JS Party: JavaScript, CSS, Web Development

This week we are joined by Sophie Alpert, Head of Engineering at Humu, and former lead of the React Core team, to discuss her experience on being a very early adopter, contributor, and eventually maintainer of React. In her 4+ years on the Core team, she went from supporting a new niche OSS UI library to supporting a project used by millions of developers around the world. Join us to hear about this epic journey, as well as Sophie’s thought’s on some common critiques and misconceptions of React.

Rachel Nabors –beloved educator, animator, & documentation engineer at Meta– joins Amal and Amelia for a first look at the brand new React docs! This massive overhaul to the React website (which supports 2 million+ developers around the world) was no easy feat! We dive into all the behind the scenes coordination, as well as the goals, wins, and intended outcomes of this new way of approaching educational content and API reference material for open source projects.

JS Party listeners and panelists celebrate our favorite moments from the past 100 episodes! You'll hear from over 20 of your favorite voices across 14 episodes. We also share some behind-the-scenes and read/hear from listeners! Here's to the last 200 episodes, and the next 200 as well. 🥂

KBall catches up with Chris Ferdinandi about the trends in modern web development towards smaller libraries, pre-compilation, and applications at the edge.

We're putting together a special highlight reel for our 200th episode! Share **your favorite** moments, guests, topics, and/or episodes from the past 100 shows. Every listener who gets their voice or text message included in the episode gets a **free JS Party t-shirt**! The details for submission are at jsparty.fm/200

Nader Dabit shares his motivation and experience on recently transitioning to focus on technologies and communities that support the decentralized internet. In this hot topics discussion, we cover all the buzz words you’ve likely heard over the past year. We have honest and nuanced conversations about the world of Ethereum, Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, and Web3. Hype or hit? You’ll have to tune in to find out.

Matteo Collina, Ph.D takes us to school on all things Node, Fastify, and Pino. We start with his journey into the Node community, how he got started in open source, and his experience as a member of Node's Technical Steering Committee (TSC). We then nerd out about middleware architecture, data structures and logs (yes, logs), and of course, we dive into what makes Fastify so darn fast and how Pino was the precursor project.

Doug Martin joins Nick to talk to us about building GraphQL backends in TypeScript with NestJS and his project, nestjs-query). We talk about what NestJS is and its built-in support for GraphQL and REST, and then dive into how NestJS-query extends it to generate code for you.

Muffin fairies, thumb wars, and fruit transit can only mean one thing: _Explain it Like I'm 5_! We're also covering the news, discussing the effects of remote work, and agreeing it's OK to ignore the frontend dev scene for awhile.

Mitch and Andrew from the 1Password team talk with Amal and Nick about the company's transition to Electron and web technologies, and how the company utilized its existing web stack to shape the future of its desktop experience.

Russel Goldenberg & Caitlyn Ralph from The Pudding join Amelia & Nick to talk about how they create data-driven, interactive articles, how the team works on both The Pudding's data journalism articles and Polygraph's client work. We also dive into how the team works with contractors and how the company manages itself using a Holocratic method.

Your favorite web dev podcasts join forces for a super collab that'll knock you frontend off! Amelia joins Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from ShopTalk Show while Divya teams up with Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski from Syntax. Let the FEUDing begin!

Amal, KBall, and Nick welcome David Khourshid to the show to talk about his project, XState. XState brings state management to a new level using finite state machines and is compatible with your stack. We talk about how the idea came to fruition, its practical uses, and where it's going.

Alex Page & Sam Rose from Shopify's Polaris team join Jerod & Divya to discuss their open research) into finding and selecting a viable alternative for Sass at the company. Six solutions enter, but which one will walk away with the 🌹?

Ahmad Awais joins Amal, Amelia, and Jerod to discuss scripting, automation, and building CLIs with Node! We hear Ahmad's back story, learn the ABC's of mastering Node automation tooling, and share automation wins from all of our lives (and Twitter too).

Luis Villa of Tidelift joins the show to discuss GitHub Copilot and the implications of an AI pair programmer from a legal perspective.

On this episode, we make our big Frontend Feud announcement, welcome Amelia to the party, then share a metric crap ton of productivity tips & tricks: scripting, pomodoro, retaining your dev flow, and more!

This week we talk with Kent C. Dodds, one of the greatest React teachers in the industry, all about React! Why choose React over another framework? What are the hardest parts about learning React? You'll find out this week!

Feross is back with a brand new web app for us to pick apart! Wormhole is the fastest way to send files on the internet and we want to know why he built it, how it works, and what crazy hacks he invented along the way.

The panel discusses all the things that have to happen before you write a lick of code. Then, for _Story of the Week_: Dan Abramov thinks npm audit is broken by design. We also have thoughts. Lots of 'em.

KBall and Nick Nisi sit down with Nick Fitzgerald to learn about running JavaScript on WebAssembly. They talk about almost instantaneous startup, running interpreted languages at the edge, and take a deep dive into the weeds of how Wasm based modules will change the future of application development.

Nick Reese joins the party to tell us all about Elder.js, his opinionated static site generator and web framework built with SEO in mind. Elder.js was purpose-built with large, content-heavy websites in mind and already serves in many production capacities. We discuss imposter syndrome, the startup/product mindset, Svelte's virtues, and much more.

This week we chat with Angie Jones about all things testing. We'll cover unit testing, visual testing, end-to-end testing, and more!

