We kick off this week’s episode with news that React Native framework Expo now has a developer preview of universal React Server Components. For the first time ever, you can use React Server Components & Server Actions in native apps. In a controversial move, Amazon has mandated all employees must return to offices by Jan 2025. The hosts discuss the pros and cons of working from the office vs remote, and speculate this is just another way for Amazon to conduct layoffs without actuall...

The AI race continues with lots of new updates straight from the GitHub Universe conference!New features from GitHub include: the ability to choose different AI models for GitHub Copilot Chat to use (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, etc.), Copilot Workspaces reviewing PRs, suggesting code changes, and validating fixes.In addition to the GH Universe announcements, the October VS Code release has a bunch of new Copilot additions like: Copilot Edits to change multiple files at once, Copilot Chat in a sec...

In a special guest episode, Rob Eisenberg joins the podcast to talk about the role web components play in today’s web development ecosystem. Rob is uniquely qualified to discuss web components, as the former architect for Microsoft’s web component tech stack, FAST, used by about 1,500 internal MSFT teams, and creator of the Web Component Engineering course. Special Guest(s):Rob Eisenberg, Founder and Chief Software Architect at Blue Spire, former architect for Microsoft’s FAST Web Compon...

Jack is away this week speaking at the React Advanced conference in London, so be sure to check out his recorded talk (and all the others) about if React is really dying.For the news this week, we’ve got a bunch of interesting topics, the first of which is the latest release of Next.js: Next 15. It’s stable and production ready offering React 19 and React Compiler (experimental) support, Turbopack Dev, improvements to caching, and a change to async Request APIs that will allow for simplified ...

In the new frameworks based on React, we introduce you to One. It is a Vite-powered project claiming to support React web apps and React Native apps all in one.Next, Host Jack Herrington shares an update on how Astro’s Server Islands work after trying them out for himself. Similar to React’s Suspense components, Astro’s Server Islands allow any component that relies on server data to render with a “fallback” (like a loader or skeleton component) in the browser until the data is returned and t...

.io domains have been in vogue for over a decade, but now that the British government has decided to give up sovereignty over the small set of islands in the Indian Ocean that owned that country code on the Internet, it will soon cease to exist. Evan You, of Vue JS and Vite fame, has started a new company VoidZero Inc. to build the next generation toolchain for JavaScript. While trying to make Vite even better, Evan realized he needed a full-time team and funding to build the best toolch...

WP Engine is taking Automattic and Matt Mullenweg to court. The complaints are numerous and juicy: extortion, libel, slander, and include screenshots of text messages, tweets, and emails that look pretty damning against Automattic. The whole story has “Made for TV documentary” written all over it.In slightly less controversial news, React 19 has renamed its Server Actions to Server Functions. This name change brings React’s server functions more in line with other frameworks who support the s...

This episode kicks off with the new Deno 2 release candidate. V2 boasts improved dependency management, updates to the APIs and CLI, and improved CommonJS support because even though ESM is the future, so much good stuff in the JS ecosystem still runs on CJS. Web Components take a big step forward in terms of wider spread adoption with the adoption of the Declarative Shadow DOM by all major browsers back in August. The Shadow DOM (a Web Components standard) provides a way to scope CSS st...

Tanner Linsley, creator of TanStack Query and TanStack Router, continues expanding the Tanner-verse with a new TanStack Start framework. It’s a full-stack React framework powered by TanStack Router, Vinxi, and Vite, and boasts all the mainstays of a JavaScript framework today, including SSR, streaming, server function support, RPCs, and more. With the release of the new Apple operating system, iOS 18, comes new updates to the Safari browser and its WebKit rendering engine. A couple notab...

Big news this week when it’s announced that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has moved ChatGPT from using Next.js to using Remix. While both metaframeworks rely on React under the hood, Remix seems a bit less opinionated about how teams might want to structure their projects to best suit their unique use cases and needs.TypeScript has also released v5.6, and amongst the many improvements is one many day-to-day TS users will benefit from: disallowed nullish and truthy checks. Although the n...

Kicking off the discussion is the release of Vue 3.5. Although it’s not a major release, Vue 3.5 packs some great new features and optimizations like: reactivity system improvements (up to 56% less memory usage for apps than before), reactive prop destructuring stabilization (it’s simpler to declare props with default values), and SSR improvements like lazy hydration for async components.RedwoodJS is also out with a new version, and 8.0 packs a wallop. It makes RedwoodJS the third framework t...

We’ve got a good show for you today! It’s chock full of new build tools, better date handling in JavaScript, and SSR benchmarks to prove which framework is truly the fastest.The rust-ification of JavaScript build tools continues, as next generation build tool Rspack hits v1 and claims it’s ready for primetime. Rspack boasts (almost) complete compatibility with the webpack API while also being 10x faster.JS dates are about to be fixed thanks to the new Temporal API proposal, which is currently...

