June means Monsoon out here in Kerala and I’m glad to be out of the Summer heat.

I’m watching the news that there is a heat wave going across many countries. My sympathies if that is where you are right now.

Plan for React 18

React core team has made the plan for next major version 18 public this June.

When it’s released, React 18 will include out-of-the-box improvements (like automatic batching), new APIs (like startTransition), and a new streaming server renderer with built-in support for React.lazy.

The Plan for React 18 – React Blog

The React team is excited to share a few updates: We’ve started work on the React 18 release, which will be our next major version. We’ve created a Working Group to prepare the community for gradual adoption of new features in React 18. We’ve published a React 18 Alpha so that library authors can try it and provide feedback. These updates are primarily aimed at maintainers of third-party libraries. If you’re learning, teaching, or using React to build user-facing applications, you can safely…

React 18 brings a stream of improvements to SSR, Dan has discussed in detail on Github Discussion.

Earlier this month, Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit and more go down in Fastly CDN outage. A large part of the open internet went down all at once, others losing parts of their service (like Twitter losing GIFs).

This drew discussions on how concentrated our open and distributed web is, how much of the internet can disruption of one service take down?

Releases

• Windows 11 - Windows 11 debuted last month with a grand event and a grander leak. For developers, there is the announcement that Windows Store (or Microsoft Store) will take zero revenue if the apps have their own payment gateway setup. This is a direct confrontation to store policies by Google and Apple. The version might come with stricter hardware requirements for tightening up security on Windows.
• ES2021 spec for JS - The 2021 spec has been officially released. The new release comes with Promise.any, numeric literal specifiers and bunch of other stuff. (See last issue of this newsletter for a primer on how the Spec and naming works.)
• Tailwind 2.2 - Tailwind expands on the features available from the new JIT compiler with styling before/after and every other pseudo selector you might know.
• Safari 15 Beta - Safari 15 debuts with the new layout changes. (good idea on paper, terrible on the ground so far) Features like top level await and support for wider coloring schemes were long time coming.
• Hydrogen by Shopify - Shopify is building a development platform based on React which also hosts the storefront.
• Jotai - The state management library from React Spring team based on Recoil API is now v1 and stable. Also check out Zustand from the same team.

Tutorials

• Redux Toolkit 1.6 - The new version of redux toolkit comes with RTK Query, most of react-query features now build into Redux Toolkit.
• What’s not new in React 18 - React team has been dragging their feet on web components for very long now and this is a scathing criticism on their approach.
• Custom Scrollbars in CSS - The old ways and the modern ones.
• Introduction to Kafka Streams - This ❤️
• State of Web Workers in 2021 - Das Surma on Worklets and their usage on the Web.
• Demystifying styled-components - We have to have a post from Josh, so demystifying styled components. Josh attempts to build styled components library from scratch and explain how it works.

In the Spotlight 🔦

Github CoPilot

Github launched the technical preview of it’s code writing AI based on OpenAI’s now revolutionary AI technology. Among a bunch of these tools that launched last year, this looks the most polished and well put together approach. It integrates directly with Visual Studio Code (also a Microsoft Product) and provides users with inline suggestions as we write code.

There are widespread fears as to whether this AI would replace developers. Most are of the opinion that this is a supplementary tool that will help developers bring Stackoverflow searching into the browser. But whatever happens, it makes programming’s biggest problem - naming things even bigger.

I have been testing CoPilot for last couple of days and while it is awesome to look at, I haven’t received much help from it yet in terms of actually writing code I want. There is certainly some confusions from suggestions looking comments (on my theme of course) and tab or enter sometimes triggering emmet, sometimes autocomplete and others CoPilot.

In Other News

• Corporate Courage - Sam Harris - After losing third of it’s employees, Basecamp founder Jason Fried was on the podcast with Sam Harris to explain his side of things and how politics is shaping work.
• Conformance - Conformance is a an internal model developed in Google to respond to scale. The blog post breaks down their principles and how NextJS conforms.
• Peanut the Waiter Robot Is Proof That Your Job Is Safe - Lots of restaurant outlets are struggling to hire people back after the pandemic and there is widespread panic that raising minimum wages in US might trigger automations in the industry. Wired picks on one of the leading robots and examines why your job is safer for a while longer.

Watch some beautiful dancing from Boston Dynamics Spot:

Looking Ahead

• JSDay - July 6-7
• JAMStack Conf - CFPs are now open