This newsletter started back in March of 2020, which, in “tech years”, seems like a lifetime ago. A lot has changed since then. Looking ahead, I’d love to know more about how I can make this newsletter better for you and hopefully broaden its reach. That’s why I am, for the first time, asking for some feedback from you via this Google form. It should just take a few minutes. You can also, as always, email me back directly as well if you have any feedback you’d like to offer directly. Thanks!
– Brian
What’s Good
Caching in Next.js 15 and Forward
In this tweet thread (summarized here by thread reader), Lee Robinson explains some of the reasoning behind how automatic caching and prerendering works in Next.js 15 and why nothing is prerendered when running the development server (which can cause confusion so they are adding the icon to indicate a page will be prerendered back). He also shares that the Next.js team believe that partial prerendering (i.e. where parts of a page are static and the dynamic parts are streamed in) is the future of rendering in the framework.
Lee Robinson
As there’s no sponsor this week, I want to take the opportunity know more about you and your interests so that I can guide the future of this newsletter. I’d really appreciate it if you take <5 minutes to tell me about yourself and offer feedback in this Google form. Thanks!
The Interactive Guide to Rendering in React
Rendering in most modern frameworks is a complicated topic. I’ve been using React for years and can’t say that I fully understand it. This guide by UI.dev is an excellent, detailed and easy-to-understand way to become an expert on React rendering.
UI.dev
State of JavaScript 2023
It’s important to always take developer surveys with a grain of salt, but there’s still lots of interesting trends to watch. For example, React and Webpack keep slowly gaining popularity (i.e. usage) but rather rapidly losing sentiment (source). Usage, interest and sentiment around Svelte seems to be climbing (source). And there seems to be little slowing down the continued rise of Next.js (source).
Tools, Resources & More
Qwik has been adding new features and updates at a fast clip and just released v1.7.0.
Hexo, a JavaScript-based static site generator, has been around seemingly forever. Once upon a time, I would cite it as the only good JS SSG. It’s still around focused on generating blog sites and just released v7.3.0.
Vercel announced that soon function streaming will be framework-agnostic, meaning you can use it with any framework you deploy to Vercel whereas previously it was limited to Next.js, SvelteKit and Remix.
NuxtHub (Beta) is an extension of Nuxt for building full-stack applications on a Cloudflare account, with zero configuration.
Wouter is a tiny (2.1kb) router for React and Preact apps that relies on hooks.
Tidbits
WebAuthn: Enhancing Security with Minimal Effort
Part of a series around authentication, this post talks about WebAuthn, an auth API built into most browsers that supports things like Passkeys.
Taylor Beseda
Migrating Git from multirepo to monorepo without losing history
Monorepos have become a popular solution to improve visibility, reusability and collaboration, but moving from multirepo to monorepos can be fraught. Simon and Phil walk through the steps.
Simon Knott and Phil Hawksworth
Add Squirrelly Support to Eleventy
Some people use a week off to relax. If you’re Ray Camden, you use a week off to write a ton of Eleventy-focused posts. This one covers adding the Squirrelly template engine but he also wrote about building a Mastodon Archive
and adding BASIC language support to Eleventy.
Raymond Camden
Hybrid i18n with Next and Astro (part 1)
A 4 part series looking at some of the complexities of adding internationalization into hybrid web apps.
Eric Burel