Barbie Edition

Today’s issue: What do TypeScript and Al Gore have in common, Netlify’s newest trademark, and the best recorder solo you’ve ever heard in your life.

Welcome to #207. If the #barbie theme this week is too much, you can read the online version here.

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Framework Barbie, let’s go party

Welcome to Framework Barbie Land, where all your favorite JavaScript frameworks are different Barbies and the atomic bomb was never invented.

FBL is a magical place with 100% positive vibes. In here, none of the framework Barbies ever subtweet each other, care about who invented what, and they’d never even dream of calling each other out because of one contrived performance benchmark.

So in that spirit, allow me to introduce you to each of our uniquely-talented-and-equally-loved framework Barbies:

Malibu Barbie — React. It wasn’t the first Barbie/framework, but it’s probably the first one that comes to mind for most people. Sure, they both might be a little problematic for perpetuating unrealistic body images/bundle sizes, but they’re popular for a reason. And since they both continue to reinvent themselves, you know they’re not going away anytime soon. (And yes, this does mean that Next.js is Ken.)

Darwinian Barbie — Angular. “Adapt and survive” has been this framework Barbie’s motto since the Angular.js days, and it hasn’t stopped evolving since. Its most recent major release introduced some major SSR upgrades and made it the first major framework to introduce a signals library for fine-grained reactivity. It’ll adapt and thrive for years to come.

Hipster Barbie — Svelte. This framework Barbie is cool and hip, kind of like a British person with great hair who lives in Brooklyn 😉. It’s not as mainstream as some of the others on this list (yet), but it’s always ahead of the curve with new ideas about creating incredibly concise components, not using the virtual DOM, and incorporating some cool interactive elements into their documentation.

Independent Barbie — Vue. Unlike all the other framework Barbies on this list, Vue is the only one that isn’t currently backed by a multi-billion dollar tech company (depending on what you value Vercel at these days). It’s been almost a full decade since Vue’s first release, and during that time it’s managed to consistently grow its market share, ship powerful new features, and build a passionate community — all while remaining fully independent and financially viable 👑.

Bottom Line: After reading this you might be wondering — Was this whole story basically a glorified BuzzFeed quiz and did Bytes somehow score a strange-but-lucrative crossover brand deal with Warner Bros. and Mattel? Also, am I in the middle of a fever dream?

No, at least we don’t think so.

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Have a job you want to fill?

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What will be logged to the console when this code executes? The answer is below.

window.name = "Mike Tyson";

const me = {
  name: "Tyler",
  sayName() {
    console.log(this.name);
  },
};

const sayName = me.sayName;
sayName();

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1. A few quick releases: Bun 0.7 gets Vite support ⚡️, Remix 1.19 gets better networking options in the dev server, and Astro 2.9 gets experimental support for view transitions.

2. Zero created an easy way to integrate 3rd-party API credentials into your project. Their SDK is available for TypeScript, Rust, Python, and Go. [sponsored]

3. Yusuke Wada wrote about how Hono + htmx + Cloudflare is a new stack. So that must be why Netlify just filed a trademark for HonotmxFlareStack Conf™️.

4. Anders Hejlsberg and his team of fellow TypeLords just released TypeChat — a new project that uses the type definitions in your codebase to retrieve structured AI responses that are type-safe, with the goal of using AI to make a bridge between natural language and application schema and APIs.

5. Stefan Baumgartner wrote an article called 5 Inconvenient Truths about TypeScript. That’s 4 more inconvenient truths than Al Gore has 🤯.

6. We built and recently released useHooks, a collection of modern, server-safe React hooks.

7. TurnKey just launched Dev’s Got (Extra)Talent! — the first global talent competition for developers to showcase their skills beyond coding. The winner will be crowned “World’s Most Extra Talented Developer” and receive a tasty grand prize of $5,000. Register here before August 31st, and good luck trying to beat my talent of playing a perfect Wonderwall cover on the recorder. [sponsored]

8. LangChain just released LangSmith — which one developer described as “Postman for LLM calls” because it’s a single platform for testing, debugging, and monitoring LLM applications. But honestly, what could possibly go wrong if we fail to test and monitor AI apps?

9. Addy Osmani wrote about why you should Stick to boring architecture for as long as possible. Ok, so maybe hold off on using HonotmxFlareStack in prod for now. (Sorry Netlify.)

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What will be logged to the console when this code executes?

window.name = "Mike Tyson";

const me = {
  name: "Tyler",
  sayName() {
    console.log(this.name);
  },
};

const sayName = me.sayName;
sayName();

The answer? “Mike Tyson”.

Since we’re not in strict mode, sayName isn’t a method, and we’re not using call or apply, this inside of sayName will default to the window object.