Frontend First

Ryan talks to Sam about reproducing iOS's new image background treatment for his Open Graph Preview tool, opengraph.ing. They talk about different approaches for generating gradients from images, inc…

Sam and Ryan talk about React 19's useActionState hook. They discuss how adding async functions to a plain React app introduces lots of in-between states that developers must grapple with, and how us…

Sam and Ryan talk about using Cloudflare Tunnel for local development, the new React Compiler beta release, and why reading or writing refs during render violates the rules of React.

Timestamps:

• 0:00 -…

Sam and Ryan talk about building a useAnimatedText hook that can animate streaming text. They also discuss how React code that uses state changes to approximate events can be simplified, and the bene…

Sam and Ryan talk about how frameworks and infrastructure evolve with each other, using Next.js as a representative example. They discuss how hosting providers like Heroku have always imposed certain…

Tom Occhino, Chief Product Officer at Vercel and former Engineering Director at Facebook, joins Sam to talk about the pivotal moments in React's history. He talks about how React popularized the idea…

Sam and Ryan talk about render props in React. They discuss where they came from, how Hooks superseded them for sharing stateful logic, how data attributes compare to them for customizing styling, an…

Sam and Ryan discuss controlled and uncontrolled components in React. They talk about how uncontrolled components can be thought of as components that manage their own internal state, why you should …

Sam and Ryan talk about the pattern of building unstyled components with React. They discuss why unstyled components were created, how they improve upon composition patterns from UI libraries like Bo…

Sam and Ryan talk about what sorts of capabilities a tool should have to be considered a web framework. They discuss how frameworks tackle the complexity of getting different systems to communicate w…

Sam joins Lane Wagner in a crossover episode with the Backend Banter podcast. They talk about abstractions in frontend and backend frameworks, what JavaScript is doing differently from other language…

Sam and Ryan read and discuss a fantastic interactive blog post about queueing in HTTP written by Sam Rose.

Timestamps:

• 0:00 - Intro
• 6:57 - Queueing: An interactive study of queueing strategies
• 9:05 - Wh…

Sam and Ryan discuss the new features in React 19 that will specifically benefit developers building single-page applications. They talk about how Suspense and Transitions let developers "teach" Reac…

Sam tells Ryan about a recent talk he gave at BigSkyDevCon. They chat about how backend frameworks are raising the ceiling of what UIs they’re capable of delivering, how frontend frameworks are raisi…

Sam and Ryan talk about the difference between the costs of building a feature and the benefits that feature brings to our end users. They discuss how libraries and frameworks can lower the technical…

Ryan tells Sam about his experiments with using the new View Transitions API in a React photo gallery app. He talks about how he likes the flexibility of the API, how to think about integrating it in…

Sam tells Ryan about his experience setting up an in-browser code editor with CodeMirror that he plans on using for blog posts and code recipes, as well as what he thought about using Radix Themes fo…

Sam and Ryan talk about why it’s better to think of throw as a general-purpose JavaScript language feature rather than something that should only be used for error handling. They discuss the ambiguit…

Sam and Ryan discuss the core values of the Next.js framework, and how those values motivate several of the framework’s design decisions. They talk about caching, why layouts don’t have access to the…

Sam talks to Ryan about refactoring an MDX blog post to a React Server Component. They discuss how RSC’s ability to render server-side content with “client-side holes” turns out to replace MDX for ma…