Optimism Hour

Tom MacWright talks about some of the decidedly good things happening in web development.

In the not-so-recent past, when I was writing server-side code, I’d have to use a module like request to handle HTTP requests, the querystring builtin or the qs module for decoding query strings, and url.parse() for parsing URLs, and moment to format dates in English.

Today, none of those problems require, or even really benefit from, using Node.js-specific modules. We have fetch() on the backend, and the URLSearchParams object for query strings, the URL object for URL parsing, and the Intl system for formatting dates, numbers, and lists.

Plus, those are standardized APIs, meaning any JavaScript runtime, which there are starting to be many, all have them. Tom points out how frameworks are getting better and shifting towards an SSR model, tools are getting faster, the edge is picking up, and even computers themselves are taking strides.