Issue #42: Right Now

🎵 Workin’ so hard to make it easy, whoa, got to turn, come on, turn this thing around… 🎵

There’s a lot of uncertainty in the industry these days – about the ways software will go in the near future specifically, mostly because of the AI frenzy. It almost is like a prediction market of a sort, where every company, community, open-source project, you name it, tries to place a bet at what will and what will not work for software development (and full-stack web development in our case specifically). Someone waits and watches, another one moves forward with bold opinions and solutions. Like it or not, you choose something out of that each day, even right now, reading this newsletter. Let’s see what yet another fortnight of waiting in the metaframeworks world has brought to our plates.

The Good

Next.js, the metaframework famous for its tight coupling to the single preferred deployment target of Vercel, published the significant write-up on the recent new Adapter API and what it means for the community of React developers building with Next.js. This feature builds up on the foundation laid out by the OpenNext project providing developers with the possibility to work with their Next.js apps not only on Vercel but on Cloudflare, Netlify, Google, AWS Amplify, and other platforms. As OpenNext guys loudly (but somewhat sadly, announcing the project sunsetting this way) declare in their blog,

The future of Next.js is not just open, it’s everywhere.

In all my ignorant honesty, it kind of feels to me like a FOMO move from Vercel, both in the context of the wider industry problems and in the light of the recent community jokes, but anyways, it definitely goes for a good thing in my books.

[P]latforms no longer need to reverse-engineer the build output.

In the end, AI doesn’t care which platform one uses, so the clearer the API for the corresponding adapters is, the better. And tools like v0 or lovable will get new awesome streamlined deployment options too, busting their sales, which is not bad for the economy and taxes and stuff…

The Bad

Another company also famous for its brilliant deployment story (including Next.js, you bet!), Deno, went to behave weirdly starting from switching into a kind of stealth mode for its organizational updates and finishing with laying off a lot of cool folks on the way. Looks like the main object of our interest there, the Fresh metaframework, still goes on with a lot of fresh contributors’ blood and a new boss, so we’ll see how it goes, but nevertheless, it all doesn’t smell good. For me, the Deno runtime is quite enticing with its security emphasis, and as the recent write-up from FrontendMasters revealed, the platform still has a lot to offer compared to the alternatives. But this is a pretty rotten alarm bell for me, largely because the aforementioned security question in the npm world specifically is not in a good shape these days at all, to say the least.

The recent major vulnerability in widely used (especially in the React ecosystem, but gosh it exploded much louder) Axios package triggered something that looks like a series of attempts for a sophisticated social-engineering attack to the popular open-source projects. Human factor was not the only reason for the latest vulnerabilities across the npm registry, but especially in this AI era, Kevin Mitnick’s words about the weakest link in the security chain remain bitterly true.

And who knows, maybe if Anthropic bought and used Deno instead of Bun they could avoid the shameful situation with their leaked source code – however in this case, we would miss another good developer life lesson, in addition to not believing messages from “well-known company interested in collaboration” (especially in Slack, duh), namely making sure development artifacts, especially in the sophisticated metaframeworks-based environments and pipelines, do not see the light of production.

What it shows is a company moving at a speed where the tooling can’t keep up with the ambition.

We know some other examples of such popular companies, bravely bringing some collateral damage here and there, so let’s just promise ourselves to not be alike and eagerly learn on.

The Noteworthy

One of the greatest examples of learning from the experience of giants is the comparatively new hybrid linter project – Flint. It’s a great example of an awesome tool bringing not the innovation for the sake of it or some dull hype, but new technical ideas and solutions for real problems with the great thoughtful community of clever dedicated developers.

Another project that can bravely brag about thoughtfulness and real innovation is Solid Start, which is, along with its framework foundation, getting closer and closer to major version 2.

The Vue-based metaframework project Quasar in its 2.19.0 release fairly decided to switch to the latest and greatest Vite ecosystem’s tools, namely Oxc and Rolldown. Meanwhile the Angular-based Analog uses (for quite a long time already) this ecosystem extensively to deliver its new minor version 2.4 with Astro 6 support and lots of other improvements.

And Astro themselves is not going to settle on v6 for long, that’s for sure – its new minor greatly complements the list of awesomeness this March has brought to the ecosystem which is, as usual, just endless. To my shame, during one of the recent updates to the Metaframework Records’ source code, I found the cool CLI command that is there from v4 – astro check – bringing important insights about the website health and possible issues.

And if you don’t have any health issues and ready to sit in front of a TV monitor for another 45 minutes, you should definitely check out this interesting presentation from TanStack Start author (happened at the recent BeJS conference) about the metaframework and its architectural benefits for building client-first full-stack webapps and websites.

Otherwise, I can let you go right now, to build some awesome projects with your metaframework of choice – with Slack notifications silenced, sourcemaps disabled, and full curiosity mode on. And if you found something useful for that in this newsletter issue, go tell them friends to give it a shot too. Who knows, maybe there’s the next week’s hero among them…

💪