⛵️ August 2025

• The results of the State of CSS 2025 survey are out. The usual caveats about diversity of respondents etc. apply. Still a good read to find out how people are writing CSS nowadays, and which new features and trends to keep an eye on. The main takeaway:

It’s clear that CSS is no longer “just” a styling language. It has made a fundamental shift in direction, taking on a larger role when it comes to layouts, motion, compatibility, and of course, accessibility. This shift helps redefine CSS’s identity not as a legacy styling language, but as a modern, expressive toolset that is finally getting the recognition it deserves.

• For a while, I have dreaded debugging Java with VS Code because I assumed it would be very complicated to set up. Turns out it’s really quite simple, and even works for more involved projects with Gradle and Spring Boot (like Normen). My mission to replace IntelliJ with VS Code is now complete 🎉 (everything else is still pretty much the same as I reported last time).

• SmolCSS, a collection of “minimal snippets for modern CSS layouts and components”.

• A while ago, we learned that TypeScript is being rewritten in Go, promising much better performance. Now the roadmap is becoming more concrete: TypeScript v6 is going to be a transition release, introducing a few deprecations and smaller changes in behavior. v7 will be the rewritten version.

• “How I build software quickly”: spoiler—it only involves a small amount of AI, and lots of setting expectations, iterating, and negotiating requirements.

• The latest beta of Vitest adds support for visual regression testing via the toMatchScreenshot assertion.

• You can use Git Worktrees to check out more than one branch at a time. Think of it like cloning the repository multiple times, except that everything will be shared, so it’s faster and consumes less disk space. VS Code recently has added support for Worktrees, too.

• The Zed team is hosting Agentic Engineering, a series of events on making software with AI. While I’m still struggling to find a good workflow for myself personally, their principles sound reasonable to me, and the conversations are interesting.

• Type stripping in Node is now enabled by default from version 22.18.0 onwards. That means we can now run TypeScript directly without any additional configuration! Two caveats: TSX, as well as TypeScript in dependencies, are not supported.

• GitHub’s CEO has resigned. As a result, GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft but has so far operated as an independent organization, is now part of the Core AI team at Microsoft. Will be interesting to see how that’s going to shape GitHub going forward. Interesting discussion on Hacker News, too.