JS Party: JavaScript, CSS, Web Development
JS Party is a weekly podcast celebrating JavaScript and the web. The show features a rotating panel of developers discussing the web platform, front-end frameworks, and JavaScript runtimes. Topics include browsers, React, Vue, Svelte, Node, Deno, and Bun, as well as web animation, CSS, and other web technologies.
Episodes
One last party
Jerod is joined by KBall, Nick & Amy to throw one last JS Party! We review last year's predictions, discuss the state of the web dev world, opine on coding AIs (of course) & divulge what comes next for the JS Party crew. Thank you for partying with us all these years! 💚
React: then & now
Back at React Summit in New York, KBall & Nick sat down with Tom Occhino & Shruti Kapoor for more fascinating conversations.
Tom Occhino, a key figure in React's history at Facebook (now Meta), reveals the origin story of React, which began when an ads engineer presented a revolutionary approach to web UI rendering. The discussion extends to React's evolution through Next.js.
Then, Shruti Kapoor
WYSIWYG
At React Summit in New York, KBall & Nick sat down with Kent C. Dodds & Theo Browne for two fascinating conversations. Both of them showed us the whole gamut of their personalities!
Kent shared his insights on effective teaching methodologies and the future of developer education, while diving deep into React and the Remix/React Router ecosystem, and closing on an appeal for kindness int he world
Nine pillars of great Node apps
Recently, four pillars of the JavaScript community (James Snell, Natalia Venditto, Michael Dawson & Matteo Collina) teamed up to create a resource that lays out nine principles for doing Node.js right in enterprise environments. On this episode, Natalia & Matteo join Jerod to discuss all nine.
It's all about documentation
Carmen Huidobro joins Amy, KBall & Nick on the show to talk about her work, the importance of writing docs, and her upcoming conference talk at React Summit US!
How Vercel thinks about Next.js
Vercel CPO, Tom Occhino, joins Jerod for a one-on-one covering React & Next's past, present & future. We discuss the birth of React, Tom's move to Vercel, deploying Next apps to non-Vercel hosts, React as the next jQuery, the viability of Web Components, Vercel customers getting surprise bills & so much more.
Kind of a big deal
Jerod & the gang play "Twenty" Questions to get to know Amy, review the big Svelte 5 release, discuss commercial open source & get Nick's report from SquiggleConf!
Digging through Jerod Santo’s tool box
KBall interviews Jerod about the tools he uses in development, podcasting & business. We start with text editors & terminal tools, move to podcast recording & editing tools, discuss the open source podcasting platform Jerod built in Elixir, then finish with tools to run a small business & our approaches to genAI. Oh, and you don't want to miss Jerod's Big Confession!
A great horse to bet on
Jerod & KBall discuss a trio of goings on in/around the web dev world: Evan You's new startup, Matt Mullenweg's WordPress mess & Ryan Carniato's WebComponents debate.
Create interactive tutorials the easy way
Tomek Sułkowski from TutorialKit joins Jerod to tell him all about the open source toolkit for creating awesome, interactive tutorials without having to code up the hard parts.
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2
Jerod is joined by Ryan Dahl to discuss his second take on leveling up JavaScript developers all around the world. Jerod asks Ryan why not try to fix or fork Node instead of starting fresh, how Deno (the open source project) can avoid the all too common rug pull (not cool) scenario, what's new in Deno 2 & their pragmatic decision to support npm, they talk JSR, they talk Deno KV & SQLite, they even
It's all about the squiggles
Nick is joined by Josh Goldberg & Dimitri Mitropoulos to discuss SquiggleConf, a new conference focused on web dev tooling. We explore the motivations behind creating a conference dedicated to developer tools, the challenges of organizing both conferences and local meetups, and strategies for building engaged tech communities.
We also discuss the importance of developer tooling, the pandemic's i
Undirected hyper arrows
Chris Shank has been on sabbatical since January, so he's had a lot of time to think deeply about the web platform. On this episode, Jerod & KBall pick Chris' brain to answer questions like, what does a post-component paradigm look like? What would it look like if the browser had primitives for building spatial canvases? How can we make it easier to make “folk interfaces” on the web?
Don’t ever use these TypeScript features
Jerod, Nick & Chris discuss a next-gen JavaScript bundler, Node getting even tighter with TypeScript, the top programming languages according to IEEE Spectrum, Chris' feelings on Node's built-in test runner & more!
When 3rd party JavaScript attacks
Simon Wijckmans from c/side joins Jerod & Nick to discuss the Pollyfill attack in detail. What does it mean for web developers & client-side security going forward?
