Welcome to the 4th annual OSScars

Today’s issue: JavaScript celebrity culture, extreme TypeScript, and a fun-and-easy way to get on the NSA’s watch list.

Welcome to #372.

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The OSScars, Part 1

Welcome to the 4th annual OSScars, where we hand out very real awards (that we made up) to some of the biggest stars in JavaScript.

I’m honored to be your host again this year, and I want you to know that I’m wearing my cleanest tuxedo t-shirt for this occasion. But unlike Conan O’Brien, my skin hasn’t quite become fully translucent yet – despite following his patented diet of Funyuns and unicorn blood.

Without further ado, let’s meet our OSScar winners.

Best Supporting Actor/Actress: Expo. After years of supporting React Native, Expo has now teamed up with AI platforms like Replit and Bolt to allow developers (and normies) to build and ship mobile apps “without writing any code” – or at least a lot less code. Hopefully this will usher in another App Store golden age, because I’ve really been missing Lightsaber Unleashed and Doodle Jump.

Best Drama: Vercel. They’re a major character in the AI drama, React core team drama, hosting/serverless drama, and the framework war drama. It sounds a little exhausting to be the main character all the time like that – but I guess that’s why Vercel was just valued at $3.5 billion, while I’m hosting a newsletter-based parody awards show. We all have our strengths.

Best Costume Design: shadcn/ui: This is the second year in a row shadcn has won this award, but it’s blasphemous to choose anyone else for this honor. Not only did it add a bunch of amazing new components in 2024, it also added another 38,000 GitHub stars – the most of any project in the JavaScript ecosystem.

Best Cinematography: Bun. TIL that cinematography is a fancy word for “making creative technical decisions to tell a story,” and Bun does that better than anyone. They’ve managed to get developers irrationally excited about a new JS runtime by writing it Zig, adding a bunch of built-in APIs and tooling, making it all blazing fast, and shipping like crazy. Plus, all their launch videos are pure cinema to me.

*Generic orchestra music plays in the background*

We’ll be right back with the rest of the OSScar winners after a quick word from our sponsor.

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The OSScars, Part 2

Best Original Screenplay: StackBlitz. 6 months ago, StackBlitz looked dead. They had spent years developing WebContainers to allow you to run Node.js apps in the browser, but they were struggling to find a killer use case for it. And then they launched Bolt, and everything changed. They hit $20m in ARR in two months, raised another $80m from investors at a $700m valuation, and landed on the front page of the NY Times last week.

Best Breakthrough Performance: Zustand. The “bare bones” state management lib has come out of nowhere to become a go-too tool for both React and React Native apps. Its npm downloads are up over 4x in the past 2 years, and React devs are flocking to it because it’s small, fast, and scalable – without being too opinionated or boilerplatey.

Best Director: The Interop Project Being a great director requires you to carefully manage the egos and agendas of a bunch of different stakeholders – which feels like the perfect metaphor for trying to get all the different browser vendors to cooperate. Interop has done a better job than anyone dreamed possible.

Lifetime Achievement Award: Node.js. Many of us had given up on Node in the last few years – including its biological father, Ryan Dahl. But 2024 was a huge year for Node.js as it added initial TypeScript support, require() support, a new task runner to execute package.json scripts, and more. The JS runtime wars are starting to heat up, but it’s clear that Node will not go quietly into that good night.

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Did you know that Chrome DevTools has some magical shortcuts powered by the $? Here are some of the most useful ones:

$() - is an alias for document.querySelector(). It allows you to select the first element that matches a given CSS selector. For example, $('div') would return the first div element on the page.

$$() - is an alias for document.querySelectorAll(). It returns an array of all elements that match a given CSS selector. For example, $$('div') would return all div elements on the page.

$0, $1, $2, ... $n - are references to the elements you have recently selected in the Elements panel. $0 represents the most recently selected element, $1 represents the second most recent, and so on.

$_ - represents the value of the most recently evaluated expression in the console.

$x() - allows you to query the DOM using XPath expressions. For example, $x("//div") would return all div elements on the page.

C.R.E.A.M. - Wycliff Jean 🤝 Chrome DevTools

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1. TanStack Form v1 comes with “extreme type safety,” schema and async validation, and a VIP invite to next year’s OSScars (black tie optional).

2. TypeScript 5.8 is out with better checks on return expressions, support for require() of ESM in --module nodenext, and other updates to make your code objectively better but also a little less spicy.

3. Speakeasy now lets you generate TypeScript SDKs with a runnable MCP server – so you can expose your APIs to AI agents. MCP is a very cool open-source protocol from Anthropic that allows LLMs to visit websites, read files from your machine, and lots more. Read more about it. [sponsored]

4. Anthony Fu wrote about async, sync, and in between. Because sometimes you’re on the spectrum without even knowing it.

5. Leerob wrote a big guide to building APIs with Next.js.

6. Stephen wrote about extreme server side rendering, which could help you get invited to either the JavaScript X Games or an NSA watchlist. Both fun.

7. Datadog created this RUM product brief that walks you through how to identify and resolve high-impact errors and get a high-level view of your entire application’s health. [sponsored]

8. Dr Axel wrote What is TypeScript? An overview for JavaScript programmers. Because the first step is acceptance.

9. Jacob Clausen wrote about how to build custom tabs with Expo Router UI.

10. Adam Argyle wrote about creating CSS Kaleidoscopes, which TIL is the most difficult word to spell in the English language.