tRPC rhymes with tipsy

Today’s issue: Biome v2 steals our trade secrets, React Native turns 10, and a disturbing truth about Next.js that nobody saw coming.

Welcome to #379.

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tRPC rhymes with tipsy

Much like J-Kwon from 2004-2006, tRPC has been on a generational run lately.

Since their last major release in Nov 2022, they’ve grown their weekly npm downloads 8.5x, hit 35k GitHub stars, and firmly replaced GraphQL as the type nerd’s Backend of Choice™️ (like we predicted 🤫). And with last week’s tRPC v11 launch, it’s clear that they’re not slowing down any time soon.

This release doesn’t introduce many breaking changes, but it does pack some powerful new features that should prime the project for its next phase of growth.

Here are the highlights:

• Support for non-JSON content types – You can now easily send and receive data in a variety of non-JSON content types, including FormData and binary types like Blob, File, and Uint8Array.

• New TanStack React Query integration – They removed a confusing layer of abstraction and created a simpler way of working with RQ that’s more “TanStack Query-native.”

• New terminating link, httpBatchStreamLink – allows you to stream responses from queries, which is helpful when working with large datasets.

• Server-Sent Events – A new and simplified way to handle subscriptions and real-time updates in your app without needing to mess with WebSockets.

Bottom Line: tRPC is growing up right before our eyes, and choosing to double down on simplicity and backwards-compatibility in its first major release in 2.5 years is another sign of maturity from a project that already has one of the highest approval ratings in JavaScript TypeScript Land.

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1. The Biome v2.0 beta comes with their first iteration of linter plugins, which sounds suspiciously similar to the name of my WIP men’s toupee line, Linter Plugs.

2. The Next.js team wrote a postmortem on the middleware bypass, which included a disturbingly low number of snarky comments directed at Cloudflare executives.

3. Clerk just released an experimental @clerk/agent-toolkit package that helps you build powerful agentic systems with support for managing users, user data, orgs, and more. [sponsored]

4. Lars Wikman and José Valim wrote about Coordinating the Super Bowl’s visual fidelity with Elixir.

5. The State of Vue 2025 report just dropped.

6. Lazar Nikolov created this hands-on debugging session, where you build, break, and fix a Next.js app with Sentry in under an hour. [sponsored]

7. A principal engineer at Netlify wrote about what you should know before choosing Next.js, and apparently it’s controlled by a for-profit company? Wild.

8. Julik wrote about a tiny undo stack.

9. CarbonQA provides high-quality QA services that scale. Their US-based testers will break your app repeatedly, and do all the manual testing your engineers hate doing. [sponsored]

10. Jamon Holmgren wrote a celebratory blog post about React Native turning 10 years old, which is more than I can say my dad did for me when I turned 10.

11. Tim Severien wrote a data-driven article on the state of the front-end and full-stack job market. If hating React is 90% of your personality, you’re gonna want to skip this one.

12. CSS Mixins are a new platform feature that just landed in Chrome Canary, and my second favorite fro-yo topping.