📬 June and July 2024: State of JS Results
Happy summer everyone!
I am loving the hotter weather and longer days. I was feeling a touch disengaged from the world of software engineering, but after celebrating Pride and taking a trip to Europe, I am back and feeling re-energized.
Looks like the 2023 State of JS results came out recently. I always love these surveys as they provide an interesting pulse on where the industry is headed. Shoutout to Vite for sweeping half of the awards – most adopted, highest retention, and most loved library. If you are a front end platform engineer and you haven’t tried Vite out yet, you’re missing out!
The front end frameworks section is also always interesting to me. React continues to maintain its dominance, though retention and interest continue to drop. Such is the lifecycle of any dominant player in a market. Its prevalence in the industry means that it’s still a valuable skill to learn. I’m curious where we’ll be in a few years and I’m personally going to tinker with Svelte, Solid, and htmx on the side.
On the meta-frameworks side, Next is the dominant player, though Astro is making moves. I use Astro to build all my personal websites and find the experience incredibly seamless. Looking at runtimes, Node is still the king, though Bun is gaining traction, winning the most write-ins award.
Testing continues to be fairly fragmented. Jest, Storybook, Cypress, Vitest, and Testing Library are all major players and each can serve slightly different purposes. I personally would love to see some convergence here so we can focus on writing tests vs debating how to write tests.
What do you think about the State of JS results? Let me know!
Highlights and Tooling Roundup
- Storybook 8.2 advances their journey toward no-compromise component testing with new test hooks, portable stories, and more.
- TypeScript 5.6 Beta is available, featuring disallowed nullish and truty checks, iterator helper methods, and more.
- typescript-eslint releases version 8, which adds full support for ESLint v9.
- Astro 4.12 introduces Server Islands
- State of React 2023 survey results
- StackOverflow developer survey results
- What’s new in ECMAScript 2024?
Articles and Guides
Performance and Security
- Enhancing The New York Times Web Performance with React 18
- If you’re using Polyfill.io code on your site – like 100,000+ are – remove it immediately
- Running untrusted JavaScript code
- Sneaky React Memory Leaks: How useCallback and closures can bite you
Tooling
- From ESLint and Prettier to Biome
- Migrate to ESLint 9.x
- How Airbnb Smoothly Upgrades React
- Node 22.5.0 postmortem
- ViteConf is back on October 3!
CSS and Accessibility
- So you think you know box shadows?
- Typed CSS variables using @property
- CSS Grid Areas
- Embracing Functional CSS: Have we moved on?
- Getting To The Bottom Of Minimum WCAG-Conformant Interactive Element Size
Architecture
That's all for now, folks! See you next month 👋
Got thoughts or questions? I'd love to hear from you. My DMs @fe_platform are open.
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