Yulia Startsev from Mozilla's SpiderMonkey team joins Jerod & Feross to talk compilers, going back to get your Master's, making decisions as a group, process of shepherding a feature through TC39, how Firefox actually works, and LavaMoats. Yes, LavaMoats.

Tanner joins Nick to talk about his projects, react-query and react table, and discuss scratching your own itch in a maintainable way with open source.

Eric Simons and the StackBlitz team recently announced WebContainers which let you run Node.js **natively** in your browser! This has BIG implications and leaves us with many BIG questions like: _how_ did they do it, _why_ did they do it, and _where_ does it go from here? Tune in! Keyword: BIG

Brian LeRoux has been building the web long enough to see many ways we produce HTML come in and go out of fashion. On this episode, he joins Amal & Nick to discuss the past, present, and potential future of rendering patterns on the web. SSR, ISR, & DSR (oh my!)

This week Emma and Adam are joined by Una Kravets to discuss difficult parts of CSS.

Ever wanted a language like JavaScript, but without the warts, with a great type system, and with a lean build toolchain that doesn't waste your time? Patrick Ecker from the ReScript Association sits down with Jerod and Feross to tell us all about this "JavaScript-like language you have been waiting for".

Paul Bakaus from Google Web Creators joins Amal, Nick, & Jerod to talk about this new initiative to promote, educate, and equip people to create on the web. Along the way we discuss Web Stories, AMP, RSS, Google Reader, and more, of course. Join us: for a more dope web!

KBall, Amal, and Feross are joined by special guest Jenn Creighton to talk about all things Apollo. How does Apollo fit into the GraphQL ecosystem, what's the next big thing, and when would you choose to use it?

The gang talks about thier favorite software and hardware as developers. Brian Douglas joins to share his unique and open GitHub Actions flow.

Jerod & Feross learn all about htmx (a pragmatic approach to web frontends) and \_hyperscript (an experimental scripting language inspired by HyperTalk) with special guest Carson from Big Sky Software. Thanks to Rajasegar Chandran for requesting this episode!

Jerod and Nick discuss the big Deno news, play a ridiculous new game in honor of April Fool's Day, then give shout outs to some awesome software projects we love.

KBall, Amal, and Nick dive into key dimensions of what makes a developer work environment good -- or bad. They discuss systemic factors, individual factors, what you can do about it, and a proposed scoring system for good work environments.

In which Jerod, Nick, and KBall play the most preposterous round of "Explain it Like I'm 5" in human history. Then we dig in to Vite a little further than is advisable on a podcast. Finally, we talk about our Quiz Show app that powers JS Danger. You're welcome!

Spotify's Tryggvi Gylfason joins Emma & Nick to discuss common accessibility mistakes and tips for avoiding them!

The wonderful folks behind CSS-Tricks (maybe you've heard of it?) face off in our much beloved _don't-call-it-jeopardy_ game show. Can you out smart our intrepid contestants? Play along while you listen (or watch). It's JS Danger time, y'all!

The week we talk about the new Open Web Docs initiative and the future of MDN.

Go Time's Mat Ryer joins Jerod, KBall, and Nick to play _Story of the Week_, _Today I Learned_, _Unpopular Opinions_, and _Shout Outs_!

Eric Normand (long-time FP advocate and author of Grokking Simplicity) joins Jerod and KBall for a deep conversation about Functional Programming in JavaScript. Eric teaches us what FP is all about, details the functional side of JS, and reviews the good/bad/ugly of React. Oh, and join us in the #jsparty channel of our community slack where we're giving away <mark>three FREE e-book copies</mark> of Eric's new book! 🎁

Our debate format returns! Divya & Feross take the "Nope" side while Amal & Nick represent the "Yep"s. Whose side will you take?

Benjamin Coe joins Amal and Divya to discuss his wide-ranging open source projects, test coverage with Istanbul, and the future of testing in JavaScript.

KBall hangs with Nick and Jerod to analyze and discuss the trends of the web world according to the latest State of CSS and State of JS survey results.

Kamran Ahmed, creator of Developer Roadmaps, joins Jerod to talk through his 2021 roadmaps to becoming a web developer. We cover why Kamran created these resources, who they're for, how to interpret them, and then take a stroll down the paths to becoming a frontend and backend developer. Which path are you on in 2021?

Preact creator Jason Miller joins Jerod and Nick to discuss WMR– the tiny all-in-one development tool for modern web apps. We ask Jason what "modern web app" means, how WMR fits in to the JS tooling landscape, why the Preact team created it in the first place, and dig into all it has to offer. _Where's My Roomba_?

KBall, Amal, Chris, Divya, Jerod, and Emma discuss 2020: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Then they change direction and discuss their 2021 resolutions and wishes!

Amal and Divya turn our spotlight inward and interview our very own Christopher "Boneskull" Hiller about maintaining Mocha.js. Mocha has been a mainstay in the JavaScript testing community for ten (!) years now! They discuss the secret to Mocha's success, what it's like to maintain it, and how to make maintainers (and users) happy!

Tailwind CSS creator Adam Wathan joins Jerod, Nick, & Feross for an in-depth discussion of his trending utility-first CSS framework. We cover why everyone complains about CSS, how Tailwind began and how it gained popularity, how developers use with Tailwind and integrate it into their workflows, and how Adam has managed to build a business around the project. Thanks, Bette Midler!

Suz, Amal, and Chris join Jerod to discuss what APIs are all about, share some APIs they admire, and lay out principles and practices we can all use in our APIs.