Sending UIs over APIs, use more gap than margin + Miško’s conference tour continues

Hey folks,

How’s it going?

So, apparently, there’s some sort of an attempt to bring RxJS into your browser. Well, not really, but there’s a proposal to bring in an Observable API to your HTML elements. This would offer a syntax that would look something like:

// Filtering and mapping:
element.on('click')
  .filter(e => e.target.matches('.foo'))
  .map(e => ({x: e.clientX, y: e.clientY }))
  .subscribe({next: handleClickAtPoint});

Bear in mind that this is just a proposal, but interesting nonetheless.

Vercel keeps scooping up incredible talent. This time, they added ShadCN to their roster, creator of ShadCN/UI.

Not sure how many of you work remotely and use WeWork, but you might not have an office there even if you do, as they might declare bankruptcy. I’ve been using WeWork sporadically, but guess I’ll have to keep working in my living room during summertime with my kid playing his Switch behind my back 🤷🏽.

Miško gave three really interesting talks on his conference tour:

This time around, as Miško is still running around the world and since I haven’t heard a dad joke from him in a while, I turned to Threads and found this:

We all know about Murphy’s Law – Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. But have you heard of Cole’s Law?

It’s thinly sliced cabbage.

Latest from the Builder Blog

Yoav (me 🤘🏽) wrote about a technique that both Instagram and Builder.io use — sending UIs over APIs.
Yoav also wrote about why you should be using CSS gap instead of margin, which will simplify your layouts.

Interesting tidbits

Alice Alexandra Moore delves into the fundamentals of React Server Components shedding light on their purpose, benefits, and optimal use cases.
If you're hungry for more RSC content, another great article is on mux.com — Everything I wish I knew before moving 50,000 lines of code to React Server Components.
Contemplating what the right choice is between Playwright or Puppeteer? The folks at OpenReplay go over the tradeoffs.
The same folks also had a great write-up about how to avoid delays by using lazy loading in JavaScript.
Michelle Barker showed how to link animations to the scroll progress of a container using CSS.
Here’s another problem to add to the famous quote about RegEx — you know the one — you think you’ll use it to fix your situation, and now you have 2 problems. The kind folks at FreeCodeCamp pile up by releasing “The Regular Expressions Book – RegEx for JavaScript Developers”. Now you have to read it.
Ahmad Shadeed, the CSS hero we all need, wrote another deep dive, this time about the virtual keyboard API.
Chris Jayden wrote about rate-limiting requests with tRPC in Sveltekit.
The survey results for the State of Databases were published.
What developer doesn’t know StackOverflow? The famous copypasta site for developers is losing its traffic and declining in relevance with the rise of AI. Priyam Mohanty attempts to explain the fall of StackOverflow. Ironically, also worth mentioning that now StackOverflow is trying to get into the AI game itself.
If you’re a TypeScript aficionado like myself, there’s no chance you haven’t come across Matt Pocock. This past 2 weeks he tackled which should you use Type or Interface in 2023, how to use Extract, and how as const is one of the most underrated features in TS (▶️).

Tools, libs, utils

Animotion elegantly combines Svelte, Reveal.js, and Tailwind CSS, helping you create stunning presentations and bring your ideas to life through code.
OpenStatus is an open-source alternative to your current monitoring service with a beautiful status page.
Yusuke Wada, the creator of Hono.js, wrote about his new stack of choice — the dev hipster trifecta — Hono.js + htmx + CloudFlare.
Node.js Toolbox is a collection of libraries in the ecosystem broken down into categories. It aims to surface the most maintained and popular libs.
Lucia is a TypeScript authentication library that simplifies the process of managing users and sessions. It integrates with your database to provide a user-friendly, comprehensible, and adaptable API.
Speaking of auth, Auth.js released support for DrizzleORM.
Meilisearch is an open-source search engine that claims to be “blazingly fast”. Don’t know about you, but they had me at “blazingly fast”, The Primeagen would be proud.
NextUI v2.0 is out (FYI it is not tied to Next.js). In the release post, they talk about why they transitioned to Tailwind, their new TW plugin, React Server Component support, and more.
Supabase now supports Hugging Face via Python and JavaScript.
Preevy is a CLI that helps you deploy preview environments to the cloud a la Vercel or Netlify. You have to use Docker-Compose, and it supports only a few platforms, but hey, OSS FTW.
EspressoTS is a new TypeScript-based Node.js framework.
MetaGPT is an AI agent that’ll spin up multiple agents given a requirement and map out your product. Disclaimer: This is not by Meta the company.

At the risk of being repetitive, once again I am left with more links/posts that I found interesting and I’d like to share with you.

For example, Malte Ubl, CTO at Vercel, had an interesting thought piece about defining the difference between frontend and backend. Not sure I completely agree with the way he framed it, but goes to show how we see things differently.

Another opinion piece that resonated with me was Things you forgot (or never knew) because of React by Josh Collinsworth. He dove deep into the weeds of frontend land in a very eloquent, thorough, and thoughtful post. Worth your time if you’re working with React for sure.

Anyway, that’s it for this time.

For the next one, I’ll be on vacation, so my good buddy and colleague Vishwas will be filling the gap.

Hope you’ve enjoyed it and have a fabulous weekend!

Peace out ✌🏽,

Yoav.