📨 #158: Astro, Server Components, VisionCamera, Owner Tree, Props Drilling, Next.js, Remix, Chakra, TypeScript, Skia, Biome, CSS, Node.js...

September 6, 2023 · 7 min read

Newsletter Editor - Docusaurus maintainer

Hi everyone!

We're covering 2 weeks of news, including 2 great releases: Astro 3.0 and VisionCamera 3.0. There have also been a lot of interesting articles, so I've had to filter a bit!

Bun 1.0 coming out tonight. I'm curious to see what they have planned. Having tested it on unit tests as a replacement for Jest, it's really very fast.

The React-Native EU conference kicks off today. I spotted some 🐦 very interesting talks, particularly the one on Static Hermes.

For those who want to visit Italy, go to reactjsday in Verona on 27 October 27. The conference is offering -10% on tickets and 2 online/remote tickets to our readers, which I'm giving away to the first 2 people who reply to this email and claim them.

I often forget to mention it here, but I "build in public". You can check out my latest monthly Indie Hackers report and 🐦 more Twitter details.

💡 Check this newsletter on Twitter - visual format 🎨

As always, thanks for supporting us on your favorite platform:

🦋 Bluesky
✖️ X / Twitter
👔 LinkedIn
👽 Reddit

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My favorite resource for keeping up with the React community!

Evan BaconEngineering Manager - Expo

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Astro 3.0

This new version of Astro innovates in particular through the use of the new View Transition API, and the ability to navigate fluidly and animatedly from one page to another, while preserving the state of the components displayed. This reduces the need for a SPA in many use cases.

Other notable improvements include:

Image Optimization stable
Faster Rendering Performance: Astro components render 30-75% faster.
SSR Enhancements for Serverless: New ways to connect to your hosting platform.
HMR Enhancements for JSX: Fast Refresh support for React and Preact.
Optimized Build Output: Cleaner and more performant HTML.

Making Sense of React Server Components

Josh Comeau is back with a great introduction to React Server Components, taken from his course that should become available next week. The many animated diagrams make it easy to understand this new React paradigm.

💸 Zero To Shipped - Master Fast-Paced Fullstack Development and Finally ship that product
🐦 Remix v2 pre-release: if you have already enabled future flags v2, you should be able to upgrade easily and remove these flags.
🐦 Dan Abramov joins Bluesky: Dan has left Meta and joined this Twitter competitor based on a cross-platform Expo app. I think this is great news, we may have gained a great evangelist to promote cross-platform and Expo.
🐦 WIP testing docs for Next.js App Router
🧑‍🎓 Next.js App Router - Forms and Mutations docs: new doc page explaining the use of Server Actions and the React useFormStatus and useOptimistic hooks.
💬 Next.js Tim Neutkens' Deep Dive - Caching and Revalidating
📜 Parents & Owners in React: Data Flow: original interactive and visual article, explaining the problem of props drilling and how to avoid it with slotted components. Explains the concepts of parent tree and owner tree. The props drilling problem becomes clearly visible in the diagrams.
📜 Challenging Established Norms: Making Component Fetching the Exception: an interesting thought that encourages you to run your queries at route level to avoid waterfalls, and use composition to avoid props drilling.
📜 Rust Server Components: proposes to partially reproduce RSC, MDX and Suspense using Rust, HTMX and a few other libs. "the Rust equivalent of T3 Stack". Nice to read, even though I don't do Rust. Not convinced that the end result solves all the problems RSCs do.
📜 Chakra, Panda and Ark - What's the plan?: Segun answers a number of questions about his libraries. Chakra v3 arrives in Q4, but will still use Emotion. The addition of "use client" makes it easier to use in RSCs. Adoption of the Radix asChild pattern.
📜 How to Pass a Component as a Prop in React: Matt shares some TypeScript + React typing tips. The type to implement "as" prop is quite scary 😬.
📜 Handling type-safe toast notifications with zod in Remix applications: explains how to use the Remix flash session to give feedback after an action.
📜 Optimizing Next.js cold starts for Vercel
📜 Strongly Typing React Props with TypeScript
📜 You Might Not Need A useEffectAsync Hook
📜 Web Developers, CSS-in-JS is Ruining Your Product
📜 Build your own headless UI components
📜 Building a toast component
📦 next-flat-routes
📦 Puck - Self-hosted drag and drop editor for React
📦 react-prod-sourcemaps
📦 Reshaped 2.2 - Now available on NPM
👥 reactjsday (Verona 🇮🇹, Octobre 27, 2023) is offering us -10% on conference tickets with code "media_TWIR"

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If every newsletter was as informative, the world would be a better place!

Mike GrabowskiCTO and founder - Callstack

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