Please take our listener survey so we can better tailor the podcast to your interests. It’s only mid-February and already the State of React survey results for 2024 are in! Unsurprisingly Next.js continues to dominate as the most used React-based framework and Tailwind CSS tops the charts when it comes to CSS tools and libraries. TypeScript 5.8 bet…

The latest wrinkle for AI coding assistant tools like Cursor and Windsurf is known as the Model Context Protocol (MCP). MCP is an open protocol that allows users to provide custom tools and services to agentic LLMs like calling a third party weather service. In further AI news, OpenAI has introduced a new deep research agent designed to conduct mul…

A new challenger to rival OpenAI’s best ChatGPT model has arisen from China named DeepSeek R1. The reason it’s causing even more of a stir is because the creators claim DeepSeek R1 was trained for under $5M - a mere fraction of the cost of comparable models to date - and they’ve open sourced the code, the models, all of it. In the same vein, both T…

This week, the team behind JavaScript runtime Bun drops some major updates into Bun 1.2. Bun introduces a built-in S3 storage API, a built-in Postgres client (with MySQL coming soon), 90% compatibility with Node.js, and it’s faster than ever before. Tailwind CSS v4 is out as well, and it boasts a new higher performance engine for 5x faster full bui…

The first topic of conversation this week is an unexpected new area the Expo team is tackling: Expo Application Service Hosting. EAS Hosting is a new service for quickly deploying web projects built using Expo and React Native apps. It makes it easy to compile and sign apps with custom native code, upload apps to the Play Store or App Store, and pu…

This episode begins with a cautionary tale to double check your browser extensions. Popular coupon browser extension Honey’s been caught replacing affiliate links with its own tracking codes right before checkout, as well as applying pre-selected discount codes from its business partners that aren’t always the best deals. A few weeks ago we reporte…

To start us off, the State of JS 2024 survey results were recently released, and there’s lots of interesting stats to share. Vite continues to be the most loved framework and build tool amongst all JS devs, React continues to be the most used framework amongst JS devs at work, and SvelteKit and Astro are the two meta frameworks JS devs are most int…

We wrap up the podcast with an end of year holiday spectacular episode! Instead of the usual news, the hosts share the biggest front end stories of 2024, the most fascinating developments, and the moments that made us happiest. Thank you, Front-End Fire listeners! We couldn’t have done this without you. Wishing you a wonderful holiday season, and w…

In our last news episode of the year, we share that React 19 is declared stable, just in time for the holidays. It’s been a long road from release candidate in April to stability now, but it was well worth the wait. React 19 is packing a lot of features, including: Actions, hooks, form actions, the new use API, and of course, React Server Component…

The new JavaScript package manager and serverless registry vlt debuted recently, promising to be a drop-in replacement for existing package managers like npm with additional offerings like a dependency query syntax selector and GUI experience for dependency graphs. Vite 6.0 released this week, and its biggest improvement is the new experimental Env…

Co-host Jack Herrington is just back from the React Summit conference in New York and he shares some of the highlights of the conf, including the announcement that TanStack Start is now in beta status and Tanner Linsely (the creator of the TanStack products) will be working on it full time. Additionally, React-based animation library Framer Motion …

We kick off this week’s episode with news that React Native framework Expo now has a developer preview of universal React Server Components. For the first time ever, you can use React Server Components & Server Actions in native apps. In a controversial move, Amazon has mandated all employees must return to offices by Jan 2025. The hosts discuss th…

The AI race continues with lots of new updates straight from the GitHub Universe conference! New features from GitHub include: the ability to choose different AI models for GitHub Copilot Chat to use (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, etc.), Copilot Workspaces reviewing PRs, suggesting code changes, and validating fixes. In addition to the GH Universe announ…

In a special guest episode, Rob Eisenberg joins the podcast to talk about the role web components play in today’s web development ecosystem. Rob is uniquely qualified to discuss web components, as the former architect for Microsoft’s web component tech stack, FAST, used by about 1,500 internal MSFT teams, and creator of the Web Component Engineerin…

Jack is away this week speaking at the React Advanced conference in London, so be sure to check out his recorded talk (and all the others) about if React is really dying. For the news this week, we’ve got a bunch of interesting topics, the first of which is the latest release of Next.js: Next 15. It’s stable and production ready offering React 19 a…

In the new frameworks based on React, we introduce you to One. It is a Vite-powered project claiming to support React web apps and React Native apps all in one. Next, Host Jack Herrington shares an update on how Astro’s Server Islands work after trying them out for himself. Similar to React’s Suspense components, Astro’s Server Islands allow any co…

.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 …

WP Engine is taking Automattic and Matt Mullenweg to court. The complaints are numerous and juicy: extortion, libel, slander, and include screenshots of text messages, tweets, and emails that look pretty damning against Automattic. The whole story has “Made for TV documentary” written all over it. In slightly less controversial news, React 19 has r…

This episode kicks off with the new Deno 2 release candidate. V2 boasts improved dependency management, updates to the APIs and CLI, and improved CommonJS support because even though ESM is the future, so much good stuff in the JS ecosystem still runs on CJS. Web Components take a big step forward in terms of wider spread adoption with the adoption…

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 …

Big news this week when it’s announced that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has moved ChatGPT from using Next.js to using Remix. While both metaframeworks rely on React under the hood, Remix seems a bit less opinionated about how teams might want to structure their projects to best suit their unique use cases and needs. TypeScript has also rele…

Kicking off the discussion is the release of Vue 3.5. Although it’s not a major release, Vue 3.5 packs some great new features and optimizations like: reactivity system improvements (up to 56% less memory usage for apps than before), reactive prop destructuring stabilization (it’s simpler to declare props with default values), and SSR improvements …

