JS Party: JavaScript, CSS, Web Development

Jerod is joined by KBall, Nick & Amy to throw one last JS Party! We review last year's predictions, discuss the state of the web dev world, opine on coding AIs (of course) & divulge what comes next for the JS Party crew. Thank you for partying with us all these years! 💚

Back at React Summit in New York, KBall & Nick sat down with Tom Occhino & Shruti Kapoor for more fascinating conversations. Tom Occhino, a key figure in React's history at Facebook (now Meta), reveals the origin story of React, which began when an ads engineer presented a revolutionary approach to web UI rendering. The discussion extends to React's evolution through Next.js. Then, Shruti Kapoor breaks down React 19's major features, including React Server Components (RSC), the new compiler implementation, and enhanced APIs that promise to streamline development workflows.

At React Summit in New York, KBall & Nick sat down with Kent C. Dodds & Theo Browne for two fascinating conversations. Both of them showed us the whole gamut of their personalities! Kent shared his insights on effective teaching methodologies and the future of developer education, while diving deep into React and the Remix/React Router ecosystem, and closing on an appeal for kindness int he world. Then Theo took us behind the scenes of his developer-focused content creation, from streaming to the origins of the T3 stack, and how his online persona (including T3!) is "just him".

Recently, four pillars of the JavaScript community (James Snell, Natalia Venditto, Michael Dawson & Matteo Collina) teamed up to create a resource that lays out nine principles for doing Node.js right in enterprise environments. On this episode, Natalia & Matteo join Jerod to discuss all nine.

Carmen Huidobro joins Amy, KBall & Nick on the show to talk about her work, the importance of writing docs, and her upcoming conference talk at React Summit US!

Vercel CPO, Tom Occhino, joins Jerod for a one-on-one covering React & Next's past, present & future. We discuss the birth of React, Tom's move to Vercel, deploying Next apps to non-Vercel hosts, React as the next jQuery, the viability of Web Components, Vercel customers getting surprise bills & so much more.

Jerod & the gang play "Twenty" Questions to get to know Amy, review the big Svelte 5 release, discuss commercial open source & get Nick's report from SquiggleConf!

KBall interviews Jerod about the tools he uses in development, podcasting & business. We start with text editors & terminal tools, move to podcast recording & editing tools, discuss the open source podcasting platform Jerod built in Elixir, then finish with tools to run a small business & our approaches to genAI. Oh, and you don't want to miss Jerod's Big Confession!

Jerod & KBall discuss a trio of goings on in/around the web dev world: Evan You's new startup, Matt Mullenweg's WordPress mess & Ryan Carniato's WebComponents debate.

Tomek Sułkowski from TutorialKit joins Jerod to tell him all about the open source toolkit for creating awesome, interactive tutorials without having to code up the hard parts.

Jerod is joined by Ryan Dahl to discuss his second take on leveling up JavaScript developers all around the world. Jerod asks Ryan why not try to fix or fork Node instead of starting fresh, how Deno (the open source project) can avoid the all too common rug pull (not cool) scenario, what's new in Deno 2 & their pragmatic decision to support npm, they talk JSR, they talk Deno KV & SQLite, they even talk about Ryan's open letter to Oracle in an attempt to free the unused "JavaScript" trademark from the giant's clutches.

Nick is joined by Josh Goldberg & Dimitri Mitropoulos to discuss SquiggleConf, a new conference focused on web dev tooling. We explore the motivations behind creating a conference dedicated to developer tools, the challenges of organizing both conferences and local meetups, and strategies for building engaged tech communities. We also discuss the importance of developer tooling, the pandemic's impact on tech events, and share insights on encouraging new speakers and creating inclusive environments & more!

Chris Shank has been on sabbatical since January, so he's had a lot of time to think deeply about the web platform. On this episode, Jerod & KBall pick Chris' brain to answer questions like, what does a post-component paradigm look like? What would it look like if the browser had primitives for building spatial canvases? How can we make it easier to make “folk interfaces” on the web?

Jerod, Nick & Chris discuss a next-gen JavaScript bundler, Node getting even tighter with TypeScript, the top programming languages according to IEEE Spectrum, Chris' feelings on Node's built-in test runner & more!

Simon Wijckmans from c/side joins Jerod & Nick to discuss the Pollyfill attack in detail. What does it mean for web developers & client-side security going forward?

Eric Bailey joins Jerod to discuss everything Dungeons & Dragons taught him about writing alt text, building accessible websites, Primer, the problem with a11y overlays & more.

