Issue #15: Dream On

🎶 Sing with me, sing for a year, sing for the laughter, and sing for the tear… 🎶

This is an anniversary issue of the Metaframeworks Weekly newsletter and I wanted it to be about dreams coming true and songs being sung. There’s no specific metaframeworks-related topic I could tie to that this week, but there is something meta I wanted to reveal as a gift to all the loyal newsletter readers (you’ll get to know it in the very end). Meanwhile, there are some technical news, findings, and insights I wanted to draw your attention to as probably you’re here not for some stupid tunes or dreams or other sort of trivia but rather for things that make the web tinkle. The metaframeworks…

The Good

A month has passed in the Astroverse and another insightful post in the Astro’s monthly series of gems sharing got issued. There are some exciting team news (congratulations guys!), some new noble framework adopters (welcome, Firebase Studio), a bunch of case studies on choosing Astro over something else (like Next.js, or Next.js), weird things someone definitely (and desperately) needs (like building SPAs with Astro), and lots more goodies, showcases, and videos. The only reason every software developer in the world doesn’t use Astro yet (I can think of) is not reading these blog articles, which is a shame.

Another shame I’m guilty of (which is a great exploration of the last week) is missing the Learn page of the Next.js website. It is a set of free courses and educational materials of different level (from the first beginner React step to scaling the best Next.js production practices) from the Vercel team which, honestly speaking, makes other learning resources on Next.js ecosystem a bit unnecessary. I personally consider this approach more accessible than the official React docs though there is some smell of being sold something in all this story. But nah, nonsense, why would that be this way…

The Bad

I mentioned a couple of issues ago the Remix / React Router security issue our old friend Rachid had discovered. Guess what, it wasn’t the last one for the unfortunate framework team. A couple of new issues of the similar sort were discovered by Rachid, which made the Netlify team even come up with the new dedicated “security” tag in their blog, where the guys describe the series of the React Router problems and the ways they can be mitigated, with all the references. One of the problems had got pretty high severity score (8.2 out of 10) which underlines the importance of the Rachid’s researches and highlights the wide range of angles the metaframework vulnerabilities may be approached from. As usual, make sure to strengthen your infrastructure with the appropriate patches, if applicable.

The Noteworthy

There were some notable minor releases in the metaframeworks world the last week, as usual. TanStack Router got some DX improvements, Brisa team prepares to the exciting v0.3 where everything will change thanks to binary builds, and Analog guys deliver a whole bunch of improvements with v1.16.0 (also cooking another major update coming with v2). All in all, looks like the teams were celebrating this year’s Labour day with their hands dirty which deserves a lot of due respect.

And what to use to celebrate these small achievements on the way to the big dream of not a good song? If you read this newsletter for some time, you know that each issue of it is titled (and quoted) with a line from a relevant song. Most of the songs can be attributed to the hall of pop culture fame more or less, though it wasn’t a goal — I just wanted to make some cool move and bring some personality to the boring problem of naming things we programmers are damned with forever. So to make things more vivid and… well, live — I decided to turn the list of issues into a YouTube playlist where you could not only see the titles, but also listen to them. So here we go — the Metaframeworks Weekly YouTube playlist! You may like it or not but if metaframeworks could sing, that’s what the concert would be about.

IMO, of course. As usual. Sing with me!

👋