There seems to be a growing desire to find ways to reduce the growing complexity of web development, but simplicity, it turns out, is a complex problem. What defines simplicity? Early Jamstack, as Matt Biilmann points out in his talk, definitely embodied it. By solving the build and deployment complexity, creating early Jamstack sites became simple, but, by and large, the nature of the sites we built weren’t complex.
Can we build more complex sites without making them increasingly complicated to develop? That’s part of the promise of tools like Remix, Astro and a range of newer frameworks and it seems to be driving adoption. Will they retain that sense of simplicity as they evolve to meet the needs of new users? We’ll see.
– Brian
What’s Good
Keep It Simple, Frameworks: Netlify CEO Praises Astro, Remix
This is a good review of Matt Biilmann’s keynote at TheJam.dev, which laid out his view of how Jamstack evolved, gaining a lot of complexity, since his initial introduction of the concept and how he sees the future of it. If you’d like to watch Matt’s keynote, it’s posted to YouTube. It’s also worth checking out this alternative point of view from Bryan Robinson.
Richard MacManus
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Removing React is just weakness leaving your codebase
There have been quite a few posts bemoaning the current state of React lately (as Simon points out). Simon’s post is a good overview of some of the concerns about React and why you might consider an alternative.
Simon MacDonald
Remix Takes on Next.js in Battle of the React Frameworks
Based on an interview with Michael Jackson, one of the creators of both Remix and React Router, this is a look at why Remix was created, how it differs from Next and how it’s being used at Shopify (which bought it in 2022).
Richard MacManus
Tools, Resources & More
Nuemark is a Markdown-based text editing format for rich internet content (think MDX-like components expressed as Markdown). The standalone library works with Bun, Node, and Deno.
Zach Leatherman, Eleventy’s creator, recently announced an upcoming virtual conference called 11ty International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real Good in May. Details are forthcoming but I love the name already!
Astro 4.3 adds experimental support for specifying different domains/subdomains for different supported locales along with other improvements.
Deno v.1.40 adds the Temporal API for advanced date and time operations, as well as the latest decorator syntax.
Nuxt 3.1 adds experimental shared asyncData when prerendering, meaning useAsyncData and useFetch calls will be deduplicated and cached between renders.
Lene Saile has released a 2.0 version of her Eleventy starter called Eleventy Excellent.
Sensitive environment variables are encrypted secrets (environment variables) that can only be decrypted during builds. They are replacing Vercel’s legacy secrets.
Tidbits
Why I Migrated My Newsletter From Substack to Eleventy and Buttondown
A lot of content creators have been moving off of Substack due to the company’s stance on hate content. Richard built his alternative with Eleventy for the web site and Buttondown for email.
Richard MacManus
The Good, The Bad, The Web Components
A detailed exploration on what web components are, why they are important and different tooling/framework options for using them in your projects.
Zach Leatherman
Take a Qwik Break from React with Astro
Exploring the Qwik framework and how it differs from React using it within an Astro app.
Paul Scanlon
How To Containerize Your Docusaurus (And Why You Should)
A walkthrough on building the proper Docker container for hosting a Docusaurus documentation project.
Natalie Lunbeck
Migrating to Astro: The Beginning
A three part series documenting the steps Ray’s move from Next.js to Astro for his blog.
Ray Gesualdo