Js Party

It’s our 3rd annual New Year’s party! We welcome a new panelist, review our (failed) resolutions from last year, discuss what’s trending in the web world, and even set some new (failed) resolutions for this year.

Jerod, Nick, and a node_modules-worthy collection of JS friends played an intense game of Frontend Feud at React Advanced London’s after-party back in October. Today, you get to play along with us!

Rich Harris joins Amal & Amelia for a Svelte deep-dive! What’s it all about? Why might you pick it over React and friends? What up with SvelteKit? Rich is working on it full-time now?! Will even more questions be answered?

Salma Alam-Naylor joins us this week to share her thesis that JavaScript is best in moderation, and is a liability when creating performant, resilient, and accessible web applications. Salma says we’re drunk on JavaScript, and it’s time we learn how to leverage this powerful web primitive to enhance our web experiences, alongside HTML and CSS, instead of purely relying on JavaScript to completely run the show.

Liana Leahy tells Amal and KBall all about her journey from software engineer to product manager. Along the way we learn what a PM does, how to be great at it, how to know if it’s for you, why the role is in such demand these days, and much more. - It’s UNIX, I know this!

This week we are joined by Sophie Alpert, Head of Engineering at Humu, and former lead of the React Core team, to discuss her experience on being a very early adopter, contributor, and eventually maintainer of React. In her 4+ years on the Core team, she went from supporting a new niche OSS UI library to supporting a project used by millions of developers around the world. Join us to hear about this epic journey, as well as Sophie’s thought’s on some common critiques and misconceptions of React.

Rachel Nabors –beloved educator, animator, & documentation engineer at Meta– joins Amal and Amelia for a first look at the brand new React docs! This massive overhaul to the React website (which supports 2 million+ developers around the world) was no easy feat! We dive into all the behind the scenes coordination, as well as the goals, wins, and intended outcomes of this new way of approaching educational content and API reference material for open source projects.

JS Party listeners and panelists celebrate our favorite moments from the past 100 episodes! You’ll hear from over 20 of your favorite voices across 14 episodes. We also share some behind-the-scenes and read/hear from listeners! Here’s to the last 200 episodes, and the next 200 as well.

KBall catches up with Chris Ferdinandi about the trends in modern web development towards smaller libraries, pre-compilation, and applications at the edge.

We’re putting together a special highlight reel for our 200th episode! Share your favorite moments, guests, topics, and/or episodes from the past 100 shows. Every listener who gets their voice or text message included in the episode gets a free JS Party t-shirt! The details for submission are at jsparty.fm/200

Nader Dabit shares his motivation and experience on recently transitioning to focus on technologies and communities that support the decentralized internet. In this hot topics discussion, we cover all the buzz words you’ve likely heard over the past year. We have honest and nuanced conversations about the world of Ethereum, Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, and Web3. Hype or hit? You’ll have to tune in to find out.

Matteo Collina, Ph.D takes us to school on all things Node, Fastify, and Pino. We start with his journey into the Node community, how he got started in open source, and his experience as a member of Node’s Technical Steering Committee (TSC). We then nerd out about middleware architecture, data structures and logs (yes, logs), and of course, we dive into what makes Fastify so darn fast and how Pino was the precursor project.

Doug Martin joins Nick to talk to us about building GraphQL backends in TypeScript with NestJS and his project, nestjs-query. We talk about what NestJS is and its built-in support for GraphQL and REST, and then dive into how NestJS-query extends it to generate code for you.

Muffin fairies, thumb wars, and fruit transit can only mean one thing: Explain it Like I’m 5! We’re also covering the news, discussing the effects of remote work, and agreeing it’s OK to ignore the frontend dev scene for awhile.

Mitch and Andrew from the 1Password team talk with Amal and Nick about the company’s transition to Electron and web technologies, and how the company utilized its existing web stack to shape the future of its desktop experience.

Russel Goldenberg & Caitlyn Ralph from The Pudding join Amelia & Nick to talk about how they create data-driven, interactive articles, how the team works on both The Pudding’s data journalism articles and Polygraph’s client work. We also dive into how the team works with contractors and how the company manages itself using a Holocratic method.

Your favorite web dev podcasts join forces for a super collab that’ll knock you frontend off! Amelia joins Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from ShopTalk Show while Divya teams up with Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski from Syntax. Let the FEUDing begin!

Amal, KBall, and Nick welcome David Khourshid to the show to talk about his project, XState. XState brings state management to a new level using finite state machines and is compatible with your stack. We talk about how the idea came to fruition, its practical uses, and where it’s going.

Alex Page & Sam Rose from Shopify’s Polaris team join Jerod & Divya to discuss their open research into finding and selecting a viable alternative for Sass at the company. Six solutions enter, but which one will walk away with the

Ahmad Awais joins Amal, Amelia, and Jerod to discuss scripting, automation, and building CLIs with Node! We hear Ahmad’s back story, learn the ABC’s of mastering Node automation tooling, and share automation wins from all of our lives (and Twitter too).