(Taylor's Version)

Issue #75.November 15, 2021.2 Minute read.
Bytes

This week we’ve got a new remix dropping, Cloudflare announcing everything, and a Guy Fieri charm bracelet for that special someone in your life. Welcome to #75.

The Iron Giant meme

Developers stanning a new framework they haven’t used yet.

Introducing Remix v1.0

If you’ve opened Twitter in the last 3 months, you’ve probably heard of Remix. It’s a brand new React framework that no one used because it cost money, but now it’s free, so that’s cool. They recently raised some VC cash, hired Kent Dodds (as a founder), and today — they’ve released v1.0.

Now I know what you’re thinking – Kent’s name looks funny if you take out the C. Oh, also, hype aside, WTF actually is Remix?

Remix is three things – “A compiler, a React meta framework, a general purpose web framework that can deploy anywhere, even worker environments like cloudflare”.

Here are some other things that make it cool -

  • Server-side rendering only — no static sites for you, but thanks to edge computing, it could be even faster than static, theoretically.

  • Platform-agnostic deployment — so you can deploy your app anywhere you want. Remix supports regular Node.js servers, serverless functions, Cloudflare workers, and eventually in-browser ServiceWorkers.

  • Progressive enhancement through built-in browser features. You can take advantage of features like <form> to maintain interactivity even if JavaScript hasn’t loaded yet. #useThePlatformLol

  • Per-page styling through actual <link> tags (What’s next? Using tables for layout?). You tell it what CSS needs to load on a page, and it swaps the files out as your user navigates, avoiding selector conflicts.

There’s also a growing ecosystem of packages for translations, authentication, and a bunch of other things.

Web infrastructure has gotten as fast as SSG with edge computing like Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, Fly.io, etc. You can make your server fast, but you can’t control the user’s network! Remix is designed for the edge, sending less over the network for a fast, fresh, modern UX without the spinner jank and complexity of SPAs. — Ryan Florence. Co-founder of Remix

Bottom Line: Time will tell if Remix becomes “the best way to build any web app”, but it definitely pushes the state of the art forward. I’m personally looking forward to watching Remix and Next.js directly compete with each other for users while simultaneously pretending that they’re not at all competing with each other for users.

Mufasa meme

Live footage of the new Cloudflare announcements

Highlights from Cloudflare’s Full Stack Week

In my family, Full Stack Week refers to that time my mom went out of town, and my dad spent 4 hours making a huge stack of pancakes to feed me and my siblings for the next 6 days. (Mom did come back… eventually.)

Cloudflare’s Full Stack Week was kind of like that too — except instead of pancakes there were approximately 612 new releases and announcements. We’ll break down some of the most interesting ones here, and let you check out the rest on your own.

Full Stack Cloudflare Pages are now a thing. It’s basically CF Workers + Pages, which means you can deploy your entire app with a single commit. It also means that CF Pages can now do pretty much everything that Netlify can.

Wrangler 2.0 is a new release for Cloudflare’s Wrangler CLI (no relation to the dad jeans with the Brett Favre commercials). This release makes it easier to get started with CF Workers (with just a single JavaScript file), easier to do live debugging, and easier to switch into local mode.

Socket Workers make it possible to use non-HTTP socket connections to and from CF Workers and Durable Objects (TCP, UDP, QUIC, etc). The big news here is that Cloudflare standardized a Socket primitive that works seamlessly across different JavaScript runtimes — including browsers, Node, Deno, and any other anagrams Ryan Dahl’s brain can dream up.

Services have replaced scripts as the “building blocks” for deploying apps on CF Workers. They’re composable (so they can talk to each other), and they’re able to support multiple environments — so you can test in a preview environment, then easily promote to production.

Bottom Line: $NET makes up over 50% of my public equities portfolio and you know now that I’m writing this out that seems like not a GREAT idea but also Stripe and Vercel are still private so like, i dunno. also this, lol

Jobs

Alan is looking for experienced fullstack engineers in France, Spain and Belgium

Alan is the first health insurer in France since 1986, and we’re aiming to build the healthcare super-app for 10M Europeans. Our 400+ strong team enjoys our values of distributed ownership, radical transparency and a flexible remote policy. We recently raised a Series D bringing the company’s total valuation to €1.4bn, and we were named the #1 best startup to work at in France by LinkedIn.

Cool Bits

  1. TypeScript 4.5 was released with new Promise improvements, lib overrides in node_modules, snippet completions, and lots more. Can’t wait to hear what my Grandpa thinks about this release when we discuss it over Thanksgiving dinner. (My grandpa is Bill Gates.)

  2. Okay, yeah it’s another guide — but this one’s really good. The Developer’s Guide to Core Web Vitals will teach you how your scores relate to your UX and share the best tools for optimizing your scores. [Sponsored]

  3. Svelte turns 5 years old this week and celebrated hard at last weekend’s Svelte Summit. I didn’t watch all of it, but I know that Rich Harris’s 10-minute talk was just as meaningful to Svelties as Taylor’s 10-minute version of “All Too Well” was to Swifties.

  4. Astro v0.21 was just released with a new compiler and a new build engine, because apparently all of these OSS authors were just sitting around in a Discord server last week and said, “screw it, let’s just all release new stuff at the same time.”

  5. Salem Hilal wrote about Etsy’s journey to TypeScript — so now you can feel extra (type) safe when using their web app to buy your significant other that handmade Guy Fieri charm bracelet for the holidays.

  6. Nanda Syahrasyad dove deep into the technical details of How Arrays actually work. You might think you know how, but you probably don’t.

  7. Julia Evans wrote about using esbuild. Spoiler alert: it’s very fast and she likes it (same as everyone).

  8. React 18 hit beta and introduced three new APIs — useSyncExternalStore, useId, and useInsertionEffect. The status of React 18’s general release is kind of like the relationship status of Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson — intentionally vague, occasionally frustrating, but with too much juicy drama to outright ignore.