Hey June 🚀
Every time I start to make a reference to the season, I remember that it’s not the same season for everyone. It’s monsoon at my place, but it might be summer at yours. It’s impossible to generalise. I think it’s important that we remember this when building web applications as well. There are all kinds of people all around the world and experiences you build might be critical to some of them. Let’s be humble and keep the different seasons for users in our mind.
As we did for the last couple of issues, I will begin with some updates from the war field (I wish I didn’t have to)
Cloudflare was celebrating Platform Week this month and there are a slew of announcements from them. Here’s some that got me excited.
The next major version of Flutter was announced at Google I/O and it brings in support for six major platforms - iOS, Android, Web, Windows, Linux and MacOS apps. Material Design is also entering it’s v3 with this release. It’s cool to know that Google finds 500,000 apps that are now build with Flutter.
Satya Nadella accentuated their commitment to low code/no code on keynote while launching their new static page builder - Power Pages. It comes with a design view where users can change designs to a templates hub for most common applications.
This minor release focuses on the upgrade to NodeJS 16 and support for ECMA module system natively. This brings forth it’s own challenges and features (for eg. the wild system that forces you to say .js for every file you import). There are also other useful changes like:
The announcement reads that this is the biggest release yet for expanding what you can do with stories. The rewrite of storybook and support for runners other than Webpack (Vite for now) is really cool. Even if you continue to use Webpack, it now supports lazy compilation of stories (which makes a lot of sense here) things should be much quicker.
Stephanie Eckles creates a site for minimal snippets with modern CSS for problems that has existed since forever. Even if you are familiar with the solutions mentioned, you will find that the code has smol tidbits that help you avoid potential problems.
Last month’s newsletter had featured a tweet with some migration wisdom on Stripe’s transition to using TypeScript - That’s been converted into a detailed blog post now. There are interesting catches now how they decided to convert their codebase and migration path.
React Router is combining with the powers of router from Remix (from the same authors). This means that a lot of data fetching, loading states and error boundaries get tied into the route configuration but also faster smarter states for all these. It’s still under release plan, the code is really cool but I’m wondering how data fetching libraries like react-query take this approach.
The new RFC from NextJS has a killer feature (that apparently has existed in NuxtJS since forever in JavaScript times) - Nested Routes. It is super difficult to build nested layouts in NextJS right now. (Here’s how). The layouts will make this process much simpler and it seems like NextJS is going the Rails - Convention over Configuration route this time as well.
Matt Pocock is wildly recognised as a TypeScript Guru. He was on Visual Studio Code Youtube channel explaining some tips and concepts with TypeScript with live code examples and use cases. It’s a great watch if you want to level up and test TypeScript depths.