Front-End Fire

TJ VanToll, Paige Niedringhaus, Jack Herrington

A weekly show that helps you stay up to date on the latest and greatest in the front-end world.

#39 in the Top 100 technology Weekly chart

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Top 10 Front-End Fire Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Front-End Fire episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Front-End Fire for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Front-End Fire episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

News: TanStack Start, Safari 18 Updates, and Astro 5.0 Highlights

Front-End Fire

09/23/24 • 39 min

Tanner Linsley, creator of TanStack Query and TanStack Router, continues expanding the Tanner-verse with a new TanStack Start framework. It’s a full-stack React framework powered by TanStack Router, Vinxi, and Vite, and boasts all the mainstays of a JavaScript framework today, including SSR, streaming, server function support, RPCs, and more.

With the release of the new Apple operating system, iOS 18, comes new updates to the Safari browser and its WebKit rendering engine. A couple notable highlights for Safari 18 are “distraction control” where users can hide distracting items on web pages like sign-in banners, cookie preference popups, and newsletter signup overlays, and iPhone mirroring and remote inspection.

And the Astro team is at it again with the release of Astro 5.0 beta. This new release introduces the Astro Content Layer, a flexible, extensible way to interact with content in Astro, no matter where it comes from.

And for the Fire Starters section of the show this week we learn more about the writingsuggestions attribute.

News:

Bonus News:

Next.js SaaS starter

Fire Starters:

writingsuggestions attribute

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Bad Monkey show and Carl Hiaasen books in general
Jack - iOS 18 and Sony Alpha 7C II - Full-frame interchangeable Lens Hybrid Camera
TJ - Bookshelves

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

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Bye-bye .IO, void(0)’s Next Gen JS Toolchain, and StackBlitz’s AI platform bolt.new

Front-End Fire

10/14/24 • 52 min

.io domains have been in vogue for over a decade, but now that the British government has decided to give up sovereignty over the small set of islands in the Indian Ocean that owned that country code on the Internet, it will soon cease to exist.

Evan You, of Vue JS and Vite fame, has started a new company VoidZero Inc. to build the next generation toolchain for JavaScript. While trying to make Vite even better, Evan realized he needed a full-time team and funding to build the best toolchain around, and the engineers and investors agreed.

StackBlitz enters the AI arena as well with its bolt.new offering, AI-powered software development allowing users to prompt, run, edit, and deploy full-stack web apps directly in the browser.

WordPress drama reaches new levels of pettiness with a new checkbox that users must check before signing into their WP accounts swearing they are not affiliated with WP Engine in any way. In happier news, Sentry doubles down on its support for open source software (and the maintainers) by creating the Open Source Pledge where companies who use OSS for profit are encouraged to commit to paying the maintainers of the software they use so that burnout and related security issues can be better addressed.

News:

Paige - void(0) JavaScript tooling
Jack - StackBlitz’s Bolt.new AI dev tool
TJ - The end of .io domains

Bonus News:

Fire Starters:

HTTP QUERY

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power season 2
Jack - The Substance movie
TJ - Cider mills

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire and BlueSky.

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News: AI Model Runner ONNX and JS Framework Maker Vinxi w/Returning Guest Jason Lengstorf

Front-End Fire

07/15/24 • 54 min

Friend of the podcast (and previous guest host), Jason Lengstorf, joins Jack and Paige today to talk about the latest happenings in the web dev world - and wax poetic at the end about favorite restaurants and fine dining.

First up, is AI model runner ONNX, which Jack’s been digging into recently. ONNX offers many pre-trained models which can run locally or in the browser and integrates well with many different programming languages.

After that is new Lodash library competitor es-toolkit. It’s smaller, faster, relies heavily on native browser APIs, and wants to supplant Lodash for all those useful helper functions so many JS apps still rely heavily on.

Then there’s a new React project framework named react-server that claims to be the easiest way to build React apps with server-side rendering.

Finally, Jason shares his experience with full stack JavaScript SDK Vinxi, which makes it easy for devs to build JavaScript apps and even frameworks.

