The Weekly Dev's Brew #18 ☕

Vite 7.0: Five Years of Quietly Taking Over the Web

The Vite team dropped version 7.0 this week, and buried in the release notes is a mind-bending stat: 31 million downloads per week. That's a 14 million increase just since Vite 6 dropped seven months ago. To put that in perspective, Vite is now being downloaded more times per week than there are people in all of Australia.

But here's what caught my attention beyond the numbers - they're shipping Vite itself as ESM-only and requiring Node.js 20.19+. This isn't just a version bump; it's Vite saying "we're done carrying legacy baggage." The team can now distribute as pure ESM without worrying about CJS compatibility, thanks to Node's new require(esm) support.

The real sleeper feature? Baseline Widely Available as the new default browser target. Instead of the old 'modules' target, Vite 7 now automatically updates browser support based on what's been stable across browsers for 30+ months. Chrome goes from version 87 to 107, Safari jumps from 14.0 to 16.0.

Oh, and ViteConf is going in-person in Amsterdam this October. After three online editions, the ecosystem that quietly revolutionized frontend tooling finally gets to meet face-to-face.

Angular Wants to Drop @angular/animations (Finally)

The Angular team published an RFC proposing animate.in and animate.out features to replace their 8-year-old animations package. The current package weighs 60kb and runs animations in JavaScript instead of leveraging hardware acceleration. The new approach? Pure CSS with framework help for the tricky parts. These aren't technically directives – they're built natively into the framework for better optimization and tree-shaking – but they look and feel just like directives in your templates.

What's brilliant about this RFC is the timing. CSS now has @starting-style and view transitions – features that didn't exist when @angular/animations was created. The team is essentially saying "hey, browsers can handle this stuff natively now, so let's just get out of their way.”

The function syntax looks particularly clean:

javascript
animateFn = (event: AnimationEvent) => {
  gsap.to(event.element, {
    rotation: 360,
    onComplete: () => event.animationComplete()
  });
}

It's Angular embracing third-party animation libraries instead of fighting them.

Quick Sips

• Prettier 3.6 shipped with an experimental CLI that's 3x faster on large codebases (with the help of e18e). Of course, this performance boost is hidden behind the --experimental-cli flag because apparently even our code formatters need to be feature-flagged now (this is actually a good thing).

• Michael Thiessen wrote a comprehensive deep-dive on Vue 3.5's useTemplateRef, covering everything from basic DOM access to advanced composable patterns with the Flexible Arguments Pattern. It's the kind of thorough walkthrough that makes you realize you've been doing template refs the hard way this whole time.

• Model Context Protocol got a major update that actually makes AI coding assistants more useful. The big win? Structured tool output means your AI can return properly formatted code, configs, and responses instead of just text blobs. Plus, the new "elicitation" feature lets AI tools ask you follow-up questions mid-conversation – like "which database are you using?" – instead of making assumptions. It's basically making AI assistants less chatty and more like pair programming partners who actually know when to ask for clarification. Somewhat related I recently implemented an MCP from scratch with Max Kless from NX, might want to check it out

• The "Not Paying Open Source Maintainers Is Expensive" post from OpenSource Pledge makes a compelling case: paying maintainers isn't charity, it's risk management. Log4Shell and XZ Utils happened because maintainers were burning out on unpaid work. Highly recommend reading it!

• Framework Field Guide dropped the first 3 chapters of their second book "Ecosystem," diving deep into the tooling that surrounds frameworks. The bundling chapter covers how transpiling, code merging, and optimization actually work, while the linting/formatting chapter breaks down Prettier, ESLint, and TypeScript. It's the kind of resource that explains why your build pipeline does what it does, instead of just how to configure it.

Ryan Carniato Spills the Tea on Signals 2.0

Speaking of framework evolution, Jan-Niklas Wortmann sat down with Ryan Carniato - CEO of Signals and creator of SolidJS – for a deep dive into how signals are reshaping the JavaScript landscape. The conversation covers everything from how SolidJS is unique compared to React (spoiler: it's not just about performance) to the upcoming Signals 2.0 and their potential impact on async JavaScript patterns.

Ryan shares insights from his open-source journey and provides practical advice for developers trying to keep up with the ever-changing frontend world. Whether you're a React developer curious about what else is out there or just want to understand why everyone's talking about fine-grained reactivity, this 95-minute conversation is worth your next coffee break.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLvAJYHQ9m0

Listen to the audio version: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2470901/episodes/17374948

Coffee Fact of the Week ☕

Coffee was originally discovered by goats in Ethiopia around 850 AD – or so the story goes. Legend says a goat herder named Kaldi noticed his goats becoming unusually energetic after eating certain red berries. He tried them himself, felt the buzz, and brought them to local monks who initially thought the berries were the devil's work – until they realized how much longer they could stay awake for evening prayers. There's no concrete proof this actually happened, but it sounds plausible enough that we've been retelling it for over a thousand years. So technically, we might owe our entire coding-fueled late-night session culture to some hyperactive goats – or at least to whoever invented this charming origin story.

See you next week. Happy coding & brewing!

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