Welcome to the very first edition of the Javascript Insights newsletter! Together we are going to journey through the ever-evolving world of Javascript, bringing you the latest trends, tutorials and expert insights right to your inbox.

👋 Introduction

As the world of technology continuously changes, staying relevant can be a real task. For many developers, this can mean spending hours every week watching Youtube videos, reading blog articles, looking through Hacker News, browsing Reddit, and perusing the latest Twitter framework drama 👀.

That’s where I hope to step in. Through this newsletter, I aim to help you stay up-to-date while spending significantly less time sifting through all the content out there.

📖 My Story

For me, staying relevant in the Javascript ecosystem has been crucial to my success as a developer. I have always tried to stay on top of the latest trends. I'd watch hours of Youtube videos, listen to all the podcasts, read blog posts and try to read through Twitter threads. As the amount of developers grows, we see more and more content being produced for developers. This provides more accessible education material for the growing population, but has made it an absolute chore to keep up with it.

For many of us, mental health has been struggle the past few years. I know it has been for me. We need more space away from technology and with our family and friends. We need additional time for hobbies and less time spent heads down alone working at a computer.

I want this newsletter to free you up to spend more time with the people you love, doing things you love while removing the stress of staying relevant in the industry.

Ron Swanson from “Parks and Recreation” throwing his computer in the dumpster

⛰️ Quick Overview

The Javascript ecosystem is vibrant with new frameworks, libraries and patterns popping up every week. This makes it an exciting space to work in. There are always new easier ways being built to make the developer experience better.

You see people like Tanner Linsley making absolute waves in this area with transformative libraries like React Query which has completely changed the way we write React code.

There are also people like Kent C. Dodds and Theo promoting custom technology stacks that provide an amazing developer experience. These are essentially trying to be replacements for Rails/Laravel/Django but with full-stack Javascript. I’ve personally played around with the T3 stack for months now and have really enjoyed it.

The Epic Stack

Introducing an opinionated project starter that enables web development teams to ship their ideas to production more efficiently.

www.epicweb.dev/epic-stack

The freaking EPIC stack

Create T3 App

The best way to start a full-stack, typesafe Next.js app.

create.t3.gg

📋 Recent Releases

🍔 Bun 1.0 was released on September 8th, 2023

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering what the heck is Bun and why should I care? To keep it simple, it is the fastest way to run Node.js code to date. It is a drop-in replacement (minus a few exceptions currently) and can replace several other tools in your stack today.

They’ve spent a ton of time replacing the most common tools you see in the JS/TS ecosystem with the most fastest alternatives. It can replace a ton of the common packages you would setup in your project like building, bundling, testing, watching files during development, reading .env files, installing packages, etc.

TLDR;

• Bun is the fastest way to build, test, transpile and manage packages in the Node.js space today.

• Bun is stable now, but there are still reports of various APIs and packages not working with Bun.

• If you have small personal projects or want to be on the cutting edge, definitely try it out in your projects. It is insanely fast and I love that everything is built in so I don’t have to install 20 packages to get started building.

• Keep an eye on Bun. It is likely to grow in the coming months and make a big impact, but it’s also probably too early to adopt in most projects today

Bun runs a “hello world” Typescript file 5x faster than esbuild with Node.js

📆 Upcoming Conferences

I want to make sure you know about any upcoming conferences and meetups happening in our industry. These are a wonderful opportunity for you to network with other developers and hear from some of the top developers in our space.

If you haven’t been to a conference before, I highly recommend it. It is really cool to be around other developers who are all looking to grow together. It has motivated me to continue learning and growing and not give up.

Many conferences offer virtual options or are virtual-only which can be a great low-risk starting point if you are nervous about going to an event.

Typescript Congress

TS Congress is an online event doing a deep-dive into Typescript. There will be tons of industry experts, workshops, community members. If you are super interested in Typescript, I’d recommend checking this one out. Unfortunately it does have a pretty high cost. If you work for an employer where you use Typescript though, I’d check if they are able to help cover the cost.

When: September 21st and 22nd @ 7AM PST/10AM EST

Where: Online

Cost: €80/~$85.88

TypeScript Congress

TS Congress is an online event for web developers on all things TypesScript. Learn from industry professionals and community members, exchange ideas, interact, and collaborate in the form of a modern tech event. September 21 & 22, 2023.

typescriptcongress.com

ViteConf 2023

ViteConf is a conference showcasing how frontend teams are building with Vite. There are going to be a ton of great speakers here this year. I’d highly recommend attending if you have the time and are interested.

They also have a cool shareable ticket that you get to customize with your name, colors, etc. You can check out mine below.

When: October 5th and 6th @ 7am PST/10AM EST

Where: Online

Cost: FREE!

Devin Riegle Ticket to ViteConf

StackBlitz invites you to ViteConf, an immersive and interactive online event for frontend teams building the next generation of the web with Vite

viteconf.org/23/tickets/deriegle?p=React

Closing thoughts

Dwight from “The Office” saying Thank you

Thank you for joining me on this journey to learn and grow together. If you have any feedback, thoughts or things you’d like me to cover in a future edition, please let me know!

Stay tuned for more updates!

To your success,

Devin Riegle