sits down with Amal & Divya for a deep-dive in to the production side of the development world. If you’re at all curious (and/or intimidated) by terms like Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Service Level Objective (SLO), OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and the like… this episode’s for you!

Vercel dropped Next.js 13 last week and there’s a lot of new stuff (router, server components, streaming & more) in this release. If you learn best by example (and subsequent tinkering with existing things), this (WIP) repo might be a good starting place for you.

If you’re feeling the FOMO of JavaScript or you’re writing “spaghetti code” just to do something a NextJS component would do out of the box, then read this post from Bill Prin on why he moved from Django to NextJS.

The summary is that using a language like Python or Ruby for a significant web project has increasingly gotten less reasonable over time to the point where now, in 2022, it’s getting hard to justify. By not keeping your web stack in pure Javascript, you are making your life unnecessarily difficult (as usual, we’ll include languages like TypeScript as part of the JavaScript ecosystem). You will almost certainly invest a bunch of time-solving problems that would be automatically solved for you if you just stuck with JavaScript.

I will provide specific examples of solving problems using Django that would have been trivially solved in NextJS.

He goes on to share two reasons why you should use Python or Ruby for web projects in 2022.

You’re working on an existing project that hasn’t been migrated yet or is not worth migrating.
You are already a master of a Python or Ruby web stack, and you need to implement a new project as soon as possible, and you don’t have time to learn a better stack.

Suppose you learn some functional JavaScript, and it’s wonderful. But, for some reason, your team doesn’t get it? What do you do? To understand what’s going on, we need to step back and get a little perspective…

Webpack creator Tobias Koppers announcing its (Vercel-funded) successor:

Turbopack is built on a new incremental architecture for the fastest possible development experience. On large applications, it shows updates 10x faster than Vite and 700x faster than Webpack. On even larger applications, the difference is greater—often 20x faster than Vite.

Turbopack is open source and still in alpha. Here’s what the future may hold:

To start, Turbopack will be used for the Next.js 13 development server. It will power lightning-fast HMR, and it will support React Server Components natively, as well as TypeScript, JSX, CSS, and more.

Turbopack will eventually also power Next.js production builds, both locally and in the cloud. We’ll be able to share Turbo’s cache across your entire team, using Vercel Remote Caching.

Webpack users can also expect an incremental migration path into the Rust-based future with Turbopack.

What do Story of the Week, HeadLIES & Pro Tip Time have in common? They’re all games we play on this seriously ridiculous episode of JS Party!

Docusaurus maintainer Sébastien Lorber joins Jerod & Amal for a deep-dive on everybody’s favorite documentation generator. It’s back with a big 2.0 release, boasts some big users, and has a big set of new features such as document versioning, a plugin architecture, and more.

This looks like top notch work:

Get more than 20 components with beautiful defaults and simple props. From charts to input and layout elements, we covered all the essential components to lift the tedious front-end work from your shoulders. Get ahead with our simple API approach in no time.

Check out their demo dashboard right here.

This week we’re talking fresh, faster, and new web frameworks by way of JS Party. Yes, today’s show is a web framework sampler because a new batch of web frameworks have emerged. There’s always something new happening in the front-end world and JS Party does an amazing job of keeping us up to date. So…what’s fresh, faster, and new?

The first segment of the show focuses on Deno’s Fresh new web framework. Luca Casonato joins Jerod & Feross to talk about Fresh – a next generation web framework, built for speed, reliability, and simplicity.

In segment two, AngularJS creator Miško Hevery joins Jerod and KBall to talk about Qwik. He says Qwik is a fundamental rethinking of how a web application should work. And he’s attempting to convince Jerod & KBall that the implications of that are BIG.

In the last segment, Amal talks with Fred Schott about Astro 1.0. They go deep on how Astro is built to pull content from anywhere and serve it fast with their next-gen island architecture.

Plus there’s an 8 minute bonus for our ++ subscribers (changelog.com/++). Fred Schott explains Astro Islands and how Astro extracts your UI into smaller, isolated components on the page, and the unused JavaScript gets replaced with lightweight HTML — leading to faster loads and time-to-interactive.

Hang with Jerod, Nick & KBall while we discuss what’s new & noteworthy in the web world. Cloudflare Turnstile, Linkify 4.0, TC39 updates, the Figma acquisition, Penpot, pay transparency, and more! We might even discuss TypeScript if Nick gets his way…

1. run npm install -g easy-sharing
2. run sharing /directory-or-file-to-share
3. scan the QR code with your phone

Tobias Bieniek:

Have you ever worked with JavaScript? Have you been annoyed by the three hundred copies of left-pad in all of the node_modules folders on your disk? Would you prefer if all of your projects shared their node_modules folders instead of each getting their own copy?

