Front-End Fire

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 m...

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...

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 a...

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...

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 wo...

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...

This is a rapid fire episode of news topics today because (as always) there’s plenty going on in the front-end development world. Evan You, the creator of the popular Vue.js framework and Vite build tool, is back with a new static site generator named VitePress. VitePress allows users to build fast, content-centric websites with Markdown, a fully customizable theme, and Vue-enhancements for greate...

Conference season is in full swing this week Vercel showed off the new goods they’ve got for developers to get excited about. During Vercel Ship, the Next.js 15 RC (release candidate) was officially announced. Next.js 15 includes benefits like: support for React 19 and the React Compiler (Experimental), plus hydration error improvements. It also offers experimental support for partial pre-renderin...

We’ve got an exciting episode with our co-host Jack Herrington fresh from his trip to React Conf where the React core team and close collaborators unveiled all the cool things they’ve been working on, including the much anticipated React Compiler and some exciting new features for React Native Expo. React Compiler is a new Babel-enabled plugin that will allow React apps to handle the memoization a...

On this episode of Front-End Fire we welcomed special guest Jason Lengstorf to chat about the news with us. We opened with a follow-up discussion of the let versus const debate from last week. Jack made a video (see below for link), and we had a bit of fun talking about the controversy. After that we introduced Effect, a library that dubs itself the missing standard library for TypeScript. Effect...

This week we’re all about beta releases and technical previews of AI that will make us even more productive coders. Since the release of React 18, just over 2 years ago, the React team’s been hard at work, and at the end of April, React 19 beta dropped on npm. This new version brings Server Components and Server Actions out from behind the canary channel, stating they are now stable and will not b...

There’s rarely a dull moment in the web development world and this week is no exception to that rule.  The episode kicks off with an update on Shopify’s meta framework Hydrogen, which is now built on top of the open source framework, Remix, which Shopify acquired back in October of 2022. Hydrogen now has full Vite support and integration with the Vite plugins ecosystem, an overhaul of its SEO (now...

The episode starts off with news about Figma’s new Code Connect feature. Code Connect is the bridge between a design system’s component code and Figma, so when viewing components in Figma’s Dev Mode, they’ll have the same real world code that the design system relies on, and Code Connect can also map properties from code to Figma, enabling dynamic and correct snippets. The catch? This sweet new fe...

The group dives into the week’s news right away, starting off with a new open source project from Google called Jpegli. Jpepgli is a new JPEG coding library, which claims to compress images up to 35% smaller while also being able to deliver JPEGs in even higher quality than what is currently available today. The GitHub repo the article links to still looks to be in the early stages of development,...

Signals have been around in the JavaScript world as early as 2010 when Knockout.js first introduced them, but the past few years they’ve been picking up steam among JS frameworks as a way to effectively manage application state so that developers can focus on the business logic parts of their apps. Now there’s a proposal to make Signals part of the native JavaScript ecosystem, and it’s being backe...

It turns out we had a lot of news to cover in this week’s episode. We kicked it off discussing how RedwoodJS is the latest framework to support React Server Components, and has some pretty nice illustrated docs to help devs get started. Then, there was a rapid fire of interesting topics including a great new article about modern CSS from Mr. CSS Tricks himself, Chris Coyier, a new documentary film...

CSS-in-JS has been around for years now, but have you tried JS-from-CSS? This week we talk about the new alternative trend sweeping through the web development community: writing only CSS to create a fully styled and typed React component. Two early frontrunners in this race are MistCSS and Stylin, and we’ll keep an eye out for if this new twist on writing JSX components catches on. AnalogJS, the...

In this episode, we explore the latest in web development with Astro unveiling Astro DB, a fully managed, blazing fast SQL-based database that is “ridiculously easy to use.” Next, you may not know the name, but Speedometer just released version 3.0, which further solidifies its status as the browser benchmark for web app responsiveness. Next up is Pigment CSS, a zero-runtime CSS-in-JS solution fro...

Today we discuss Vercel’s latest offering: AI SDK 3.0, which streams React components from LLMs to deliver richer user experiences than text-only chatbots. Then we dive into the world of modern styling as Tailwind CSS drops its latest gem - version 4.0, now open source for community exploration. And then finally we talk about the latest improvements in Safari 17.4. Plus, stay tuned for Elon Musk’s...

We discuss JSR, the new package registry from Deno, and whether it can compete with npm. Next, we talk about Parcel’s new support for macros, which is a handy way to embed build-time logic into your code. After that we some get into some BrowserStack legal drama, and wrap up with some BREAKING NEWS about Apple, PWAs, and the EU. Drama! News: Paige - JSR - Deno’s New JavaScript Package Registry Jac...

News: Paige - Hono v4 takes aim at full-stack frameworks Jack - Storybook 8 TJ - An update on Apple breaking PWAs in the EU Bonus News: Google cut a deal with Reddit for AI training data Node.js unveils its new mascot Rocket Turtle What Makes Us Happy this Week: Paige - Learning watercolor painting and The Fourth Wing novel Jack - Drive to Survive season 6 TJ - Detroit Red Wings Join Us: Thanks as...

Special Guest(s): Kelvin Omereshone, lead maintainer of Sails.js and creator of The Boring JavaScript Stack Main Topic: The Boring JavaScript Stack Relevant Links: The Boring Stack repo The Boring Stack docs Kelvin on Twitter Kelvin on YouTube Kelvin’s website Sailsconf keynote announcing The Boring Stack Why the name Who is Boring for? Sails.js Sails repo Inertia.js Sailscasts Join Us: Thanks as...

News: Paige - Nx Project Crystal Jack - Simple Stack Streaming TJ - Apple breaking PWAs in the EU Bonus News: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI What Makes Us Happy this Week: Paige - Mr. & Mrs. Smith TV series Jack - The Murderbot Diaries book series TJ - Casey Neistat’s video on the Apple Vision Pro Join Us: Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on Y...

News: Paige - Vite 5.1 Jack - LLRT and Million Lint TJ - Interop 2024 & wpt.fyi Bonus News: React Native visionOS for the Apple Vision Pro jQuery 4 beta What Makes Us Happy this Week: Paige - A Court of Mist and Fury book (sequel to A Court of Thorns and Roses) Jack - A Libertarian Walks into a Bear book TJ - Only Murders in the Building Join Us: Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Colla...

Special Guest(s): Rachel Nabors, formerly of React at Meta known for their work on reactnative.dev and react.dev  Evan Bacon, Engineering Manager at Expo Matt Carroll, Developer Advocate React at Meta Relevant Links: The Two Reacts blog post by Dan Abramov Rachel Nabors on Twitter, @ rachelnabors Evan Bacon on Twitter, @ Baconbrix Matt Carroll on Twitter, @ mattcarrollcode Join Us: Thanks as alway...