![]() We hope everyone who entered the great TicketMaster Today, we’ve got user testing with method actors, unfettered slurping, and Upton Sinclair. Welcome to #137 – if you’d like to share this issue, here’s the web link. ![]() The Main Thing![]() Shoutout to our thicc king Gatsby 5 is down with the thicknessGreatness is about playing to your strengths. That’s why Netflix has produced dozens of And with last week’s Gatsby 5 release, it’s clear that Gatsby is doubling down on its own area of expertise — thicc sites. That’s our cute nickname for content-heavy sites with thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of pages that need to prioritize performance and flexibility over just about everything else. Let’s dive in to what that looks like in Gatsby 5:
Bottom line: Gatsby is still a great option for other types of projects besides thicc sites. But given Next’s general dominance of the React metaframework landscape, it’s a smart business move for Gatsby to focus on serving this relatively large (but underserved) niche.
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Learn how you can set up multi-tenant dashboards based on login info with Auth0 in this blog post. (It doesn’t have to be hard).
The auth battles are heating up – data by npmtrends.com
If you’ve got users, you probably need auth. The big question is, do you want to do it yourself or outsource it to “the experts”?
Personally, I usually like to let the neck beards highly skilled engineers at some other company do what they do best — but some developers love the rush that comes with doing it yourself. So which one should you choose? Based on the trends, they both seem equally popular (Passport.js vs the field), so it really depends on what you value most. Let’s zoom in.
Control & Flexibility: If you want control and flexibility over everything, passport.js
is the obvious choice. It’s the OG Node auth solution with 500 “strategies” worth of flexibility. (And if that’s still not enough, you can roll your own.)
Bundle Size: If you are using a hosted Auth solution, a lot of the work is done on the client, and client auth libraries are notoriously large. Ranking for bundle size, the new Auth0 SDK is the slimmest (13kb), Amplify is the largest at 62kb, and Firebase sits in the middle at 33kb.
Cost: The cost for the hosted providers is almost the inverse of the bundle sizes. Firebase and AWS have free tiers that go up to 50k monthly active users, Auth0’s free tier stops at 7k, and of course Passport is “free” (as long as you don’t value your time or sanity at all).
Passport and Firebase are clearly the dominant players in their respective categories, but the buy vs. build debate still rages on in auth-land.
Cloudflare just released something called the R2 Super Slurper. I don’t know what it is or what it does, but wow do I need it.
The New Relic team wrote about How to build your own synthetic user testing, so that you can simulate the random, unexpected behaviors of your users. It’s a much better approach than what my old company used to do — have every developer take a 12-week method acting course and then test the website in full character. [sponsored]
After a two-year rewrite, the first stable version of Nuxt 3 was finally just released. Even George R.R. Martin is impressed they had enough patience to spend that long on a rewrite.
PlanetScale just released PlanetScale Boost, which claims to “improve the performance and throughput of your application’s SQL queries by up to 1,000x.” Ok cool, but does it slurp tho?
James Sinclair wrote an article called, What’s so great about functional programming anyway? James has been writing a lot of good stuff lately, which leads me to believe that his real name is actually Upton Sinclair — and instead of dying in the late ’60s, he actually just started teaching himself how to code. Classic Upton plot twist.
Deno 1.28 just shipped with stabilized npm compatibility, which means you can now import over 1.3 million npm modules. Chalk that up as yet another win for pragmatism over idealism.
Vadim Makeev wrote about Conditionally Adaptive CSS. But since I didn’t take AP Spanish in high school, I never learned how to conjugate verbs in the conditionally adaptive tense. Knew it would come back to bite me one day.
TypeScript 4.9 is out with a new satisfies
operator, more efficient file watching, and more. You know what I think will pair nicely with the new satisfies
operator? You guessed it, the R2 Super Slurper.