Hey this is the Weekly Tech Hype #1

It's a quick overview of the recent FE tech news using my own Full Context perspective to fight the hype. Let’s find out what happened this week that can make a difference for the projects we work on, for our users and us software engineers.

(The headings are links to the covered topic)

#1 Next.js 13 vs Next.js 12 vs Astro 2 performance test

A video by Jack Herrington comparing the speed of the same web apps implemented in all 3 frameworks/versions. It got lots of love from the community and I also enjoyed it so please Jack no hard feelings but:

It has it all:

• Hot topic of the day FE tools ✅
• Everyone’s favorite obsession: Performance ✅
• Battle of technologies with a possible clear winner triggering tribal instincts ✅ (I know the conclusions were balanced)
• It only missed the celebrity component. ❌ Like Dan Abramov implementing the Next v13 version sharing behind the scenes info about the future of RSCs.

The 100k views wouldn’t have been out of reach. Keep it up Jack! - In all honesty it was a really well done comparison. But…

From the Full Context Perspective

The video compares the TTI and the supporting/correlating info about the size of transferred data. While TTI is a factor in achieving a good Customer Experience (link from my book on how tech and CX are related to business outcomes) but it’s far from the only or the most significant component of it.

I will be strict, the video as a whole has no added value to increase the impact of the products we are working on.

In smaller products it’s unlikely that the shown level of difference in TTI will create a bottleneck while developers on huge projects wouldn’t rely on the default output of these frameworks. These small app measurements are sadly irrelevant for that case,

That’s why Jack’s advice at the end is absolutely correct, do your own measurements for your own situation.

But then what’s the value we can take away from this comparison?

The performance comparison gets a 4 / 10 HV score.

#2 Signals, Signals, everywhere

Misko Hevery (author of Angular.js and Qwik) released a very interesting, deeply technical article about signals as reactivity primitives in modern FE frameworks. At the same time Sarah Drasner announced that Angular will introduce the use of signals. Andrew Clark teased the idea that React might add them as a compiler target, or a low level API for library authors.

Signals are not a new concept, Vue, Preact, Solid, and Qwik all use them, it even existed in Knockout. But recent implementations improve on the DX side significantly.

This is the type of news that I really appreciate. It shows us how to achieve a goal more effectively through a technical tool, - reactive state updates with high rendering performance - while also creating just enough hype to raise attention.

From the Full Context Perspective

This can be a couple hundred Impact Point worth of Productivity improvement depending on the circumstances that can manifest in a visible value increase.

The signal technology gets a 8 / 10 HV score.

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#3 Node.js runtimes, in the browser

CodeSandbox and StackBlitz both announced the next version of their in-browser Node.js implementation, respectively Sandpack 2.0 and the WebContainers API. Here’s a summary of both:

WebContainers

WebContainers are a micro-operating system based on WebAssembly designed to allow spinning up Node.js servers locally inside a browser tab

SandPack

Sandpack 2.0 introduces Nodebox, a new technology that implements its very own abstraction of Node.js in-browser. Nodebox brings a new set of possibilities allowing Sandpack to run almost any JavaScript application you can imagine in any browser.

These are cool things, but their use-cases are limited. They can mostly be used to create… cool things. Web IDEs, interactive coding tutorials, no-code/low-code environments or to compile and run Next.js, Vite and Astro projects completely client side.

These are legitimate technology advancements, totally newsworthy and congratulations to everyone who pulled it off, it’s tremendous work!

From the Full Context Perspective

This is the stuff that manifests the purest form of Business Opportunity. An innovation that creates new markets, that enables the creation of products previously impossible to build. The thing is, if the product you are working on belongs to a different category, the effect of these innovations on your life and on the business’ is 0.

For those who want to create these kinds of products

For the rest of us

The Node.js in-browser tech gets a 7 / 10 HV score.

#4 Shopify’s Hydrogen, uses Remix

This news is delivered without much buzz and I also won’t say too much about it.

Shopify devs rewrote Hydrogen using Remix. They enjoy all the benefits of Remix now. Well they bought the Remix company so they’ve got to do something with ‘em, right? The real question is the pros vs cons of using Remix over pure React and its ecosystem. I tried to form a well balanced, opinion on that last year. It’s not all songs and birds but there are a ton of major benefits. I’m interested in following how it will pay out for Shopify.

From the Full Context Perspective

I would have loved to see some measurements of how the Remix implementation did in terms of Real User Metrics or other benchmarks vs the v1 Hydrogen. That would have given us a sense of the impact of the rewrite on business value. Without that I will be optimistic with this one an give

Hydrogen v2. a 7 / 10 HV score.

I’m super happy that you read (or scrolled) till the end! I feel speechless that people actually do that! If you enjoyed the article and/or found it valuable please consider sharing it with your friends and colleagues.

I’m at a very early stage of building this Substack publication so even the smallest extra visibility can make a huge difference. My wholehearted thanks if you help with that!

See you in the next one!
Joe @fullctxdev