We’ve got a good show for you today! It’s chock full of new build tools, better date handling in JavaScript, and SSR benchmarks to prove which framework is truly the fastest. The rust-ification of JavaScript build tools continues, as next generation build tool Rspack hits v1 and claims it’s ready for primetime. Rspack boasts (almost) complete compa…

On this week’s episode, a new software licensing term has emerged in the development world: Fair Source Software (FSS). The error and exception tracking software company Sentry added some legal protections to their Codecov product last year (they are a business trying to earn money, after all), which technically meant it was no longer open source. …

AI is the main topic of conversation for this week’s episode. Between continued advancements in the technology and governments trying to put safeguards in place to prevent a Terminator-style future, there’s plenty going on. OpenAI has introduced a new feature of its API called “structured outputs,” which essentially lets developers pass in a valid …

This week’s episode kicks off with an announcement that Node 22.6 has experimental TypeScript support! What you might not realize unless you read the fine print though, is that this isn’t the sort of TS support you might assume. Instead, the feature strips type annotations from .ts files, allowing them to run without transforming TS-specific syntax…

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 r…

Web development survey results season is upon us, so this week’s episode covers two of the newly released survey results: the State of React survey 2023 and Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024. Just over 13,000 developers filled out the State of React survey, and the results were quite interesting. React devs are fans of component libraries like M…

Popular web framework Astro is making lots of headlines this week, between new experimental feature Server Islands, and achieving “official deployment partner” status with Netlify, it’s been a whirlwind. But in addition to Astro’s big news, Expo, arguably the most popular framework for building React Native apps, has been endorsed by the React Nati…

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 lo…

The hosts switch up the regular news format this week in favor of another favorite developer topic: tech gear. All the extras that make web development that little bit nicer. If you were stranded on a desert island (that only had power and Internet), what tech gear would you bring that you just can’t live without? Aside from MacBook Pros for all th…

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 w…

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 oth…

Today’s episode covers a slew of hot topics making headlines in the web development and general technology world. TJ kicks off the show with his firsthand experience of GitHub Copilot Workspace (available to users by invite only). He tested Copilot Workspace with a relatively simple issue in one of his repos, and while the plan Copilot came up with…

Vanilla JS author Chris Ferdinandi joins the podcast this week to talk about how having ADHD has affected his career in web development. Chris shares his own diagnosis of ADHD as a child, then proceeds to discuss how it can be both a positive and a negative depending on the situation and how different individuals can have ADHD to varying degrees. H…

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 c…

Conference season is in full swing this week Vercel showed off the new goods they’ve got for developers to get excited about. During Vercel Ship, the Next.js 15 RC (release candidate) was officially announced. Next.js 15 includes benefits like: support for React 19 and the React Compiler (Experimental), plus hydration error improvements. It also of…

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…

On this episode of Front-End Fire we welcomed special guest Jason Lengstorf to chat about the news with us. We opened with a follow-up discussion of the let versus const debate from last week. Jack made a video (see below for link), and we had a bit of fun talking about the controversy. After that we introduced Effect, a library that dubs itself th…

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 c…

There’s rarely a dull moment in the web development world and this week is no exception to that rule. The episode kicks off with an update on Shopify’s meta framework Hydrogen, which is now built on top of the open source framework, Remix, which Shopify acquired back in October of 2022. Hydrogen now has full Vite support and integration with the Vi…

The episode starts off with news about Figma’s new Code Connect feature. Code Connect is the bridge between a design system’s component code and Figma, so when viewing components in Figma’s Dev Mode, they’ll have the same real world code that the design system relies on, and Code Connect can also map properties from code to Figma, enabling dynamic …

The group dives into the week’s news right away, starting off with a new open source project from Google called Jpegli. Jpepgli is a new JPEG coding library, which claims to compress images up to 35% smaller while also being able to deliver JPEGs in even higher quality than what is currently available today. The GitHub repo the article links to sti…

Signals have been around in the JavaScript world as early as 2010 when Knockout.js first introduced them, but the past few years they’ve been picking up steam among JS frameworks as a way to effectively manage application state so that developers can focus on the business logic parts of their apps. Now there’s a proposal to make Signals part of the…

It turns out we had a lot of news to cover in this week’s episode. We kicked it off discussing how RedwoodJS is the latest framework to support React Server Components, and has some pretty nice illustrated docs to help devs get started. Then, there was a rapid fire of interesting topics including a great new article about modern CSS from Mr. CSS Tr…

CSS-in-JS has been around for years now, but have you tried JS-from-CSS? This week we talk about the new alternative trend sweeping through the web development community: writing only CSS to create a fully styled and typed React component. Two early frontrunners in this race are MistCSS and Stylin, and we’ll keep an eye out for if this new twist on…

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 …

Today we discuss Vercel’s latest offering: AI SDK 3.0, which streams React components from LLMs to deliver richer user experiences than text-only chatbots. Then we dive into the world of modern styling as Tailwind CSS drops its latest gem - version 4.0, now open source for community exploration. And then finally we talk about the latest improvement…

We discuss JSR, the new package registry from Deno, and whether it can compete with npm. Next, we talk about Parcel’s new support for macros, which is a handy way to embed build-time logic into your code. After that we some get into some BrowserStack legal drama, and wrap up with some BREAKING NEWS about Apple, PWAs, and the EU. Drama! News: Paige …

News: Paige - Hono v4 takes aim at full-stack frameworks Jack - Storybook 8 TJ - An update on Apple breaking PWAs in the EU Bonus News: Google cut a deal with Reddit for AI training data Node.js unveils its new mascot Rocket Turtle What Makes Us Happy this Week: Paige - Learning watercolor painting and The Fourth Wing novel Jack - Drive to Survive …