There be a11y dragons
Eric Bailey joins Jerod to discuss everything Dungeons & Dragons taught him about writing alt text, building accessible websites, Primer, the problem with a11y overlays & more.
Forging Minecraft's scripting API
Raphael Landaverde & Jake Shirley work on Minecraft full-time. How cool is that?! On this episode, they join Jerod to tell us all about the web tech that drives Minecraft's scripting infrastructure, how they incrementally change a massive / always-moving target, the best / worst parts of the job & much more.
A Nick-level emergency
Node.js makes big TypeScript & SQLite moves, ECMAScript 2024 adds some niceties to the language (but not the ones you're probably excited for) & we review the State of React 2023 results. Emergency?! Nick!
Going flat with ESLint
Josh Goldberg joins Nick & Chris to discuss the latest updates from ESLint, typescript-eslint & the new flat config format. They also discuss creating reusable configs & project generators before pivoting to talk about a new conference focused on developer tooling. Finally, Chris & Josh talk about the past, present & future of Mocha.
Building LLM agents in JS
KBall and returning guest Tejas Kumar dive into the topic of building LLM agents using JavaScript. What they are, how they can be useful (including how Tejas used home-built agents to double his podcasting productivity) & how to get started building and running your own agents, even all on your own device with local models.
The Ember take on recent hot topics
KBall takes another dive into recent hot topics around reactivity and build systems, this time with three members of the Ember core team. They also talk about some of the reasons why the Ember community has been so long lived, how thinking about upgradeability leads to universality, and how features first built specifically for frameworks make their way into the language specification or universal
A standard library for JavaScript
Philipp Burckhardt, Athan Reines & the team behind stdlib.io believe in a future in which the web is a preferred environment for numerical computation. They've been working toward building that future for over a decade. Thanks to listener, Brian Zelip, Jerod sits down with Philipp to learn all about this excellent effort: where it's been & where it's headed.
React Native the Expo way
Jerod sits down with React Native aficionado, Simon Grimm, to catch up on everyone's favorite native app platform & learn about Expo, which Simon thinks is *the* way forward for devs building with React Native.
Polypane-demonium
Polypane purveyor Kilian Valkhof joins Nick & Jerod to tell us all about his efforts building a web browser just for web development. We cover it all: from the business concerns, to the technical details, to his _excellent_ choice not to use TypeScript! We even sneak in a feature request that already made its way into this excellent dev tool for ambitious web developers.
Should web development need a build step?
We’re back with another spicy YepNope debate! This time, Nick & regular guest Eric Clemmons are arguing that web development should need a build step, while KBall & special guest Amy Dutton argue that we really shouldn't. Of course, the stance each panelist is taking is assigned ahead of time. Is that how they really feel? Tune in to find out!
11ty goes fully independent
11ty creator Zach Leatherman is taking the open source site generator fully independent in 2024 and he's back on the pod to tell us why, how & what we all can do to help.
Big Gulps, huh?
Jerod & KBall discuss what's new in the world of web development: the State of HTML survey results, Node 22, React Compiler, React 19 Beta, vlt.sh & the Gulp (!) Developer Survey.
3D web game dev jam!
Two-time React Jammer, Brian Breiholz, joins Jerod & Nick to discuss building 3D games in the browser! We hear of his game jam trials & tribulations, the in-progress game engine he's building, the dream game he's been building for a long time & more
From Shoelace to Web Awesome
Shoelace creator Cory LaViska joins Amal & Jess to tell them all about the forward-thinking library of web components that just joined the Font Awesome family to create Web Awesome.
SSR web components for all
Brian LeRoux joins Jerod to share how the Enhance team are bringing server side rendered web components to everyone. With Enhance WASM, you author components in friendly, standards based syntax and reuse them across multiple languages, frameworks & servers.
A Solid primer on Signals
Ryan Carniato joins Amal & Nick to discuss Solid with a major focus on Signals, which are the cornerstone of reactivity in Solid.
The boring JavaScript stack
Kelvin Omereshone is here to get you excited about boring, reliable tech. He believes a combination of Sails, Inertia, Tailwind & your frontend rendering library of choice are a great combo for building web apps. Tune in to find out why.
