Issue #38: Happy New Year
Yeah, the title of this issue sounds slightly outdated. But FWIW, this is the first issue of 2026 so it is legitimate, and also serves as a kickoff for some thoughts on what’s gonna happen in this year both with the metaframeworks industry, and with this project itself. Not gonna turn it into intimidatingly long read though, so let’s skip any fuss and get right to the business.
The Good
The best thing I have found to share in the beginning of the year is the amount of new shiny stuff (that is, releases) among the metaframework creators. It is the time of exciting alpha and beta announcements, thus this usually secondary topic is the hero of today’s “The Good” section.
Daishi Kato and the team had published the alpha version of the first Waku’s stable release. If you wanted to give a try to this arguably the simplest way of playing with React Server Components, this is the sign!
Our public API surface area is now stable as we shift focus towards bug fixes and compatibility.
RedwoodSDK gradually approaches its first stable release too with lots of work being done almost on a daily basis.
Qwik team is closer and closer to the long-awaited second version slowly but consistently pushing new updates.
Awesome 11ty is coming to its awesome version 4 — and summarizes what this year in the tooling development brought to us.
Eight years into this roller coaster of an open source project and it still feels like we’re just getting started!
Astro is counting down to version 6 with their new beta release and the traditional monthly retrospective blogpost.
The new Astro 6 development server refactor brings Astro’s development and production codepaths much closer together and increases stability for Astro on all runtimes.
TanStack team is pushing countless releases each week so Tanner Linsley themselves came to PodRocket podcast recently to talk about the ecosystem, the metaframework, and why their vision is better than the others. Or just different.
And as a foundational technology for almost everything listed above, Vite had a good last month of 2025 too, which Alexander Lichter talks about in the traditional teams digest.
Vite crossed 40M weekly downloads! 🥳 2x the beginning of 2025!
The Bad
And while someone is happy with the rise of the frameworks and tools, someone is always doubtful about this complexity wave.
In their piece on anti-frameworkism, Anna Monus suggests an alternative view on starting new projects for the web today, which definitely makes sense and is supported by authoritative success stories.
Anti-frameworkism isn’t about rejecting tools. It’s about starting from the problem instead of the trend, weighing real-world impact before convenience, and choosing the technology that best serves your users.
And it is not the one and only recent rant on chicken and egg problem in the web development of 2026 — as here in the post called “Avoid Mini-frameworks” the author also researches the idea of building blocks and resulting constructions.
Interestingly, Ryan Carniato basically echoes this discourse by diving deeper in his already traditional and more specific and practical piece on JavaScript frameworks in the new year.
I suppose after three years, we can consider my review of JavaScript Frameworks an annual event now.
To unofficially support that, Alicia Sykes builds a bunch of apps in different frameworks helping you to see for yourself.
Mark Techson from the Angular dev team also gives some thoughtful predictions on frameworks wars closer to the end of another recent PodRocket podcast episode dedicated to Angular (but not only that). Spoiler alert: the wars are over and the winner is… 🤫
And while everyone argues on what is the weapon of choice for the better, adversaries silently proceed conquering underlying npm ecosystem for worse. The amount of FUD brought by supply chain attacks in 2025 is overwhelmingly high. Only the last month yielded Lotusbail vulnerability stealing WhatsApp credentials and data, Evilginx phishing attack hunting for Microsoft login credentials, jsPDF flaw allowing hackers to snitch local secrets via PDF (this one hurt me badly), multiple React Router and Remix vulnerability findings, and even more foundational Node issues impacting several tools, frameworks, and metaframeworks.
The industry and web dev community are still looking for the best ways to mitigate that starting from intermittently successful official measures, through wise unofficial suggestions, and to pain-induced practical guerilla insights.
The only solid conclusion out of that is that the problems do not end when you did your research and chosen your tools and your building materials. Now the most interesting stage starts — making sure they won’t break by themselves or from external influence.
The Noteworthy
I’m going to finish this first issue of the Metaframeworks Records newsletter of 2026 with some meta news. Having [traditionally] torn up my [traditional] New Year’s resolutions after the first working day of this year, I decided that the most important thing for my personal research on the Metaframeworks Way would be my long-standing idea of an educational blogpost series called “Build your own metaframework”. It’s a project that I want to do to both teach myself on some intricacies of the corresponding technologies, and to show others that there is no black magic in this corner of the software development and everything is pretty straightforward and fascinating at the same time. More news soon, but I guess I can consider myself accountable about this venture starting from now. Along with accountability for less drama, less FOMO and FUD, and more tech — clear and sparkling.
Because, as we saw, there are inevitably both positive and negative trends around. I for that matter hope everyone (and you personally ❤️) will strive to stay on a light side in 2026 no matter what and do the best to bring more positivity into the niche. Let’s stick with the main discourse of this newsletter, namely — ideating, innovating, building, delivering, repeating all of that, and persevering.
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