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

• The 2026 ECMAScript specification—the standard behind JavaScript—has been approved. Here’s what’s new, including more reliable Error detection, an upsert method for maps, and improvements to JSON serialization of non-primitive values.

• The field-sizing CSS property is now Baseline Newly Available, allowing form elements to resize automatically based on their value.

• Josh Comeau wrote an in-depth, interactive guide to anchor positioning, including strategies for supporting older browsers.

• As someone who has a working knowledge of Docker but is by no means an expert, these five Docker best practices that are actually wrong held a few surprises for me and helped me make better sense of how we use Docker in our projects.

• The shifting line between CSS states and JavaScript events: CSS keeps gaining pseudo-classes that react to user interaction without JavaScript, and a proposed event-trigger feature would bring event listening into CSS itself.

• Bun has, to much controversy, been rewritten in Rust. Jarred Sumner, author of Bun, follows up with an explainer of why and how they did it. Claude Code apparently now ships with the Rust version of Bun. Time will tell how it works out, but in the meantime, it’s a good case study of a large-scale AI refactor.

• Do we still need build tools? Still yes for now, but a useful breakdown of what they cover and where the gaps are starting to close.

• Similarly, Lea Verou makes the case for keeping polyfills, with an interesting take on how web standards actually get made, and the role real-world experimentation plays in that.

• Some interesting JavaScript trivia about NaN, the not-a-number number that isn’t NaN.

• PGlite is a 3 MB embeddable Postgres database with reactivity and sync, running locally in the browser or in Node.js, Deno, and Bun.

• ast-grep, a “fast, polyglot tool for structural code search, linting, and large-scale rewriting.”

Notable releases:

• Claude Sonnet 5, the new version of my favorite coding model, with significant improvements over its predecessor, albeit at a higher cost due to a new tokenizer.

• Deno 2.9, introducing a new desktop command for building desktop applications, along with faster startup time, built-in snapshot testing, and support for importing CSS files as constructable stylesheets.

• GPT 5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, OpenAI’s new generation of models, promising “more intelligence from every token” and “stronger performance per dollar.”

• mise 2026.7.4, stabilizing the bootstrap and dotfiles commands for setting up fresh machines.

• Node 26.4 and 26.5, adding package maps and text imports.

• npm 12, making many security-related breaking changes. See this overview.

• Podman 6, modernizing networking, improving Podman machines, and offering better Docker compatibility.

• TypeScript 7, the native port, which should vastly improve type-checking and compilation performance. Much of that depends on the ecosystem adopting the new version, though, which might take longer since the API will not be available until 7.1.

• Vite 8.1, taking a new approach to bundling in the development server that should significantly improve performance, especially for larger projects.

• Vite+ Beta, in their words: “stable, but not yet complete. We recommend adopting Vite+ if it covers the features you are looking for in a unified toolchain.”

• Wordgard 0.1, a new rich-text editor by the author of the popular ProseMirror, incorporating insights from nine years of developing ProseMirror into a fresh start.

• Zed, with multiple releases including improved Git history viewing and Telescope-style picker previews.