Tune In This Wednesday
This week we'll be speaking with accessibility extraordinaire Ben Myers. Ben is the host of Some Antics and a frequent contributor to the Eleventy framework. He's a wealth of knowledge on web standards and we look forward to chatting with him.
Last week we discussed Shopify's new WASM enabled JavaScript functions and how to compare Lambda function cold start times across different language runtimes. We also sneaked in a brief discussion about the future of web3.
Articles
The Case for Frameworks
After Alex Russell lit up the web development ecosystem with his incendiary take on why everyone should be ashamed for using modern frameworks, there have been many attempts to defend frameworks and developers' decision to use a framework. Here is Laurie Voss providing a defense and case for frameworks.
A Love Letter to React
Chris McCord is well known for creating Phoenix, a web framework built on Elixir. He also works for Fly.io and has written a love letter to React on the Fly blog. He highlights the reactive component system, colocation abilities via JSX, and HTML aware extensible building blocks.
A Practical Guide to Building Faster Websites
Mojtaba Seyedi wrote an in depth guide for building performant websites using Astro. He starts from the basics and goes on to cover the full gamut of Astro features along with how to make the most of Astro's abilities to build a highly performant site.
The Modern Web’s Underrated Powerhouse
We usually focus on JavaScript in this newsletter but no site is complete without styling and CSS. Klint Finley on the ReadME Project gives an impassioned defense of the importance of CSS as a core building block of the web. He details the evolution of CSS and where it sits today in 2023.
Writing Javascript without a Build System
The complexity of build systems has been a common pain point for JavaScript developers going back all the way to the early 2010s when systems like Grunt and Gulp became popular. But what if we didn't need a build system to develop with JavaScript? Julia Evans explains how to develop today without the need for a complicated build system.
Podcasts
- Fred K. Schott was featured on both Shoptalk and Whiskey Web and Whatnot to discuss Astro 2.0, DX, and TypeScript.
- If you missed his previously discussed diatribe, Alex Russell joined JS Party to scold developers for wasting an entire decade on client-side JavaScript frameworks.
- Ryan Carniato detailed the newest SolidJS developments on Syntax.fm.
- Well known for his work on CSS-in-JS libraries and Cloudflare Workers, Sunil Pai is now working on a platform called PartyKit which focuses on collaborative realtime multiplayer apps. Check out his latest appearance on Devtools.fm to learn more about the project.
- Svelte core maintainer Kevin Åberg Kultalahti was featured on Web Rush to explain why he thinks SvelteKit has reached an inflection point since reaching 1.0 and is ready for production use.
One More Thing
Jack Herrington compared performance of Next.js 13 with the previous major version of Next.js along with Astro 2. The results might surprise you!
