Directives and the platform boundary

Directives and the platform boundary
7 minutes by Tanner Linsley

JavaScript frameworks are creating their own directives like "use client" and "use server" that look like official language features but aren't standardized. These directives confuse developers who treat them as part of JavaScript itself rather than framework-specific tools. While some serve practical purposes for coordination between tools, they create problems with debugging, portability, and tooling support. The trend risks fragmenting the ecosystem with competing pseudo-standards that lack proper specifications, similar to past issues with decorators.

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React and Remix choose different futures
8 minutes by Brendan McLoughlin

Bryan Cantrill's talk about platforms reflecting values provides a framework for understanding the split between React and Remix. React continues accepting complexity to deliver better user experiences, adding features like the React Compiler that automatically optimizes performance. Remix 3 breaks away entirely, choosing simplicity over stability by requiring explicit state updates and abandoning React's automatic systems.

React vs. Backbone in 2025
3 minutes by David Miranda

Frontend development has evolved from Backbone to React, yet the core challenge—mapping events and state to the UI—remains largely unchanged. Modern frameworks hide complexity behind abstractions, creating issues like stale closures, unexpected remounts, and infinite loops, while older libraries offered transparency and predictability. Despite advancements in syntax and ecosystem, true simplicity and hackability in UI development remain elusive.

Render outside the box: Floating UIs with React.createPortal
6 minutes by Alex Movchan

Modern UIs often need elements that float above the rest of the page, such as modals, tooltips, popovers, or notifications. But when you try to build these inside your component hierarchy, you quickly hit frustrating limits like overflow clipping, stacking issues, and unpredictable z-index behavior. Alex shows you how to use React.createPortal to solve these problems by rendering elements outside the normal DOM tree while keeping them fully connected to your React app.

What's new in Next.js 16
12 minutes by Trevor I. Lasn

Next.js 16 is here, and it’s the kind of release where the team finally stabilizes everything they’ve been testing for the past year. Experimental features are graduating to stable, deprecated APIs are getting removed, and the whole framework is getting faster. If you’re planning to upgrade, here’s what changed and why it matters.

javascript

• Building a Debugger: Code Analysis
• I Built the Same App 10 Times: Evaluating Frameworks for Mobile Performance
• Rethinking async loops in JavaScript
• Noop Functions vs Optional Chaining: A Performance Deep Dive
• Importing vs fetching JSON

webdev

• Solved By Modern CSS: Section Layout
• HTTPS by default
• Springs and Bounces in Native CSS
• Don’t Forget These Tags
• Tips for good UI implementation

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• React Server Components: Do they really improve performance?