🌞 May 2024: React Conf, Pigment CSS, and Angular 18

Hey everyone!

May has blessed us all with such beautiful weather ☀️ This month, I had the incredible opportunity to spend a weekend in the breathtaking Yosemite National Park. The stunning landscapes, towering sequoias, and serene waterfalls made for an unforgettable experience. If you haven’t visited Yosemite yet, I highly recommend adding it to your travel list—it’s truly a natural wonder!

On the tech front, there have been a bunch of exciting updates, especially in React and CSS. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new and noteworthy.

May Highlights

• React Conf happened! The biggest announcement was the open sourcing of React Compiler. There were also a bunch of talks on what to expect with React 19 and React Server Components. Check out the recap for a full summary.
• The team at MUI is releasing Pigment CSS, a zero-runtime CSS-in-JS package that generates colocated styles to their own CSS files at build-time. Works with React Server Components and is more performant than existing CSS-in-JS solutions out there, like Emotion and Styled Components.
• The Angular team also had a major launch with the release of version 18, which includes experimental zoneless, a new home for developers on Angular.dev, and more. Check out the full notes here.

Tooling Roundup

• Storybook 8.1 introduces a new UI for creating and editing stories, type-safe module mocking, and more.
• New features in Chrome DevTools, such as leveraging Gemini to better understand errors and more insight into the performance of CSS selectors.
• Astro 4.8 and 4.9 add new experimental features, including Astro Actions, Request Rewriting, and Container API.
• ESLint has a new configuration migrator. The ESLint team is also looking for feedback on the v9 migration.
• Remix and React Router are merging.
• Cypress 13.10 adds support for Vite 5.
• The typescript-eslint v8 beta is ready for use.
• Vercel Ship 2024 Recap including feature flags, the Vercel Firewall, and the Vercel Toolbar.

Articles and Guides

Design Systems and UI

• UI Density
• On Constraints and Freedom

HTML and CSS

• Introducing the CSS anchor positioning API
• Old Dogs, New CSS Tricks
• State of HTML 2023 results

Performance

• Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - Server Side JSX
• Comprehensive guide to JavaScript performance analysis using Chrome DevTools
• Quantifying the Impact of Styled Components on Server Response Times

Frameworks

• The Vue Ecosystem in 2024
• React Compiler: In-Depth Beyond React Conf 2024

Culture and Documentation

• The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it’s damaging our health – this is why burnout happens
• Don’t Live with Broken Windows
• How to document your JavaScript package

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.

Enjoyed what you've read? Do the ultimate good deed – pass it on to a friend who'd love it as much as you did!