While frequently derided, buzzwords (aka jargon) actually play an important role in tech. For instance, you likely found this newsletter because of a buzzword (i.e. Jamstack) and understood the range of topics it would cover without my needing to go into detail. Still, we use a lot of jargon and often overlook the importance of explaining them. This isn’t just important for new developers. I brought this up in a recent issue and decided to write a blog post where I do my best to explain a ton of them. Many of these are terms I commonly use here. I hope you all find it useful.
– Brian
What’s Good
The React 19 Beta Is Out
The release of the React 19 Beta finally makes React Server Components (RSC) official. Despite the hype, you may be surprised to know that this was previously only available on the canary releases. However, the other big announcement was Actions, which are intended to remove the need to handle things like pending states, errors, optimistic updates, and sequential requests manually. As usual, Tyler from UI.dev has a good summary as does Kathryn Grayson Nanz.
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Vercel Ditches Edge Rendering
Lee offers a good explanation as to why edge rendering hasn’t worked out for performance or pricing on Vercel’s sites and why he no longer advocates for using it.
Lee Robinson
How to make edge rendering fast
Matt says that, even though the hype around edge rendering has died, it can still offer the promised performance improvements when combined with edge API caching. He shows how to do this in a Remix app.
Matt Biilmann
Why Cloudflare is the Best Alternative to Vercel in 2024
A very detailed, feature-by-feature comparison of Vercel and Cloudflare, including cost breakdowns. (It’s worth noting that this is a vendor focused on Cloudflare.)
Pedro Rocha
Tools, Resources & More
Astro 4.7 includes significant improvements to the dev toolbar and an update checker. The Astro Integration Kit is a package of utilities for building Astro integrations.
The preview of RedwoodJS Bighorn includes big changes including moving to React Server Components and SSR rendering by default, which also deemphasizes GraphQL, though it is still supported.
If you’ve been waiting for a more stable version of Svelte 5 before exploring it, they just posted their release candidate.
Tidbits
Did Signals Just Land in React?
Daishi Kato, creator of the Waku, released use-signals, an experimental React hook which demonstrates how Signals can work in React.
Paul Scanlon
Using GitHub and NextAuth.js for Single Sign-on in Next.js
Adding SSO using GitHub as an OAuth provider and NextAuth.js for managing authentication.
Peter Mbanugo
GraphQL Growth Explodes but so Do Problems Federated Graphs Solve
According to Gartner, companies are adopting GraphQL at an increasing pace to solve their API sprawl issues using federation.
B. Cameron Gain
Latency numbers every frontend developer should know
What are the different metrics related to latency in a web application? This post details them, their estimated cost and the Core Web Vitals metric they impact.
Malte Ubl
How to do ISR and advanced caching with Astro
Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) is essentially a way to cache a page after the first request and render. This guide shows how to use caching headers to implement this, including revalidation of the cache, in Astro.
Matt Kane