Angular life goals

Today’s issue: Feeling empathy for your build system, making this less annoying, and having a waffle party with Lightning CSS.

Welcome to #360.

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Angular life goals

My two big goals for 2025 are to drink more almond milk and to beat my 14-year-old nephew in ping pong.

I wanted to share that here for accountability and also because the Angular team just shared their own two big goals for 2025:

1. Continue to improve Angular’s DX
2. Enable adoption of the latest Angular improvements

And those aren’t just empty platitudes (even though they kinda sound like empty platitudes). The Angular team actually surveyed 10,000 developers at the end of 2024 to get some specific feedback from the community on how they could achieve those goals in 2025.

Here’s what they came back with:

• Signal forms – The Ng team is aware of your constant whining constructive criticism about forms. So they’re currently prototyping signal-based forms, which will provide missing features, plus better type safety, scalability, and unification.

• Promoting “Zoneless” to developer preview – Angular has historically relied on Zone.js to detect when application state might have changed. But this new Zoneless approach enables more efficient change detection, better interoperability, and improved initial load performance.

• Selector-less components RFC – The team is working on a community-driven effort to simplify dependency management in Angular components. To do this, they’ll run an RFC for selector-less components and prototype a solution. This should resolve the “double imports” problem and improve the overall DX when creating new Angular components.

Bottom Line: We’ve written a lot about the Angular Renaissance over the past couple years, but it turns out that the secret to Angular’s turnaround has been the team’s willingness to get feedback from the community, build the things they ask for, and release them on a consistent schedule.

That, and drinking lots of almond milk from the Google cafeteria.

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1. A few cybersecurity academics published a paper called Cascading Spy Sheets about how bad guys can “exploit the complexity of modern CSS for email and browser fingerprinting.” I knew I had a good reason for refusing to learn modern CSS.

2. Vitest 3.0 comes with new reporter updates, inline workspace, and a redesigned public API.

3. Dave Rupert wrote about How to make “this” less annoying. And by “this” he means the this keyword, not “Twitter during Inauguration Day.” 🥲

4. The Oso engineering team is hosting a live technical session on Fine-grained authorization in Python. They’ll be teaching how to write dynamic policies that enable your app to support features like scoped permissions and hierarchical resources – plus a live demo on refactoring an app from hardcoded permissions to debuggable authorization. [sponsored]

5. Adam Argyle wrote about 6 CSS snippets every front-end developer should know in 2025. And why is that, Adam? So I can expose all my personal data to the dark web??

6. Dr Axel wrote about use cases and alternatives for TypeScript enums.

7. Running Postgres in production? Use Neon to instantly create Development/Preview/Test databases that shut down when unused. Work with realistic data and ship features with confidence. Learn more. [sponsored]

8. Gengkun (an Rspack maintainer) wrote about bundlers from the perspective of build systems – because it’s about time you learned a little empathy.

9. Tiger Abrodi wrote this guide to becoming an expert in React Query.

10. The newest Bolt update now allows you to open Bolt in a separate tab, so you can use it with a dual-screen setup, better preview your app, and use devtools more easily. [sponsored]

11. Martijn Hols wrote about accessibility essentials for front-end developers. Because the more you know, the more you can shame others for not knowing. Oh, and your apps will be more accessible too, which is good.

12. Lightning CSS v1.29 implements view transitions level 2. Only 6 more levels until it gets a waffle party.