Frontend First

Sam tells Ryan about his experience building an animated toggle with React Aria Components. He gives his first impressions of the new library and discusses some of functionality included from the low…

Sam and Ryan talk about updating Build UI to support lifetime memberships. They chat about the site’s current architecture, the strengths and weaknesses of objects vs. functions, how the full stack J…

Ryan and Sam use some recent Twitter conversation to guide a discussion about the design and purpose of React Server Components. They talk about how client trees and rendered on the server today, why…

Sam and Ryan share their thoughts on the latest server-centric developments taking place among React frameworks like Remix and Next.js. They discuss the declarative nature of HTML and HTTP, the evolu…

Sam and Ryan have an open-ended conversation about different caching APIs and what kinds of benefits they might afford app developers. They discuss transparent caching layers, cache keys and surrogat…

Sam and Ryan chat about their recent work migrating Build UI from a statically generated site to a run-time server-rendered app using Next.js. They talk about their past experience working on server-…

Ryan talks about a demo he built in Next.js 13 with React Server Components. He explains how RSC driven by the URL eliminated client-side states, how he used React 18 Transitions to enhance the UI, a…

Ryan and Sam read a recent article by Derrick Reimer called “Ship Small, Ship Fast” and offer their thoughts on it. They discuss how implementation details can lead to reductions in scope, the relati…

Sam and Ryan talk about seams in TypeScript programs where lies can sneak in. They chat about how API calls, form inputs, and URLs all relate to this problem, the similarity between drifting types an…

Ryan tells Sam about a side project of his that involves running the text-to-image deep learning model Stable Diffusion on his laptop in response to web requests. Ryan asks Sam questions about animat…

Ryan talks about the pros and cons of exposing Build UI’s environment-independent CMS from Hasura via schema stitching. He also talks about writing a Postgres function to add a derived field to a dat…

Sam and Ryan chat about how to avoid a flicker of content on initial render due to mismatched server/client rendering. They also chat about the pros and cons of React Hooks, and using StackBlitz cont…

Sam and Ryan chat about issues they’ve run into in the past when building media sites that store content alongside other dynamic data like user accounts, and how they’re using a CMS to alleviate thes…

Sam and Ryan chat about building their new site using services, and how they’re thinking about testing it. They talk about how testability is one of the biggest costs of using third-party hosted serv…

Ryan shares his experience getting end-to-end type safety from a Hasura backend into a React application. He tells Sam about the different ways GraphQL codegen can be used to generate types, and how …

Ryan tells Sam about some experiments he’s been running using Server Components in Vercel’s new edge runtime. He talks about how components that suspend in the node runtime cause the static build of …

Sam and Ryan chat about issues with default HTML buttons on the web across different devices and browsers. They talk about the Extensible Web Manifesto, how the React Aria library helps standardize b…

Sam and Ryan talk about whether you should use merge commits or you should rebase commits in your PRs when working on large, fast-moving codebases. They also talk about implementing build-time client…

Sam and Ryan read and discuss the first two sections of the new Next.js Layouts RFC, Nested Layouts and Server Components. They also reflect on their experience using nested layouts in other framewor…

Sam and Ryan talk about the new useEvent RFC, and how useEvent lets you extract event logic from your side effects. They also read and discuss Dan Abramov’s recent Twitter thread on how useEvent addr…