Off to see the Wiz
How does Google build Search? What about YouTube and Google Drive? We rely on Chrome's Lighthouse scores when optimizing our websites, but what does _Google_ prioritize? Recently the Angular and Wiz teams announced their intention to responsibly merge their internal frontend framework, Wiz, with Angular to bring some of Wiz's best ideas to Angular. We're chatting with Minko from Angular and Jatin
13% of the time, Devin works every time
Jerod, KBall & Nick discuss the latest news: Devin, Astro DB, The JavaScript Registry, Tailwind 4 & Angular merging with Wiz. Oh, and a surprise mini-game of HeadLIES!
Advocating for the future of the open web
Alex & James Moore, founding members of the Open Web Advocacy (OWA), join Amal to talk about the critical work the OWA has been doing to ensure users have browser choice and that web apps can be first-class citizens on mobile devices. We learn about how an ad-hoc group of software engineers worked with regulators, legislators & policymakers to help drive some of the most impactful legislation curb
Getting a pulse on your Core Web Vitals 🩺
This week, Amal and Nick are joined by Rick Viscomi and Annie Sullivan from the Chrome team to dive into Core Web Vitals, a set of performance metrics geared towards helping developers surface web page quality signals that are key to delivering great user experiences.
We deconstruct the different vitals and learn how they are helpful, as well as introduce the newest vital to hit the scene, Inter
Take a look, it's in a book
Nick delves into the intricacies of technical book writing with authors Adrienne Braganza Tacke and Dylan Hildenbrand. We talk about the process of working with a publisher, coming up with an outline, actually writing the book, and everything that comes after the book is finished.
Who's that girl? It's Jess!
Apple kills EU web apps, Amazon launches a JS runtime optimized for serverless workloads & we play a game of 20 (15) questions to welcome Jessica Sachs to the party!
Angular moves fast without breaking things
KBall & Amal dive deep with the "Dazzle of Zebras" (possible future band name), Angular team members Jessica Janiuk & Mark "Techson" Thompson. Along with an absolute riot of puns, they cover topics such as Angular's new deferrable views feature, how the Angular core team handles change, and lessons learned from the AngularJS-Angular 2 debacle that allow Angular to now move fast without breaking th
React Server Components 🧐
The week Amal & guest co-host Eric Clemmons talk to Dan Abramov all about React Server Components. We learn about why they were created, what problems they solve & how they work to improve application performance. We also dive into the rollout and current support status, the origin story, the community response & walk through the 10+ years of React history which have forever shifted the world of w
Angular Signals
KBall & Amal interview Alex & Pavel from the Angular Signals team. They cover the history, how the Angular team decided to move to signals, what the new mental model looks like, migration path & even dive into community integrations and future roadmap.
From sales to engineering
Shaundai Person joins Jerod & Nick for a fascinating discussion of her transition from a sales position to Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. Along the way, we discuss sales as a superpower, how to build confidence in yourself & even sneak a little TypeScript talk in there because you know who...
A pre-party to a feud (Changelog++ 🔐)
Jerod, Adam Argyle & the CompressedFM crew hang out prior to their Fronted Feud battle! They discuss CSS as a programming language, Apple's walled garden, how nobody is on the same social media sites anymore, how to choose tech, the community's sentiment shift on GraphQL & a whole bunch more. (This episode is for Changelog++ ears only.)
Frontend Feud: CSS Podcast vs CompressedFM
Una & Adam from The CSS Podcast defend their Frontend Feud title against challengers James & Brad from CompressedFM. Let’s get it on!
htmx: a new old way to build the web
Carson Gross (creator of htmx) & Alex Russell (Mr. Web Platform 3000) join Amal for an EPIC discussion on web architectures, the evolution of rendering patterns & the advantages of hypermedia and htmx. We dive deep on why modern web app best practices are falling short & explore how htmx gives devs an HTML-first approach to use tech that’s over 20 years old.
Tune in to learn a new way to do somet
New Year's Party 🎊
It’s our 5th annual New Year’s party! Jerod & the gang review our predictions from last year, discuss what’s trending in the web world, make a few predictions for 2024 & even set some new resolutions for this year.
What's next in JavaScript (a TC39 update)
Daniel Ehrenberg (software engineer at Bloomberg, web standards author / champion & VP of ECMA International) joins us to discuss new features that have landed in JavaScript and to preview what's cooking in various standards bodies across the web platform.
We cover a wide array (get it?) of topics from improvements to built-ins such as Promises, Maps & Sets, as well as new primitives like Record
From WebGL to WebGPU
Gregg Tavares (author of WebGL/WebGPU Fundamentals) joins Jerod & Amal to give us a tour of these low-level technologies that are pushing the web forward into the world of video games, machine learning & other exciting rich applications.
