Runtime Rundown - JavaScript and Web Development

This week we look back at 2022! The show goes off the rails a bit, but we get back on track and read The New Stacks's yearly retrospective , talking about JavaScript at the edge, static site generators, and frameworks. We have an uninformed discussion about V8 isolates and have a lovely fireside chat! Music by Hina and Kevin MacLeod

This week we talk about web performance basics and read A Web Performance Audit Checklist (not as dry as it sounds!) by David Gilbertson. This week we cover the whole spectrum: JS bundles TTI, FCP, CTCI All kinds of other acronyms Cooking hamburgers in a dryer Learning Rust Survivor Medium t-shirts As always, send your questions/comments/hamburger recipes to https://runtimerundown.com ! Music by H...

In this episode we break from tradition and cover a few different articles through the general lens of "Frontend ain't what it used to be". We kick off with a discussion on change-resistance with "Familiarity Bias is Holding You Back: It’s Time to Embrace Arrow Functions" by Eric Elliot. Evan dumps on typescript again via "The TypeScript Tax" by Eric Elliot. Finally, Joe and Evan give their expert...

In this episode, we cover "Addressing Tech Debt" by Abi Noda. This article is a summary of a much larger paper  on the common bottlenecks of scaling up engineering orgs.  Joe and Evan politely disagree on something, Evan yells at Typescript again, and we have literally no good news. Also, robots are going to kill us all (thanks San Francisco). Questions? Comments? Ideas for future articl...

This week we skip the article and talk about all the things we're thankful for in tech and our careers so far. Evan gets edited and Joe second guesses a segue. Thanks to all of you for listening! Questions? Comments? Ideas for future articles? Send them to us at runtimerundown.com ! Music by Hina and Kevin MacLeod

In this episode, we teach you how to be a programmer in 24 hours!  ...Psych. We cover "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" by Peter Norvig, an article calling out "fast learning" marketing and paving a real-world path to programming excellence. Joe and Evan walk through a bunch of things you can do to learn / excel in programming. Joe gets a little mad at computer science degrees. Evan a...

We dive deep into the "use" hook RFC , a proposal by the React team to give first-class support for promises in React.  Evan mouth codes (poorly), Joe definitely doesn't talk about bloom filters again, and we both lament the volatility of the Frontend ecosystem. Links: • React Server Components blog post • David K. Piano's tweet • <Suspense /> documentation (beta) Music by Hina and Kevi...

What did we talk about In this episode, we’re talking about “The Wrong Abstraction" by Sandi Metz. We go against years of programming best practices and propose copy-pasting code….sometimes. Along the way, we mention "AHA Programming" by Kent Dodds and "The Wet Codebase" by Dan Abramov, and generally rail against speculative generality. If you listen long enough, you’ll hear Joe mouth-coding somet...

In this episode, we cover Tanya Reilly's powerful talk - "Being Glue". Deep down, we all (hopefully) know there's a lot more to a successful software project than code. There are planning meetings, design reviews, architecture deep dives, getting buy-in from partner teams, and the list goes on. All of this is the glue that holds a team and their work together and someone needs to do it. But who sh...

This week we read The 10X Programmer Myth by Justin Etheredge. Point Hogs and Rocket Turtles, Code Fountains and Obsessors, this article is a menagerie of developer archetypes. Evan examines whether Preact Signals might actually be exactly what he needs, and Joe learns something about NextJS he probably should have known already. Let's go! Do you have a suggestion for an article we should read? A...

This week we get into one of our favorite topics: Testing! We read Software Testing Anti-patterns from the Codepipes blog and see how much we agree. We also mention the talk Please Don't Mock Me (mocking and test doubles) from the AssertJS conference. Evan has one or two Typescript hot takes, and Joe tells us about a headline he read. Questions? Article suggestions? Go to runtimerundown.com and te...

In this episode, we do some serious science stuff! Well not exactly. We read an article called "Does Experience Matter" where Abi Noda breaks down a new scientific study on what makes an effective programmer. If you want to dive into the study yourself, check it out here . We  talk about how you can’t go wrong with mentorship, code review, tests, and learning. We dump on typescript for a whil...

This week we read Introducing Signals from the folks at Preact. We discuss whether or not the world needs another state management library when it already has a million libraries such as recoil , zustand , and zingaling . We learn a bit about Panda Planners and Supabase and take you on the Good News Cruise as always! Here are the Signals docs: https://preactjs.com/guide/v10/signals/ Here's the Hac...

This week is the first part of a two episode miniseries on interviewing! We brave the thunder and lightning to talk about the candidate's point of view and share some tips and interviewing horror stories. We try out a new "What are you learning?" intro, Evan has good news about trees and Joe has good news about a cloud. This week's article: F*** you I Quit, Hiring is Broken Music by Hina and Kevin...

Our first guest! Seraphina Orsini drops in to talk about open source sustainability with this week's article Sponsoring Dependencies . We reminisce about the time we were all on the same team, Joe forgets to introduce Seraphina with her full name, and Evan forgets where Antarctica is. The other article we mention is Don't be that open source user, don't be me . Music by Hina and Kevin MacLeod

This week we read Write Code Every Day by James Resig and talk about our own experiences keeping up a coding habit. We also mention 180 websites in 180 days by Jennifer Dewalt , Evan learning to type again, and Joe feeling unprepared for his upcoming exam. Music by Hina and Kevin MacLeod

In this episode, we talk about one person's journey to becoming a staff engineer . We talk about the good traits of senior+ engineers, a bit about how to get there, and some things we think a senior+ shouldn't do.  Also, Joe shamelessly self-promotes his new Let's Build Tetris! youtube series (jk, he paid me to introduce it "naturally"). Music by Hina and Kevin MacLeod

In this episode, we talk about the cost of convenience by surma.dev . We discuss what makes a good abstraction, go off on a few philosophical tangents, and bring it all back together with a staggering quote of heartbreaking genius in the middle (you'll have to listen for it).  Music by Hina and Kevin MacLeod

This week we talk about Hyperscript and HTMX, a new-ish scripting language and its HTML-based cousin. Will it be the language that usurps JavaScript? Only time will tell. We also talk Vim and VSCode, tree structures and Tetris, and bring you some cruise-based news on the Good News Cruise. The article: Reimagining front-end web development with HTMX and Hyperscript The sources: HTMX and Hyperscript...

In this episode, we have another multi-article adventure. We start by talking about The Collapse of Complex Software , an article about how developers don't know how to delete code, then add depth by getting into a Build Your Own Framework hacker news flame war. We also apologize to Syntax, Evan compares engineers to farmers (then archeologists), and Joe experiments with terrible sound effects. Ot...

In this episode we read an article about Bun, a new JS runtime that has the community abuzz. We talk about the hype and the downsides of using beta software, and the trap of simple performance tests. We also talk about puppet master hamsters and Evan's part-time job as Reddit Batman.  Here's the article if you want to follow along: https://techsparx.com/nodejs/bun/1st-trial.html Fireship's 3...

In this episode, we talk about this article , "The End of Localhost" by Swyx . We cover what the world will look like in 2030, the challenges of ephemeral dev environments, and how we are both old farts who like coding on our personal machines (for now). Also, Joe refers to the internet as "Internet". 

Joe and Evan talk about hydration with Quik, and some other stuff.   The article: https://thenewstack.io/javascript-hydration-is-a-workaround-not-a-solution/