Milestones can feel arbitrary, but saying something is arbitrary doesn’t make it not simultaneously meaningful. 100 issues and 4 years of this newsletter is definitely meaningful to me. I will admit that, at times over those 4 yers when I am feeling stressed and overburdened, I’d thought of walking away from this task as it consumes a lot of effort and time. But I enjoy the opportunity to learn from all the people whose articles are featured and the opportunity to connect with you all to share some of my excitement about building for the web. I hope this newsletter has and continues to be useful to you.
– Brian
What’s Good
The State of Jamstack: Developers Want Return to Simplicity
The conversations started by Mike Neumegen on The Future of Jamstack have generated a lot of discussion. In this post, a variety of developers reflect on how the Jamstack became muddled and complex. A follow up discussion led to calls for an ‘anti-capitalistic Jamstack’. What does this mean? As Cassidy Williams stated, “I think we pulled in a whole lot of things [into the Jamstack definition]…for the shareholders”. Salma Alam Naylor, also a panel participant and former Netlify employee, recounted her experiences as well.
Jeff James
Sponsor
Faster data access: Distributed Postgres + Cloudflare Workers
Achieve unmatched performance in Cloudflare Worker applications: benefit from high availability and low latency data access using pgEdge distributed PostgreSQL. Check out the open source Northwind Traders example application to see it in action.
Is Hosting on Netlify Going to Bankrupt you?
While this was a hot topic this week, I debated whether or not to cover this, not out of favoritism, but because a proper discussion of this issue takes a lot more nuance than this format allows. That nuance is arguably missing from this post but it does cover the details of a controversy that involved a Netlify customer being sent a six-figure bill caused by overages potentially triggered by a DDoS attack. Netlify ultimately waived the bill, admitting that it wasn’t handled well and that they are examining their practices. Matt Biilmann posted his response here. Theo, who admits his bias towards Vercel, does cover a lot of the complexities involved and how many providers have made (and learn) from similar mistakes.
Baldo
HTMX vs React: A Complete Comparison
HTMX is another one of the newer web frameworks that take a completely different approach than the traditional SPA framework like React, by extending HTML with data attributes for data-fetching.
Antonello Zanini & Dan Ackerson
Tools, Resources & More
RedwoodJS v7.0.0 includes Redwood Studio, a new observability tool that includes OpenTelemetry and SQL monitoring as well as other analytics to monitor the functioning of your application.
HonoX is a new alpha-stage, full-stack meta-framework based upon the new Hono framework that includes file-based routing, SSR, islands and middleware support.
Eleventy achieved a milestone by crossing eight million npm downloads. Congrats Zach!
Tidbits
Elevating Video Transcripts as Searchable Content
Zach explains how he enabled video transcripts to be searchable using PageFind and Eleventy.
Zach Leatherman
Adding a Guestbook to Your Jamstack Site (Yes, Seriously)
Ray walks through how he built a guestbook for his Eleventy site backed by a Google Sheet and Pipedream.
Raymond Camden
Netlify’s Approach to the Frontend According to Its New CTO
Dana Lawson, former VP of engineering at GitHub and new Netlify CTO, discusses her views on Netlify’s approach to building tools and services for frontend development.
Loraine Lawson
What Is A Single-page Application?
This is fun little rant that critiques the experience of many modern single-page applications.
Heydon Pickering