News:

Paige - es-toolkit and what’s next for ESLint
Jack - ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) AI model runner and React Server
Jason - Vinxi · Dev Agrawal on LWJ teaching Vinxi · Nikhil on Vinxi at ViteConf

Special Guest:

Jason Lengstorf, host of Learn with Jason and developer-focused media consultant.

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

1 Listener

News: Coding Reality TV, AI Companies Crawl Excluded Content, and Apple Violates More EU Laws

Front-End Fire

07/01/24 • 47 min

In a rare turn of events, it was a slightly quieter week in terms of actual web development news, so the hosts round up some technology-adjacent news and drama to share.

Jack kicks off the show recounting his experience of being one of four developers in a reality show-type scenario that his friend Jason Lengstorf (host of the YouTube show “Learn with Jason”) put together.

Next up is more drama around how AI companies are training their LLMs. Up and coming AI company Perplexity’s getting some heat for ignoring the robots.txt files on websites banning AI companies from crawling the content to teach their models.

After that, TypeScript 5.5, previously in beta stage (in episode 42), has now reached release candidate stage. It brings with it inferred type predicates, regex syntax checking, and 33% smaller package size.

News:

Bonus news:

window.ai

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

React 19, TypeScript 5.5, and GitHub Copilot Workspace Wants to Code For You

Front-End Fire

05/06/24 • 36 min

This week we’re all about beta releases and technical previews of AI that will make us even more productive coders.

Since the release of React 18, just over 2 years ago, the React team’s been hard at work, and at the end of April, React 19 beta dropped on npm. This new version brings Server Components and Server Actions out from behind the canary channel, stating they are now stable and will not break between major versions going forward. In addition to this, v19 introduces Actions: hooks for supporting asynchronous functions in transitions like form submission, designed to handle pending, error and optimistic updates in the UI automatically. There’s also a new use API, which can use Suspense to wait for promises to resolve (or contexts to be available) before rendering, and it can be done conditionally (something that hooks cannot). Additionally, React 19 offers better hydration errors, support for documentation metadata, stylesheets, asynchronous scripts, preloading resources, and custom elements. It’s a lot to take in, but there are upgrade guides and code mods to help developers itching to get started trying out this latest version of React.

Not to be outdone, TypeScript also released v5.5 beta as well! Highlights for this new release include: inferred type predicates (good for when you filter null values out of an array but TypeScript yells because it doesn’t realize you have), regular expression syntax checking (it can’t tell you if your regex will actually catch what you want it to, but will tell you if your expression is invalid), and type imports in JSDoc.

And GitHub expands on the capabilities of Copilot with the announcement of GitHub Copilot Workspaces: a Copilot-native development environment. Within Copilot Workspaces, developers can brainstorm, plan, build, test, and run code in natural language. Inside of a GitHub repo or issue, devs can tell Copilot agents to formulate a plan to fix the error or build a new feature, Copilot Workspaces offers a plan based on its understanding of the entire codebase, issue replies, and more, and everything from its plan to the code is entirely editable. Once a user likes the plan, they can run the code directly in Copilot Workspace and tweak until happy with the final result. It’s a lofty goal to be sure (and won’t be perfect right off the bat), but in a few years time this could be the new way we all code.

News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Kevin Can F**k Himself TV series
Jack - Depth of Field project
TJ - Let me be lightning talk from Ryan Florence

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

News: State of JS 2023 Survey Results, React Drama Updates, and Adobe Sued by FTC

Front-End Fire

06/24/24 • 47 min

Although we’re already halfway through 2024, this week the State of JavaScript survey for 2023 dropped, and the hosts weighed in and discussed the results they found most interesting.

This year the survey provided a lot more write in options instead of predefined lists, which made extrapolating clear answers in many cases more difficult than it otherwise would have been, but there were still some clear winners in terms of usage and popularity among respondents. React and Next.js continued to dominate in the framework wars, Vite was beloved by most everyone, and the new category of AI tools was dominated by ChatGPT. There’s lots of interesting data here to peruse, but also some questions about the accuracy of results with having to normalize so many written responses.

