📖 March 2024: Storybook 8, Interaction to Next Paint, Rolldown, JSR

Hey everyone!

Hope March was awesome for you, and the leap forward for daylight savings time wasn’t too disruptive. On my end this month, I officially launched the frontendplatform.dev website and kicked off the blog, starting with two new posts: What is Front End Platform Engineering? and Front End Platform Engineering Specializations. Eager for your thoughts, so dive in when you have a moment!

Now, let’s rewind and chat about the cool stuff that went down in March.

March Highlights

Storybook 8 is finally here! The next major version comes with a bunch of new features, most notably the new Visual Tests add-on. This new workflow accelerates your development feedback cycle by removing the need to wait for CI. Instead, you can run visual tests locally. Version 8 also includes improved controls autogeneration (docgen), rearchitected Vite support, and faster test builds.
There’s a new core web vital in town: Interaction to Next Paint (INP). INP is the successor to First Input Delay (FID). Both assess responsiveness, but FID only measures the first interaction on a page while INP considers all page interactions. In other words, FID is for load responsiveness whereas INP is for overall responsiveness. Learn more about INP here.
We’re officially in the era of X but written in Rust. The latest development is Rolldown, a lightning fast JavaScript bundler that is compatible with the Rollup API. This tweet from Justin Schroeder explains the significance of Rolldown. Vite fans, build tool nerds, and front end infra engineers pay attention 👀
From the team at Deno comes JSR - the JavaScript Registry, a new package registry that aims to address the growing gaps with npm and modern web development practices. JSR is made for TypeScript + ESModules and works with any runtime.

🥳 Happy 3rd birthday Astro! Astro had a busy month, releasing version 4.5, Astro DB, and an updated developer portal.
Tailwind 4 enters the alpha stage with a new engine that’s optimized for speed and an integration with Lightning CSS.
TypeScript 5.4 is here, with smarter control-flow analysis in closures, the NoInfer utility type, types for Object.groupBy and Map.groupBy, and more.
Shadcn launches Blocks, ready-made layouts and page components that are fully responsive, accessible, and composable.
Biome 1.6 is shipped, including new lint rules, partial support for Astro, Svelte, and Vue files, support for biome.jsonc as a configuration file, an easier migration path from Prettier, and more.

Tailwind is hiring a Design Engineer and a Staff Engineer. Excited by the opportunity to accelerate the buzziest CSS framework? Consider applying.
ReactConf is back in 2024! Happening May 15-16 in Nevada. The ticket lottery is closed, but you can still register to get access to the free livestream.
Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer, has arrived. Gergely Orosz, from The Pragmatic Engineer, thinks it’s largely media-driven hype necessitated by Microsoft’s dominance in the space. Ryan Peterman from The Developing Dev recommends focusing on learning higher-level behaviors instead of what can easily be automated.. What do you think? Does this make you worry about job security?

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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