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When the Web Was Actively Trying to Kill You: A Field Guide to Early Front-End Lore
In the ongoing retrospective series I have kicked off on LinkedIn and YouTube about the maturation of the web platform, I am going to be focusing on how Boston and Cambridge served as ground zero for modern front-end engineering between 2008 and 2013. We will talk about the launch of HTML5 Boilerplate, the transition to…
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TypeScript Won. Now It’s Giving Up Its Superpowers.
When you spin up a greenfield project on a Tuesday afternoon, a build step feels like a completely reasonable trade-off. You install a bundler, configure a transpiler, sprinkle in a few TypeScript-specific conveniences, and marvel at the developer ergonomics. Having the compiler quietly invent runtime JavaScript out of thin air to support an enum, a…
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The Superset Trap: Why Node’s Native TypeScript is Going to Break Enterprise Brains
If you spend your time in open-source mailing lists or arguing about AST transformations on social media, the recent push toward “erasable syntax” makes total sense. I’ve been a proponent of TypeScript for a long time. In the early days, whenever someone brought up enum, for example, I remember having conversations along the lines of:…
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The Mastra Poisoning and the Yin/Yang of Ecosystem Velocity
The modern JavaScript ecosystem is incredible. If you need a utility, library or framework for anything it’s probably out there in the npm registry. Things that used to take us a week are now available as a simple `npm install.` But last week, the ecosystem reminded us of the exact tax we pay for that…
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Upgrading jQuery: Working Towards a Healthy Web
Upgrading jQuery: Working Towards a Healthy Web | Official jQuery Blog Working in the environments I do, I can tell you there are some scary situations out there with regards to jQuery. I remember John Resig, more than a decade ago, talking about wanting multiple different versions of jQuery to be able to work on…