Another topic of discussion was the new release of htmx 2.0. It’s dropping support for Internet Explorer, breaking out all the previously built-in extensions from the main project, and (most exciting of all) now offers a dark-mode version of the website.

We get an update on the React Suspense drama that began last week when the React team fundamentally wanted to change how Suspense is handled in React 19, and many library maintainers who rely on Suspense under the hood voiced concerns that it would severely impact how their libraries work. The React team has since backed off changing Suspense, and agreed to find a solution that works better for everyone, and we’ll update you on what that solution might be as soon as we know more.

And finally, Adobe continues to make headlines this year as the US Federal Trade Commission sues it over confusing and hard-to-cancel subscription plans. For a company as big and successful as Adobe, the fact that it uses confusing and obfuscated terms and conditions to penalize users who try to cancel subscriptions is shameful, and the US FTC is taking a stand against it.

News:

Paige - htmx 2.0 is released
Jack - State of JS 2023 results are in
TJ - The US FTC sues Adobe (Full complaint)

Bonus news:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

News: Astro Adds Databases, Pigment CSS, and Speedometer 3.0 Browser Testing

Front-End Fire

03/18/24 • 35 min

In this episode, we explore the latest in web development with Astro unveiling Astro DB, a fully managed, blazing fast SQL-based database that is “ridiculously easy to use.” Next, you may not know the name, but Speedometer just released version 3.0, which further solidifies its status as the browser benchmark for web app responsiveness. Next up is Pigment CSS, a zero-runtime CSS-in-JS solution from the makers of the Material UI component library that works with Next.js’ app router and React Server Components. And to cap it all off, we’ve got new details about Rolldown, the Rust-based version of Rollup, and Chris Coyier’s honest thoughts about what happened to his CSS Tricks site after it was acquired.

News:

Paige - Astro DB
Jack - Pigment CSS
TJ - Speedometer 3.0 announcement. Run the test yourself.

Bonus News:

Rolldown - the Rust-based JS bundler is in beta
Chris Coyier’s take on CSS Tricks

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Elgato Prompter
Jack - Big Shark movie
TJ - Dune 2 movie

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, reach out to us via email or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

React Conf Highlights, Vercel Raises Another $250m, and Astro Adds Actions

Front-End Fire

05/20/24 • 47 min

We’ve got an exciting episode with our co-host Jack Herrington fresh from his trip to React Conf where the React core team and close collaborators unveiled all the cool things they’ve been working on, including the much anticipated React Compiler and some exciting new features for React Native Expo.

React Compiler is a new Babel-enabled plugin that will allow React apps to handle the memoization and re-rendering of components in an application so that developers won’t have to use the useMemo() and useCallback() hooks themselves. It will essentially save devs from having to think about it (and save them from the foot guns of implementing it incorrectly), and it is completely optional (not built in to React 19) and can be done via incremental adoption across an already existing application.

In related news, Vercel (the creators of Next.js, the most popular React framework in the world) announced they had raised $250m in funding, and the company is currently valued at $3.25b. Just wow! While we can only assume some of that funding will go towards continuing to improve Next.js and their core business of web hosting, they also said they’ll continue to invest heavily in their v0 generative UI system, which currently generates copy-and-paste friendly React code using shadcn/ui and Tailwind CSS that people can use in their projects.

Another popular JavaScript framework, Astro, made a splash as well with its release of Astro 4.8. In addition to the usual performance enhancements and bug fixes, it added experimental support for Astro Actions with niceties like full type-safety, a single global action file that any client component can access, automatically parsing form request objects using a Zod schema, and progressive enhancement on forms.

Finally, the news wraps up with some new features that came out in the Safari 17.5 release.

News:

Paige - Astro Actions in v4.8
Jack - React Compiler, React Compiler Playground, Jack’s in-depth video of React Compiler
TJ - Vercel raises $250m; valued at $3.25b

Bonus News:

TJ - Safari 17.5

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

News: Google Backs Off Blocking Cookies, New CSS Features, and Vercel’s Feature Flags SDK

Front-End Fire

08/05/24 • 42 min

Google is making headline news once again as it reverses course on a decision to block third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. After years of testing, planning, and delays, Google scrapped a plan to turn off third-party cookie tracking by default like Safari and Firefox already do.

