The Weekly Dev's Brew #4 ☕

Sip-sized web dev updates to enjoy with your morning coffee

Fresh Roast: Oxlint Beta Brings Blazing Speed to Your Linting

Hey devs, It's been a rather slow week in web development news, which makes it perfectly ironic to kick things off with something blazing fast! Pour yourself a cup and settle in - Oxlint has officially entered its beta phase after more than a year of community development, and it's bringing some impressive improvements to the table.

What's brewing in Oxlint Beta?

After a year of collaborative development, Oxlint has matured into a more feature-complete, stable, and blazing fast linting tool. The performance gains are particularly eye-opening - benchmarks show it's up to 50% faster than the previous release. For perspective, linting Microsoft's VSCode (with 5,703 files) now takes just 0.792 seconds compared to the previous 1.697 seconds!

The Oxlint team hasn't just focused on speed. The beta release now includes 502 total rules (up from 205), covering popular frameworks and libraries including TypeScript, React, Next.js, and more. The default ruleset has expanded to 99 rules (up from 70), giving you more comprehensive code quality checks out of the box. One important note: Oxlint currently works only on JavaScript and TypeScript code - while it supports linting <script> content in .astro, .svelte, and .vue files, it doesn't yet provide template support for Angular, Vue, or other framework templates.

For smaller projects, you can fully replace ESLint. For larger codebases, the Oxlint team recommends using eslint-plugin-oxlint to disable overlapping ESLint rules and running Oxlint before ESLint for faster feedback.

What's coming next?

The Oxlint team is working on support for custom ESLint plugins and better editor integrations for VSCode, Zed, coc.nvim, and JetBrains IDEs.

Quick Sips

☕ Node.js Gets Experimental Config Files

The latest release of Node.js (v23.10.0) introduces an experimental config file feature to improve developer experience. Instead of passing multiple flags, you can now create a node.config.json file with your configuration options:

{
  "$schema": "<https://nodejs.org/dist/v23.10.0/docs/>...",
  "nodeOptions": {
    "test-coverage-lines": 80,
    "test-coverage-branches": 60
  }
}

Run it with node --experimental-config-file=node.config.json or node --experimental-default-config-file to use a default config file in your project root.

In other Node.js news, the project has launched an official Discord community. The server evolved from the existing Nodeiflux community and will be jointly managed by the Node.js project and community volunteers. It's a great place to connect with other Node.js developers and get help with questions. Join the Node.js Discord server to become part of the growing community!

☕ Astro 5.5 Enhances Diagramming in Markdown

Astro 5.5 just landed with better support for diagramming tools like Mermaid in Markdown content. The new excludeLangs option in your Markdown configuration lets you skip syntax highlighting for specific language code blocks:

// astro.config.mjs
import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';
import rehypeMermaid from 'rehype-mermaid';

export default defineConfig({
  markdown: {
    syntaxHighlight: {
      type: 'shiki',
      excludeLangs: ['mermaid', 'math'],
    },
    rehypePlugins: [rehypeMermaid],
  },
});

This release also adds type-safe sessions and improved heading ID compatibility. You can read all this in the official release blog post.

☕ European Accessibility Act Deadline Approaching

A friendly reminder that the European Accessibility Act (EAA) compliance deadline is set for June 28, 2025 - just a few months away. The regulation will require all digital products and services operating in the EU to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards.

This affects everything from websites and mobile apps to e-commerce platforms and streaming services. Instead of vibe coding along, you might want to get started on your accessibility work, now's the time! Fortis Adamakis provided a fantastic overview here.

☕ Google Releases Gemma 3

Google has introduced Gemma 3, a collection of lightweight open-source AI models built from Gemini 2.0 technology. These models are designed to run on single GPUs or TPUs, making advanced AI more accessible for developers.

Gemma 3 comes in various sizes (1B, 4B, 12B, and 27B parameters) and supports function calling, a 128k-token context window, and visual processing capabilities. The models support over 140 languages and integrate with popular frameworks like Hugging Face, PyTorch, and TensorFlow.

Weekly Coffee Fact

Did you know that the world's first webcam was created in 1991 at Cambridge University to monitor a coffee pot? Computer scientists working away from the coffee area created the "CoffeeCam" so they could check if there was fresh coffee before making the journey. The camera was finally switched off on August 22, 2001, but not before becoming an early internet landmark. Coffee has been driving technological innovation longer than we thought!

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