Welcome to the 2nd annual OSScars

It’s mid march which means it’s time for the best tradition in sports – March Madness. For those of you nerds who like sports ball, we’ve put together a Bytes bracket challenge you can join. We’ll send the top 3 winners some (as of today very) exclusive Bytes merch.

As for today’s issue, it’s a special one. We’ve got React as the Christopher Nolan of JavaScript, lots of Doja Cat karaoke, and CSS trying to put my 10th-grade math teacher out of a job.

Welcome to #169.

The Main Thing

Miško stays winning

Welcome to the 2nd annual OSScars

You all looked amazing on the red carpet — and I’m honored to be standing before you to host this very real award show (that we made up) to recognize a few of the OSS projects we all know and (mostly) love.

Sadly, I don’t get paid as much as Jimmy Kimmel for hosting this gig — but lucky for you, I’m a lot less boring than he is. Let’s get started.

And the OSScar goes to…

Best Supporting Actor/Actress: Vite. This next-gen frontend toolkit is everywhere you look, and much like Zoe Saldana, it plays a key supporting role in lots of big-time projects. Vite helps power Astro, SvelteKit, Nuxt (Vue), Solid Start, Qwik City, and more. I guess that’s one reason its weekly npm downloads have exploded… growing 6x since last year’s OSScars 😱.

Best Cinematography: Astro. They just launched a cool new website, hype video, and AI assistant named Houston. So now, reading the new Astro docs basically feels like you’re living an IRL version of Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century. Cetus-Lupeedus!

Best Original Screenplay: Qwik. It’s a great story of a beloved OSS author (Misko Hevery) who walked away from his first creation (Angular) to help start a new project from scratch with a great team. Along the way, they’ve introduced us to a new rendering paradigm called resumability and written more technical content than your favorite O’Reilly author with an addy addiction.

Best Performance: Bun. The benchmarks speak for themselves here, but have you ever wondered why this next-gen runtime is so fast? Bun says it’s because of the “enormous amount of time” they spent profiling, benchmarking, and optimizing things in Zig — the low-level language with manual memory management that they wrote Bun in. Turns out, my yoga instructor was right: “You have to go slow if you want to go fast.” 🧘‍♀️

Best Drama: Remix.

*Generic orchestra music starts playing*

We’ll be right back with the rest of the 2nd annual OSScars after this quick word from our sponsor.

Our Friends
(With Benefits)

Telling my manager about the data grid I built.

Are KendoUI’s JS components worth paying for?

We’re all friends here. So we can admit that building certain UI components from scratch is a huge PITA.

And while open source is great, it can often turn into a performance and security nightmare with dozens of rando npm packages.

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Each library is fast, accessible, easy to customize, and written from the ground up for the most popular JS frameworks — like React, Angular, and Vue. So you get all the benefits of native components, without having to build them yourself.

But isn’t it lame to pay for JavaScript components that I could just build myself? Hey, I could probably make a Mexican Pizza myself, but I’d much rather pay the pros at Taco Bell to do it for me. It’s faster, and a lot less messy.

👉 Check out Kendo UI’s free trial to see for yourself.

The Job Board

	Senior or Staff Front-end Engineer
	100% Remote React
	Close.com is looking for an experienced React developer to help design and implement major user-facing features. Close is a 100% globally distributed team of 70 happy people, dedicated to building a product our customers love.

The Main Thing

MFW I worship at the Church of Tanstack

The 2nd annual OSScars - Part Deux

Best Director: Tanner Linsley. He’s the fearless leader of the team behind TanStack Query (FKA React Query), TanStack Table, and TanStack Router, and they have another 5-7 libraries currently in the works. Like any great auteur, he’s definitely got a signature style — but instead of a Wes Anderson color palette or an M. Night Shyamalan twist ending, he just…makes something better and adds type safety. Don’t question his genius, people.

Best Breakthrough Performance: Zod. Against all odds, I’ve never seen a TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library capture the hearts and minds of so many developers. The future is TypeSafe, and Zod is making that future a reality.

Best Costume Design: Next.js. You’ve got to respect how they put their own original spin on the classic Mean Girls aesthetic. Instead of just saying, “On Wednesdays we wear pink,” they took it to the next level by saying, “Every day we wear black.” Love to see that team unity.

Christopher Nolan Lifetime Achievement Award: React. Like Nolan, no one has captured the imagination of their audience over the last decade quite like React. Also like Nolan, no one in recent years has left their audience wondering if they’re just too dumb to understand what’s going.

Bottom Line: Thanks for coming out tonight, and please come out for the after party. Pit Bull will be performing first, and the Vue core team will be headlining by singing karaoke versions of every song in Doja Cat’s discography.

The Tip

Sponsored by Brilliant

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You can remove all “falsy” values from an Array by filtering for Boolean.

const friends = [
  'Ben',
  null,
  'Alex',
  undefined,
  'Lynn',
  undefined,
]

const filteredFriends = friends.filter(Boolean)
filteredFriends // ["Ben", "Alex", "Lynn"]

Cool Bits

1. Julia Evans wrote this article about Some possible reasons for 8-bit bytes. I don’t think she was writing about us, but we decided to give her her own bit in Bytes anyway.

2. Bo Ingram wrote about How Discord stores trillions of messages… and I’m sure a few thousand feet pictures.

3. CarbonQA provides QA services for dev teams, so you’ll never have to do it yourself again. They work in your tools, talk with your team on Slack, and let your devs be devs — so you never have to waste engineering time on testing again 🙏. [sponsored]

4. Million.js just released v2.0 of its low level virtual DOM library with optimization utilities to make rendering faster.

5. Simon Holthausen wrote about how SvelteKit now provides Zero-effort type safety. You had me at “zero-effort.”, Simon.

6. In Were React Hooks a Mistake?, Jake Lazaroff dares to ask if we should’ve just stuck with class components all along. Trigger warning: He mentions “signals” 28 times.

7. In All JavaScript and TypeScript Features of the last 3 years, Linus breaks down the macro-economic trends that lead to the collapse of SVB and what the FED’s decision ultimately means going forward – oh wait, no sorry he walks through all JavaScript and TypeScript features of the last 3 years.

8. It’s now possible to do Trigonometric functions in CSS, like calculating sine, cosine, and tangent. Maybe my 8th grade trig teacher was right along, I will use this at work.