Monthly-ish learnings and discoveries related to frontend, the web, and software engineering in general.

Curated by me, Andreas 👋 mostly for myself and my dear coworkers at DigitalService.

🌞 July 2025

• I’ve heard many good things about JSNation 2025. Recordings of their talks are now available online. My recommendations:

  • Frontend’s lost decade and the performance inequality gap by Alex Russel: a look at the impact of nowadays’ development practices on users, and how to build performant and resilient websites.
  • Vite and the Future of JavaScript Tooling by Evan You: a first look at Vite+, the Vite team’s attempt at building a Go-style all-in-one toolchain for JavaScript, including building, testing, linting, and formatting. Very excited about this!
  • The New Defaults of the Modern Web by Jeremias Menichelli: reviewing defaults and best practices when starting new web projects today.

• Besides the talk he gave at JSNation, Alex Russel also attended React Summit, and reflects about the differences on his blog:

Near as I can tell, the schedule of React Summit mirrors the content of other recent and pending React conferences in that these are not engineering conferences; they are marketing events. […] Conferences crystallise consensus about which problems matter, and React Summit succeeded in projecting a clear perspective—namely that it’s time to party like it’s 2013.

• Vapor Mode, a Svelte-like compiler for Vue components that promises dramatically improved performance, has been merged into Vue core and should land as a preview with the next release.

• Nuxt is joining Vercel. Part of me is slightly nervous about Vercel “owning” so many frameworks (Next, Nuxt, Svelte). But for the Nuxt team it’s a good chance to secure funding, Nuxt UI will be available for free, and Svelte seems to be doing just fine. So I’m cautiously optimistic 🤞

• The CookieStore API, a more modern and ergonomic API for handling cookies, is now available in all browsers.

• JavaScript now natively supports importing JSON as modules. If you’re wondering about the funky syntax, those are called import attributes (and there are more to come).

• CSS is getting an if() function. While I can see how this might be useful, I’m not sold on the syntax. It looks kinda messy, especially if you have more than one rule in a class using it. Early days for now, but this will be coming to all browsers eventually.

• Experimenting with no-build Web Applications as a reminder that the plethora of tools we use in web development are there to solve specific issues, and not actually required. Always a good idea to be conscious about which dependencies we bring into our projects and why.

• Syntax discussing the different browsers and rendering engines that we have in 2025.

• Need a quick favicon?

• HTTP Cats 😻

Notable releases:

• Nuxt 4.0, Vue’s meta-framework, with various stability- and quality-of-life-related updates. Appreciate their approach to releases: “In general, we aim for a hype-free approach to releases.”

• Prettier 3.6, coming with a new, experimental CLI that promises to be much faster.

• Oxlint 1.0, a fast and easy to use linter from the Vite team. Keeping a close eye on this one because it seems to be the best candidate for replacing ESLint eventually 👀

• Vite 7.0, again with performance and stability improvements, as well as changing the default browser target to Baseline Widely Available. Is browserslist still a thing at this point?

• Git 2.50—can’t say I really understand all of the updates here, but merging now uses a different algorithm that is a lot faster, so I’ll take it.

• Deno 2.4, bringing back bundling for frontend and backend code.

• Edit, “a simple text editor for simple needs”, e.g. when you need to edit stuff in the terminal but can’t be bothered with Vim.

Previous editions

• 🏝️ June 2025: AI skepticism, Safari 26, Remix waking up
• 🌳 May 2025: Dotfiles, new JavaScript APIs, Generators
• 🐰 April 2025: State of Vue, visual effects in CSS, Temporal API
• 🪻 March 2025: Interop, customizable select, vanilla JS date formatting
• 🤧 February 2025: Java without IntelliJ, CLI tools
• ☃️ January 2025: Complexity, State of JS, Vue 3.6 sneak-peek

Find all previous editions in the archive.