This last decade has seen an inundation of new JavaScript runtimes (and engines in equal measure), enabling us to run JavaScript in all manner of contexts with precise fitness for task. Through these, we've seen the language spread to the Cloud, the edge, Smart TVs, mobile devices, and even microcontrollers.In this article, we'll explore what's driving this diversity, and why no one runtime or engine suffices for all purposes.Edge computingThe first consumer "edge computing" solution was introduced in 2002 by Akamai, who enabled building on the edge using Java and .NET. But it would be a long time before JavaScript would join those languages – for one thing, JavaScript wouldn't be useful as a server-side language until Node.js emerged in 2009, and for another, Node.js wouldn't be employed in a serverless context until AWS Lambda in 2014. It was only with the announcement of Lambda@Edge (in preview from December 2016; released March 2017) that JavaScript would finally be seen on the edg

It's been a remarkable year for frontend. We've seen a gold rush to capture – and invent – the server-side rendering (SSR) market; the advancing tentacles of AI; a Cambrian explosion of web renderers and JS engines; a formidable line of hopefuls attempting to unseat the big names from their pedestals; and movements on various other fronts.So before the traditional soothsaying of the year to come, let's review the hotchpotch this year has been so far.2023 in reviewSSRSSR is nothing new. PHP has delivered it for a good 28 years now, and if it's good enough for Neopets (and, begrudgingly, Facebook), it's arguably good enough for anything.But Vercel has been pushing it hard. Having become a guild house for some of the most influential figures in frontend development, it's hard to ignore their narrative (e.g. when their talk of Server Actions flooded Twitter with memes for a week) that you should be using SSR, and moreover doing so through their services.Now that the SSR pie has been re-est

I've been in pain for the last decade. Not always the same variety of pain, not always to the same degree, but always in pain. It's an incredibly draining state-of-being that has been a constant shackle on my life choices.So, whether you're in a similar position or not, I'd like to share how I make life a bit more bearable and do my best to stay productive despite it all.Every effort countsRecalibrate your threshold for achievement. Each day I manage to pull myself out of bed once again to take on the world, I commend myself for not giving up. Getting the laundry done, doing exercise – what were trivialities before are now triumphs.As VTuber Mori Calliope puts it:idk man I just think every day if you're alive and doing something, that's great. Idk man, if no one else is proud of you then fuck it, I am.Get better dreamsFinding that your dream has become out of reach due to circumstances beyond your control is crushing. But down is not out. Maybe you can't become an astronaut, but you ca

React Native has been developing rapidly in the last two years, though an exact roadmap from here has not yet been spelled out. Here I try to join the dots and speculate where we might be headed, by analysing the activities of a few key stakeholders.ExpoExpo has made waves with Expo Router, which aims to further narrow the gap between web dev and mobile dev. Bringing together file-system based routing, unified navigation, static rendering (on web) and deeplinking (on native), it promises to tame the challenge of code-sharing better than ever before.They've also come out with Expo Application Services (EAS), a set of SaaS solutions for every part of the app development lifecycle, spanning building, deploying, updating, and analytics. By spanning the whole vertical, they can offer a first-class dev experience that is impossible to match with piecemeal solutions. As their first outwardly profit-generating activity after years of open-source altruism, a lot is riding on it.Software Mansion

I'm sick of it. In the world of mobile development (though likely also elsewhere), we sink so much engineering talent into making tools that are great within-ecosystem, but as we don't bother making them available to other ecosystems, everyone ends up reinventing the wheel.The end result is that we stretch ourselves thin and waste time that could have been spent innovating new things.Titans don't want to shareHere I admit to donning my tinfoil hat, but so often, the problem starts with Big Tech creating walled gardens. For all the decades that Apple and Google have had to collaborate, how much code is actually shared between iOS and Android, besides their common Unix ancestry? Although both are platforms for handheld devices, with all the same needs, at the level facing the app developer, they have:different UI toolkitsdifferent layout enginesdifferent runtime languagesdifferent SDKsdifferent app stores… so to deploy a native app to both platforms, we need to learn and write everything

Thank you for dropping by.Here you can find my thoughts and ideas in long form, as they are best suffered. In this newsletter, I hope to un-typecast myself as a cross-platform tinkerer and expose (for better or worse) that which lies deeper.I wasn't always this way—an opensource software developer, that is. As a kid, I wanted to be a cartoonist or a gaming journalist. This is summed up pretty well by this drawing of me playing on a Sega (somehow with an N64 controller) circa 1998, aged 5-6.I never really grew out of those interests. I was drawing comics about Sega and Nintendo characters continuously from 1999...... to 2003, with a series titled "Jamie & Alex's [current year] Comics" (the companion publication to my brother's "Alex & Jamie's [current year] Comics"):The comics sadly ceased regular circulation after that (the management deemed it was unprofitable to keep writing comics for an audience of one—yes, even my brother didn't read them) but I couldn't help but keep coming back