Art of the state machine
Amal, Nick & special guest Laura Kalbeg geek out over the remarkable growth and evolution of the XState project and its team in recent years. Laura also tells everyone about Stately.ai, a SaaS platform that uses AI to create seamless state management solutions compatible with various tools like XState, Redux & zustand.
What's new in CSS land
Una Kravets, web platform ambassador & lead of the Google Chrome UI Developer Relations Team, joins Amal & Nick to take them CSS to school as they start this podcast in CSS kindergarten and end it with a Level-Up CSS Diploma. (LUCD?)
We explore all the amazing features which have recently landed in CSS — enabling super-charged user experiences with no JavaScript. Don’t forgot to check out all the
Building something new
Amal & Nick are joined by Saron Yitbarek (developer, podcaster, community leader & serial entrepreneur) to catch up and discuss her latest project: Not A Designer
We discuss all the ins & outs of tech entrepreneurship & the challenges of building something new in today’s saturated market. Tune in for a behind-the-scenes look at how she does it & get a sneak peek on what’s possibly next! (Spoiler
Best of the fest! Volume 2
JS Party listeners and panelists celebrate great moments from the last 100 episodes! You'll hear from 14 of our favorite humans (and 1 horse) across 11 episodes. Here's to our first 300 episodes and the next 300 as well. 🥂
Helping people enter, stay & thrive in tech
Valerie Phoenix from Tech By Choice joins Amal & Kball to tell them all about her non-profit that's passionate about helping people interested in technology, no matter their experience level.
I wanna React Jam it with you
The 2nd ever React Jam is on and poppin', so Jerod & Nick invited the previous winners to the pod to tell us all about the 10 day online game jam. Turns out React and video games are like peanut butter and jelly, after all!
Use Effect (not useEffect)
Prisma founder Johannes Schickling has been using the Effect library for the last couple years. Today he joins Jerod & Nick to tell us all about this very interesting tool for building robust apps in TypeScript.
Party on PartyKit
With a name like PartyKit, you know we just had to get its founder and CEO Sunil Pai on the show! PartyKit is an open source tool that simplifies creating collaborative, multiplayer applications. Join us to learn all about it and the journey of Sunil and his team!
Reflecting on Bun's big launch
Fresh off Bun's big 1.0 launch, Jarred Sumner goes one-on-one with Jerod to discuss the all-in-one JavaScript runtime that's captured the interest of many. We get into it all: what problem he's solving, how it's so fast, why no Windows support, answering the critics, the (not real) beef between Bun and Node, how the VC-backed startup will sustain & more.
Reports of Node's death are greatly exaggerated
Amal, KBall & Chris convene a "semi-emergency" pod to discuss the recent (deserved) hype over Bun and what it all means for Node's community, maintainers & users.
They're joined by Node Technical Steering Committee members Matteo Collina & James Snell who are here to dispel Bun antagonism rumors, discuss the pros & cons of each runtime, explain how Node continues to thrive & even announce a VERY
Web dev security school
This week, we're joined by Ron Perris, a Security Engineer at Reddit and software security enthusiast. Together, we dive into best practices and common pitfalls, covering topics from dangerous URLs to JSON injection attacks. Tune in for an educational conversation, and don’t forget to bring your notebooks!
Type War (what is it good for?)
Love it or hate it, TypeScript is here to stay for the foreseeable future. But, what happens when widely adopted packages go completely Type free or remove TypeScript in favor of JS with type annotations? Join us to unpack these recent events with Rich Harris, creator of Svelte, as he walks us through the nuanced decision his team made for the Svelte project, and ofc, lots of laughs along the way
A view to a transitions API
Jerod & the gang discuss the news (Astro 3.0, Vercel + Astro, Python in Excel) then play eight crazy rounds of HeadLIES! Headline or headLIE? You decide...
Modernizing packages to ESM
Mark Erikson (web dev professor/historian, OSS Maintainer & engineer at Replay) joins us to talk about the shift from CommonJS to ESM. We discuss the history of module patterns in JS and the grueling effort to push the world's biggest developer ecosystem forward. Get ready to go to school kids, this one's deep!
Ten years of TypeScript bliss
Nick celebrates a decade of writing everyone's favorite language with guest Josh Goldberg, who contributes to TypeScript, maintains typescript-eslint, and is an all-around great person! Jerod is also here to join the celebration, but let's keep that a secret from him!