Raphael Landaverde & Jake Shirley work on Minecraft full-time. How cool is that?! On this episode, they join Jerod to tell us all about the web tech that drives Minecraft's scripting infrastructure, how they incrementally change a massive / always-moving target, the best / worst parts of the job & much more.

Node.js makes big TypeScript & SQLite moves, ECMAScript 2024 adds some niceties to the language (but not the ones you're probably excited for) & we review the State of React 2023 results. Emergency?! Nick!

Josh Goldberg joins Nick & Chris to discuss the latest updates from ESLint, typescript-eslint & the new flat config format. They also discuss creating reusable configs & project generators before pivoting to talk about a new conference focused on developer tooling. Finally, Chris & Josh talk about the past, present & future of Mocha.

KBall and returning guest Tejas Kumar dive into the topic of building LLM agents using JavaScript. What they are, how they can be useful (including how Tejas used home-built agents to double his podcasting productivity) & how to get started building and running your own agents, even all on your own device with local models.

KBall takes another dive into recent hot topics around reactivity and build systems, this time with three members of the Ember core team. They also talk about some of the reasons why the Ember community has been so long lived, how thinking about upgradeability leads to universality, and how features first built specifically for frameworks make their way into the language specification or universal libraries.

Philipp Burckhardt, Athan Reines & the team behind stdlib.io believe in a future in which the web is a preferred environment for numerical computation. They've been working toward building that future for over a decade. Thanks to listener, Brian Zelip, Jerod sits down with Philipp to learn all about this excellent effort: where it's been & where it's headed.

Jerod sits down with React Native aficionado, Simon Grimm, to catch up on everyone's favorite native app platform & learn about Expo, which Simon thinks is *the* way forward for devs building with React Native.

Polypane purveyor Kilian Valkhof joins Nick & Jerod to tell us all about his efforts building a web browser just for web development. We cover it all: from the business concerns, to the technical details, to his _excellent_ choice not to use TypeScript! We even sneak in a feature request that already made its way into this excellent dev tool for ambitious web developers.

We’re back with another spicy YepNope debate! This time, Nick & regular guest Eric Clemmons are arguing that web development should need a build step, while KBall & special guest Amy Dutton argue that we really shouldn't. Of course, the stance each panelist is taking is assigned ahead of time. Is that how they really feel? Tune in to find out!

11ty creator Zach Leatherman is taking the open source site generator fully independent in 2024 and he's back on the pod to tell us why, how & what we all can do to help.

Jerod & KBall discuss what's new in the world of web development: the State of HTML survey results, Node 22, React Compiler, React 19 Beta, vlt.sh & the Gulp (!) Developer Survey.

Two-time React Jammer, Brian Breiholz, joins Jerod & Nick to discuss building 3D games in the browser! We hear of his game jam trials & tribulations, the in-progress game engine he's building, the dream game he's been building for a long time & more

Shoelace creator Cory LaViska joins Amal & Jess to tell them all about the forward-thinking library of web components that just joined the Font Awesome family to create Web Awesome.

Brian LeRoux joins Jerod to share how the Enhance team are bringing server side rendered web components to everyone. With Enhance WASM, you author components in friendly, standards based syntax and reuse them across multiple languages, frameworks & servers.

Ryan Carniato joins Amal & Nick to discuss Solid with a major focus on Signals, which are the cornerstone of reactivity in Solid.

Kelvin Omereshone is here to get you excited about boring, reliable tech. He believes a combination of Sails, Inertia, Tailwind & your frontend rendering library of choice are a great combo for building web apps. Tune in to find out why.

How does Google build Search? What about YouTube and Google Drive? We rely on Chrome's Lighthouse scores when optimizing our websites, but what does _Google_ prioritize? Recently the Angular and Wiz teams announced their intention to responsibly merge their internal frontend framework, Wiz, with Angular to bring some of Wiz's best ideas to Angular. We're chatting with Minko from Angular and Jatin from the Wiz team to learn about how Wiz has been used in Google historically, what it's good at, and why it's worth bringing some of its ideas to Angular.

Jerod, KBall & Nick discuss the latest news: Devin, Astro DB, The JavaScript Registry, Tailwind 4 & Angular merging with Wiz. Oh, and a surprise mini-game of HeadLIES!

Alex & James Moore, founding members of the Open Web Advocacy (OWA), join Amal to talk about the critical work the OWA has been doing to ensure users have browser choice and that web apps can be first-class citizens on mobile devices. We learn about how an ad-hoc group of software engineers worked with regulators, legislators & policymakers to help drive some of the most impactful legislation curbing anti-competitive behaviors on the web for tech giants such as Apple, Google & Microsoft via the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA). Tune in for this deeply important & timely discussion as we also unpack recent events with Apple and their DMA (un)compliance, and how the OWA helped successfully organize thousands of web developers from around the world to hold ground for a free & open web.