On this week’s episode, a new software licensing term has emerged in the development world: Fair Source Software (FSS). The error and exception tracking software company Sentry added some legal protections to their Codecov product last year (they are a business trying to earn money, after all), which technically meant it was no longer open source. In order to keep sharing its code with the community, Sentry created a new “Fair Source” licensing category that shares similar values to open...

AI is the main topic of conversation for this week’s episode. Between continued advancements in the technology and governments trying to put safeguards in place to prevent a Terminator-style future, there’s plenty going on.OpenAI has introduced a new feature of its API called “structured outputs,” which essentially lets developers pass in a valid JSON schema that guarantees the model will always generate responses that adhere to it. No omission of required keys, no extra values you weren’t ex...

This week’s episode kicks off with an announcement that Node 22.6 has experimental TypeScript support! What you might not realize unless you read the fine print though, is that this isn’t the sort of TS support you might assume. Instead, the feature strips type annotations from .ts files, allowing them to run without transforming TS-specific syntax.Tauri, a competitor to Electron for building cross-platform desktop apps, just released a stable release candidate of Tauri 2. Tauri promises...

Google is making headline news once again as it reverses course on a decision to block third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. After years of testing, planning, and delays, Google scrapped a plan to turn off third-party cookie tracking by default like Safari and Firefox already do.In other news, the annual CSS Working Group meeting wrapped up recently, and some of the exciting features the group will be focusing on this year include: the if() statement for conditional styling, cross docume...

Web development survey results season is upon us, so this week’s episode covers two of the newly released survey results: the State of React survey 2023 and Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024.Just over 13,000 developers filled out the State of React survey, and the results were quite interesting. React devs are fans of component libraries like MUI (Material UI) and shadc/n, state management libraries like Zustand, and data fetching libraries like TanStack Query. They gripe about well-known ...

Popular web framework Astro is making lots of headlines this week, between new experimental feature Server Islands, and achieving “official deployment partner” status with Netlify, it’s been a whirlwind.But in addition to Astro’s big news, Expo, arguably the most popular framework for building React Native apps, has been endorsed by the React Native team as the recommended way to build apps.Also, Vitest 2.0, the fastest growing test framework, has introduced a new experimental feature called ...

Friend of the podcast (and previous guest host), Jason Lengstorf, joins Jack and Paige today to talk about the latest happenings in the web dev world - and wax poetic at the end about favorite restaurants and fine dining.First up, is AI model runner ONNX, which Jack’s been digging into recently. ONNX offers many pre-trained models which can run locally or in the browser and integrates well with many different programming languages.After that is new Lodash library competitor es-toolkit. It’s s...

The hosts switch up the regular news format this week in favor of another favorite developer topic: tech gear. All the extras that make web development that little bit nicer.If you were stranded on a desert island (that only had power and Internet), what tech gear would you bring that you just can’t live without?Aside from MacBook Pros for all three hosts, there’s a good variety of office chairs, adjustable desks, external monitors, keyboards, mice, headphones, microphones, and even cameras. ...

In a rare turn of events, it was a slightly quieter week in terms of actual web development news, so the hosts round up some technology-adjacent news and drama to share.Jack kicks off the show recounting his experience of being one of four developers in a reality show-type scenario that his friend Jason Lengstorf (host of the YouTube show “Learn with Jason”) put together. Next up is more drama around how AI companies are training their LLMs. Up and coming AI company Perplexity’s getting ...

Although we’re already halfway through 2024, this week the State of JavaScript survey for 2023 dropped, and the hosts weighed in and discussed the results they found most interesting.This year the survey provided a lot more write in options instead of predefined lists, which made extrapolating clear answers in many cases more difficult than it otherwise would have been, but there were still some clear winners in terms of usage and popularity among respondents. React and Next.js continued to d...

Today’s episode covers a slew of hot topics making headlines in the web development and general technology world.TJ kicks off the show with his firsthand experience of GitHub Copilot Workspace (available to users by invite only). He tested Copilot Workspace with a relatively simple issue in one of his repos, and while the plan Copilot came up with seemed sound, the implementation didn’t end up working. It took Copilot several minutes each time he asked it to try and code a working solution ag...

Vanilla JS author Chris Ferdinandi joins the podcast this week to talk about how having ADHD has affected his career in web development.Chris shares his own diagnosis of ADHD as a child, then proceeds to discuss how it can be both a positive and a negative depending on the situation and how different individuals can have ADHD to varying degrees. He covers strategies he’s developed over the years to be most effective at his job; things like sending follow up emails after meetings with lis...