Refined thinking
Jim (Hyphen) Nielsen joins Jerod & Nick for a fun conversation about language-level toll roads, when (and how) to quit, the stratification of social networking & the state of the world in publishing your thoughts on the internet.
Take me to Val Town
Val Town is a shiny, new social programming environment to write, run, deploy and share code. Steve Krouse –Val Town creator– joins Jerod & Amal to tell us all about it.
An intimate conversation about careers
KBall and Amal go deep on careers. They share their career journeys, talk through learnings and mishaps that happened along the way, and break down key factors to understand about big role transitions like "Senior->Staff" as well as "Engineer->Manager".
Frontend Feud: CSS Pod vs Whiskey Web and Whatnot
Una & Adam from The CSS Podcast defend their Frontend Feud title against challengers Chuck & Robbie from Whiskey Web and Whatnot. Let's get it on!
This is going to be Lit 🔥
Justin Fagnani joins us this week to talk about Lit, a library that helps you build web components. With 17% of pageviews in Chrome registering use of web components, Lit has gained widespread adoption across a variety of companies looking to create reusable components which leverage the power and interoperability of the web platform. Tune in to learn about what makes this tiny library so incredib
Fundamentals all the way down
Austin Gil returns to JS Party, bringing a fresh perspective on the fundamentals of file uploads. Brace for an insightful session as we navigate the complexities of this key JavaScript topic together, much like a dedicated coach drilling the fundamentals into his team!
The massive bug at the heart of npm
Darcy Clarke, former GitHub Staff Engineering Manager and founder of vlt, joins us to discuss a major bug in the npm ecosystem that he recently disclosed. We cover the bug's timeline, nuances, and impact, all while setting some important context on npm packages, clients, and registries. Tune in to learn how to protect your codebase and gain a deeper understanding of this crucial part of the JavaSc
Is print debugging good enough?
Let's debate debugging techniques! Do you print debug or dive deep into debugging tools? KBall & Jerod argue that print statements are all you need while Amal & guest Eric Clemmons take the other side. Who will win and why will it be Jerod? 😉
It's all part of the process
The panel dives into all of the supporting structures that we build around writing code, what works in different environments, and good and bad practices they have seen. From PR etiquette to CI/CD to how to write a ticket, they look at them from an open source perspective, an enterprise perspective, and everything in between.
Million ways to render
Million.js is a JavaScript library that helps render large datasets in the browser efficiently using a virtual DOM and custom diffing algorithm. Aiden and Tobi join Nick to talk about what it does, it's goals, and where it's going.
Digging through Nick Nisi’s tool box
KBall interviews Nick Nisi about the Pandora's box that is his tooling/developer setup. Starting at the lowest layer of the terminal emulator he uses, they move upwards into command line tools, into Tmux (terminals within terminals!), his epic NeoVim configuration, and finally into the tools he uses for notekeeping and productivity.
Exciting! Exciting? !Exciting
Nick is _excited_ to explain CVA to us like we're five (then again like we're 41).
KBall is _excited_ to share details of his new stack (for the new app he's building).
Jerod is _excited_ to share some recent news items (but he's the only one).
And finally, we're _all excited_ to debate TypeScript vs JSDoc comments!
The ORMazing show
Nick & KBall sit down with the brilliant Stephen Haberman to discuss all things ORMs! 💻🔍
From the advantages and disadvantages of ORMs in general, to delving into the intricacies of his innovative project Joist, which brings a fresh, idiomatic, ActiveRecord-esque approach to TypeScript. 🚀
So sit back, relax, and let’s dive deep into the world of ORMs with the experts!
Making web art the hard way
Developer slash artist Alex Miller joins Jerod & Amelia to discuss the challenge he faced after deciding to eschew fancy frameworks and libraries in favor of vanilla JS to build an interactive essay called Grid World for the html review.
SST and OpenNext
Dax Raad joins KBall and Nick to chat about SST, a framework that makes it easier to build full-stack applications on AWS. We chat about how the project got started and its goals. Then we discuss OpenNext, an open source, framework-agnostic server less adapter for Next.js.
CSS Color Party 🎉
Adam Argyle joins Amelia and Nick to catch them up on all the goings on within the world of CSS colors. There are a lot more options than you'd expect if you haven't been keeping up, and Adam's here to help you avoid the "gray dead zone"!
Making "safe npm"
Feross and his team at Socket recently shipped a wrapper library for the ubiquitous npm package manager's command-line interface that brings enhanced security when you need it most: _before executing any code_
Bradly Farias lead this effort, so Jerod & Chris invited him on the show to learn all about it.