In other news, the annual CSS Working Group meeting wrapped up recently, and some of the exciting features the group will be focusing on this year include: the if() statement for conditional styling, cross document view transitions without the need for a JavaScript library, and (perhaps the most anticipated feature) cleaner, easier CSS anchor positioning.

Vercel introduces feature flags in Next.js and SvelteKit with Vercel’s Flags SDK. The Flags SDK works with any feature flag provider, and sits between the application and the source of the flags to help devs follow best practices for using feature flags, while keeping websites fast.

And finally, Reddit has doubled down on blocking search engine crawlers from surfacing new posts and comments in recent weeks, and as of now, Google is the only mainstream search engine that’s made a deal that will allow it to index new search results when users search for posts on Reddit.

News:

Bonus News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Apple Watch SE
Jack - 3D printing (Autodesk Fusion 360 program)
TJ - 2024 Paris Olympics

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

News: New SSG Framework VitePress, Component Libraries Based on shadcn/ui, and Angular 18 Drops

Front-End Fire

06/03/24 • 35 min

This is a rapid fire episode of news topics today because (as always) there’s plenty going on in the front-end development world.

Evan You, the creator of the popular Vue.js framework and Vite build tool, is back with a new static site generator named VitePress. VitePress allows users to build fast, content-centric websites with Markdown, a fully customizable theme, and Vue-enhancements for greater interactivity, and it will generate static HTML pages that can be deployed anywhere.

There’s also two new component library frameworks taking a page from the shadcn/ui open source component library: JollyUI and Ark UI. JollyUI provides shadcn/ui compatible, react aria components that you can copy and paste into your apps. They’re accessible, customizable, open source, and look darn good at first glance. Ark UI takes a slightly different approach billing itself as a headless library for building reusable, scalable design systems that work for a wide range of JS frameworks.

And the Angular team is back at it again with the twice a year release of a new major version of Angular. We’re up to v18 now, and Angular is encouraging users to move away from zone.js for change detection. It’s been a staple of Angular for years, but the library came with a number of developer experience and performance downsides and so the Angular team’s been hard at work building new APIs that don’t rely on zone.js and they’re ready for devs to try them out.

In bonus news, Google now offers its Gemini AI in Chrome DevTools to help developers better understand the errors and warnings that pop up in the console, Kyle Shevlin shares a very well written design system retrospective based off his own experiences building cross platform design systems for clients and dev teams, and IBM watsonx brings its own Code Assistant AI tool to the table. A unique twist with Code Assistant is that it offers not only code generation, but also code modernization (i.e. refactoring legacy code or translating code from one language to another).

News:

Paige - VitePress SSG framework
Jack - Ark UI 3.0 and JollyUI react aria compatible components
TJ - Angular 18 is now available

Bonus news:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - BUBM double layer cable travel bag
Jack - Creo Chocolate tour
TJ - Sharp Tech podcast

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

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FAQ

How many episodes does Front-End Fire have?

Front-End Fire currently has 66 episodes available.

What topics does Front-End Fire cover?

The podcast is about Podcasts and Technology.

What is the most popular episode on Front-End Fire?

The episode title 'News: AI Model Runner ONNX and JS Framework Maker Vinxi w/Returning Guest Jason Lengstorf' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Front-End Fire?

The average episode length on Front-End Fire is 38 minutes.

How often are episodes of Front-End Fire released?

Episodes of Front-End Fire are typically released every 7 days.

When was the first episode of Front-End Fire?

The first episode of Front-End Fire was released on Jul 31, 2023.

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Front-End Fire

TJ VanToll, Paige Niedringhaus, Jack Herrington

Top 10 Front-End Fire Episodes

FAQ

How many episodes does Front-End Fire have?

What topics does Front-End Fire cover?

What is the most popular episode on Front-End Fire?

What is the average episode length on Front-End Fire?

How often are episodes of Front-End Fire released?

When was the first episode of Front-End Fire?

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