This week, Amal and Nick are joined by Rick Viscomi and Annie Sullivan from the Chrome team to dive into Core Web Vitals, a set of performance metrics geared towards helping developers surface web page quality signals that are key to delivering great user experiences. We deconstruct the different vitals and learn how they are helpful, as well as introduce the newest vital to hit the scene, Interaction to Next Paint (INP). Join us for a fun and nerdtastic discussion as we dive into the humbling universe of web performance!

Nick delves into the intricacies of technical book writing with authors Adrienne Braganza Tacke and Dylan Hildenbrand. We talk about the process of working with a publisher, coming up with an outline, actually writing the book, and everything that comes after the book is finished.

Apple kills EU web apps, Amazon launches a JS runtime optimized for serverless workloads & we play a game of 20 (15) questions to welcome Jessica Sachs to the party!

KBall & Amal dive deep with the "Dazzle of Zebras" (possible future band name), Angular team members Jessica Janiuk & Mark "Techson" Thompson. Along with an absolute riot of puns, they cover topics such as Angular's new deferrable views feature, how the Angular core team handles change, and lessons learned from the AngularJS-Angular 2 debacle that allow Angular to now move fast without breaking things.

The week Amal & guest co-host Eric Clemmons talk to Dan Abramov all about React Server Components. We learn about why they were created, what problems they solve & how they work to improve application performance. We also dive into the rollout and current support status, the origin story, the community response & walk through the 10+ years of React history which have forever shifted the world of web development.

KBall & Amal interview Alex & Pavel from the Angular Signals team. They cover the history, how the Angular team decided to move to signals, what the new mental model looks like, migration path & even dive into community integrations and future roadmap.

Shaundai Person joins Jerod & Nick for a fascinating discussion of her transition from a sales position to Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. Along the way, we discuss sales as a superpower, how to build confidence in yourself & even sneak a little TypeScript talk in there because you know who...

Jerod, Adam Argyle & the CompressedFM crew hang out prior to their Fronted Feud battle! They discuss CSS as a programming language, Apple's walled garden, how nobody is on the same social media sites anymore, how to choose tech, the community's sentiment shift on GraphQL & a whole bunch more. (This episode is for Changelog++ ears only.)

Una & Adam from The CSS Podcast defend their Frontend Feud title against challengers James & Brad from CompressedFM. Let’s get it on!

Carson Gross (creator of htmx) & Alex Russell (Mr. Web Platform 3000) join Amal for an EPIC discussion on web architectures, the evolution of rendering patterns & the advantages of hypermedia and htmx. We dive deep on why modern web app best practices are falling short & explore how htmx gives devs an HTML-first approach to use tech that’s over 20 years old. Tune in to learn a new way to do something old, so you can simplify your code & use JavaScript when/where it’s uniquely able to shine ✨

It’s our 5th annual New Year’s party! Jerod & the gang review our predictions from last year, discuss what’s trending in the web world, make a few predictions for 2024 & even set some new resolutions for this year.

Daniel Ehrenberg (software engineer at Bloomberg, web standards author / champion & VP of ECMA International) joins us to discuss new features that have landed in JavaScript and to preview what's cooking in various standards bodies across the web platform. We cover a wide array (get it?) of topics from improvements to built-ins such as Promises, Maps & Sets, as well as new primitives like Records, Tuples & Temporal. We round out this epic discussion with a look at cross-project standardization efforts like WinterCG, open source sustainability & how Bloomberg’s open source program gives back in important projects in the web ecosystem.

Gregg Tavares (author of WebGL/WebGPU Fundamentals) joins Jerod & Amal to give us a tour of these low-level technologies that are pushing the web forward into the world of video games, machine learning & other exciting rich applications.

Amal, Nick & special guest Laura Kalbeg geek out over the remarkable growth and evolution of the XState project and its team in recent years. Laura also tells everyone about Stately.ai, a SaaS platform that uses AI to create seamless state management solutions compatible with various tools like XState, Redux & zustand.

Una Kravets, web platform ambassador & lead of the Google Chrome UI Developer Relations Team, joins Amal & Nick to take them CSS to school as they start this podcast in CSS kindergarten and end it with a Level-Up CSS Diploma. (LUCD?) We explore all the amazing features which have recently landed in CSS — enabling super-charged user experiences with no JavaScript. Don’t forgot to check out all the epic links & demos in the show notes — and hold on to your butts, kids, this one is a ride!