The single character that saved him all that space? The p in pnpm…

Patformatic co-founders Matteo Collina & Luca Maraschi join Amal & Chris to discuss their just-announced (and we mean just announced) open source database tool: Platformatic DB!

It’s a daemon that can turn any PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, or SQLite database into a REST and GraphQL endpoint. What makes it special is that it allows massive customization thanks to the flexibility of Fastify plugins.

It’s Hacktoberfest again, but you don’t know where to find interesting projects? This CLI will help you find participating projects based on your starred repositories. Simply run:

npx hacktoberfest-hunt

I love that people are bringing HTML back to the forefront:

Our mission is to enable anyone to build multi-page dynamic web apps while staying as close to the platform as possible. Enhance fills in the gaps to make building for the backend, and the browser a seamless experience for web authors and consumers.

Modern JavaScript frameworks bring more problems than they solve; recreating native web platform features adding unnecessary weight and complexity, which is challenging to unravel.

Enhance provides a dependable foundation built on standards-based web platform features, allowing developers to create web applications that are lightweight, flexible, and future-proof.

This project is a web implementation of the raining green code seen in the Matrix franchise. It’s built right on top of the upcoming graphics API WebGPU, but falls back to the functional WebGL wrapper, REGL; its previous Three.js version is maintained in a separate branch.

I used to spend countless hours in college scouring the web for the best digital rain screen saver for my laptop. Sounds like the author is with me on that:

The number of implementations out there of this effect is a testament to the size of the film’s impact on popular culture. For decades, I’ve enjoyed searching for and comparing them from time to time. That’s probably how you arrived here— it’s fun to see what kinds of solutions different people come up with to a problem, when the process is purely recreational and its success is subjective.

This one’s really nice and even has a 3D mode. The README says it’s “made with love”, but from what I can tell it’s almost entirely JavaScript. 😜

We’re back with another spicy YepNope debate! This time, Amelia and KBall are arguing that there’s real value to (continue) using React in 2022, while Amal and special guest (and author of the post which stemmed the whole debate) Josh Collinsworth argue that React’s time leading innovation has passed. Of course, the stance each panelist is taking is assigned ahead of time. Is that how they really feel? Tune in and find out!

Tan Li Hau gave this talk at Front Conference, but the videos won’t be out for a year (!), so he gave the talk again and posted it to his YouTube channel. Here’s how he described the video to us:

Watch the <1 hour video to write a simplified Svelte compiler <300 lines of code is amazing! Easy to follow, inspiring, and gives a great overview of how to write a compiler.

Austin Gil joins the show and KBall continues an old email correspondence about the JS community and growth. Then, the gang plays a round of TIL where Austin shares his learnings about the HTML capture attribute. Finally, Austin shares what it’s like to have a blog post blow up.

Jaun Diego covers some little known yet extremely useful APIs, such as the Page Visibility, Web Sharing, Broadcast ChanneI and Internationalization.

This is a nice round-up of some new(ish) HTML and JavaScript features related to forms. Now that Safari 16 is out, good stuff like requestSubmit and showPicker are looking pretty green!

11ty creator Zach Leatherman recently released a standalone HTML serializer for generating markup for Web Components. Here’s what Zach had to say about it on Twitter:

This is an early preview and I welcome feedback! I think it’s a great way to build standards-based HTML-first components without JavaScript framework overhead 🙌🏻

Jerod, KBall & Nick “Holla!” at React India, share what we’re excited about these days, and then take up a KBall topic that goes off the rails but manages to climb back on them, power through, and end up in a good place.

Josh Collinsworth (an unapologetic React non-fan) writes on his blog about the ubiquity of React:

I don’t know what the future of front-end looks like. Nobody really does. But it’s a very safe bet that React will continue to be the thing for a very long time.

If you’re learning front-end development in the hopes of getting a job, or trying to level up your career, and React is a knowledge gap for you, it seems like the safest bet you could make. React isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. That said, however…

But why does React remain on top?

Because we don’t always value the strongest choice as much as we value consensus. (In fact, you could make an argument that consensus is the strongest choice, in many ways.)

React keeps getting picked…because React keeps getting picked.

But there’s a ton more to unpack. Josh got into the details on the best choice for the job, covering: Performance, learning curve, bundle size, scalability, community and support, financial backing, hireability, and developer experience.

Should I spoil it for you? Nah. Read Josh’s words for the full story.