Frontend First

Tom Preston-Werner joins Sam and Ryan to talk about some of the architecture decisions behind Redwood JS, a recently released full-stack JS framework he's been working on for more than a year. Tom ta…

Sam and Ryan talk about the unique aspects of ES modules that have driven the recent explosion of innovation in the frontend build tooling space, giving rise to tools like Snowpack and Vite. They als…

Sam and Ryan read and discuss Tom MacWright's recent article "Second-guessing the modern web," as well as Rich Harris's response "In defense of the modern web." The articles respectively argue agains…

Sam and Ryan grapple with the way useEffect nudges you to build UIs. They discuss whether JavaScript object identity is a good proxy to use for business logic equivalence, whether useEffect leads to …

Sam and Ryan chat about how and why framework APIs get used and abused. Ryan also shares his experience working with AWS Amplify on a side project.

Topics include:

- 3:17 – How useEffect can be confus…

Sam and Ryan try to unpack the meaning of JAMstack. They discuss the constraints of the architecture, why it's confusing to think of it as an application stack, the implications it has for app cachab…

Topics include:

• 5:30 - Gatsby, six months later
• 8:10 - Mirage REPL
• 11:50 - Next Link
• 15:10 - Render props vs. Hooks
• 24:05 - Vercel
• 27:47 - Twin.macro
• 38:50 - Learning CSS grid through Tailwind
• 48:59 - Node d…

Topics include:

• 6:00 – Adding Cypress tests to the Mirage Inspector
• 14:00 – Lazy page generation, incremental rebuilds and cache stampedes with Next.js
• 24:51 – CDNs & surrogate keys
• 38:00 – Will global d…

Sam and Ryan discuss what has driven JavaScript adoption on the web over the past 5-10 years, and what implications those drivers have had for the tools and frameworks we work with today. They also t…

Sam and Ryan talk about the tradeoffs between shipping a single bundle of code vs. the route-based code splitting approach used by many tools like Gatsby and Next. They also talk about their recent e…

Topics include:

• 0:44 - Tailwind UI
• 4:27 - Framework-agnostic tools
• 11:44 - Logux
• 33:31 - Next, code on the edge, static websites, and caching

Links:

• Software Engineering Daily
• Tailwind UI
• Logux
• Next.js 9.3

Yehuda Katz joins Sam to talk about the strategies Ember's developed to keep the majority of the community on recent versions of the framework for more than 8 years. He talks about lessons learned fr…

Topics include:

- 0:00 - What is Faktory?

- 2:28 – Why might I need a background job?

- 13:26 – Why did you make Sidekiq?

- 16:15 – What lead to Faktory?

- 24:02 – Why'd you use Go to implement Faktory's …

Topics include:

- 6:00 - Exploring Next.js's architecture

- 22:33 - Is runtime SSR an antipattern?

- 44:04 - Are there any downsides to this architecture?

- 1:11:25 - React's single shot SSR vs. Ember's …

Topics include:

- 3:33 – Is usePrevious a bad hook?

- 14:13 – Does declarative code make sense for app logic that's about state transitions, like animations?

- 40:04 – Dependabot shifts some of the app …

Topics include:

- 2:46 – Launching Mirage JS!

- 10:17 – Feeling empowered bringing Mirage to the wider JS ecosystem, and what's next for Mirage

- 19:40 – A Mirage tutorial + video series

- 19:30 – GraphQ…

Topics include:

- 4:45 - Building out Mirage's new homepage. SVG positioning.

- 15:42 - CSS Grid for layouts

- 19:36 - Update on launching Mirage JS. Adding types to Mirage.

- 24:09 - Learning about idem…

Topics include:

• 3:17 - Refactoring to Tailwind defaults
• 11:17 - What exactly are Container components?
• 17:35 - Marginless components
• 23:40 - Grids
• 25:50 - What you can learn by using Tailwind defaults
• 41:0…

Topics include:

- 0:40 – Which concepts should a framework be responsible for teaching?

- 7:20 – What does it actually take for someone to start using a framework? And Vue's multiparadigm approach.

- 16…