thoughts

JS Nation - 2023-06-01

1. APIs are evolving. Again. - Matteo Collina, Luca Maraschi

Marketing Talk about their new product: platformatic.dev

Takeway: I didn’t really takeaway anything from this talk. It was very marketing heavy and, IMO, didn’t provide a lot of value.

2. SolidJS: why all the Suspense ? - Ryan Carniato

Very interesting Talk about Async handling with Suspense and how to think about UIs when loading async data.

Takeway: Suspense is you friend, use it to build your UI in a user friendly manner.

3. Top Core Web Vitals Recommendations for 2023 - Barry Pollard

Lot’s of insights about the top 9 Core Web Vitals to monitor as a developer. See https://web.dev/top-cwv-2023/

Takeway: (automatically) monitor your pages/apps for those Core Web Vitals.

4. Modern Web Debugging - Jecelyn Yeen

Presentation of the Chrome DevTools features

Takeway:

5. The core of Turbopack explained (live coding) - Tobias Koppers

Nice and easily understandable explanation of the basic principles of the Turbopack implementation. Basically: recursion, caching and graph construction/invalidation.

Takeway: building up a graph and using it to prevent multiple code execution might be an interesting approach for perf in some cases.

6. When optimization backfire - Ivan Akulov

Explained how the Lighthouse score is calculated (10% FCP, 25% LCP, 30% TBT, 25% CLS, 10% SI). See: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/performance-scoring/

CDNs and Cache Partitioning (aka. loading Google Fonts from Google servers won’t have the cache benefits you thought)

Use <link rel="preload"/> when necessary

Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/iamakulov/status/1664132124675551234?cxt=HHwWhMDR6bbWl5guAAAA

Takeway: monitor your pages/apps for Core Web Vitals (see #3) but don’t optimize prematurely ;)

7. Building a Web-App: the easy path and the performant path. Why are they not the same? - Miško Hevery

Presentation of Qwik and the core principle of resumability

Takeway: Qwik achieves high perf by using server side rendering firs and then only loading the minimal required JS for interactivity.

8. Rome, a modern toolchain! - Emanuele Stoppa

Presentation of Rome: https://rome.tools

Takeway: Rome is very fast but doesn’t seem to be very extensible. Errors are nicely displayed though :D

9. Dialog Dilemmas and Modal Mischief: A Deep Dive Into Pop-Ups - Hidde de Vries

Dialog, Popups and Modals accessibility problems and how to solve them

Takeway: use the (web) platform instead of building custom components that are not accessible

10. Package-based Monorepos - Speed Up in Under 7 Minutes - Juri Strumpflohner

Presentation of NX

Takeway: look into NX when you have time :)

11. Maintaining a Component Library at Scale - Joran Quinten

Very interesting talk of how Jumbo (NL Retailer) manages their component library at scale.

Takeaway: involve the teams early in your decisions and get them to be part of the design system development.

12. Accessible Component System Through Customization - Maya Sharvin

Takeaway: again, use the platform (see #9)

13. AI and Web Development: Hype or Reality - Wes Bos

Wes gives an insight into how he’s using AI to power his Syntax.fm podcast and generate side content for the shows. Very insightfull.

Takeway: AI tooling can be very powerful when used correctly. Probably takes a lot of time to get it setup though, so especially good for repetitive tasks.