It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA (News)

0:28What up nerds? We did a big thing, no spoilers here, and we even started dreaming of the next one. Huge thanks to Gerhard Lazu, Breakmaster Cylinder, and Nora Jones for making the show extra special. We're producing the live bits now and will ship the resulting episodes and videos starting next week. Okay, let's get into the news. It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA. Jono Alderson takes aim at single page apps as the answer to the inevitable request to make it feel like an app. Quote, at some point during the scoping process, someone says the words, a CMO, a digital lead, a brand manager, and with that single phrase, the architecture is locked in.

1:15It'll be an SPA, probably React, maybe Vue, almost certainly deployed on Vercell or Netlify, bundled with a headless CMS and a GraphQL API for good measure. But the decision wasn't really about architecture. It wasn't even about performance, scalability, or content management. It was about interactions, about how the site would feel when you clicked around. The assumption was simple. Seamless navigation requires us to build an app. That assumption is now obsolete. End quote. Jono's claim, and I 100 % hope that he's right, is that the new View Transitions API teamed with speculation rules gives us everything we need to make it feel like an app without needing a single line of JavaScript.

2:01Turn almost any device into a file server. This copy party project is a seriously cool piece of open source software. Here's the pitch. Quote, a portable file server with accelerated resumable uploads, D-dupe, webdav, FTP, TFTP, zeroconf, media indexer, thumbnails++, all in one file, no dependencies, end quote. Once the server is up and running, the files can be accessed from any web browser, even IE6. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time. The readme is top-notch too. It features screenshots, videos, a quick start guide, the project's philosophy, and a read-only demo server running on a NUC in the author's basement.

2:51This is so obviously a passion project, it's hard to fake this level of care and attention to detail. The Game Genie Generation Ernie Smith refreshed his 2015 piece on Game Genie in honor of its 35th anniversary. Quote, July 1990, a full 35 years ago, was supposed to be the coming out party for one of the best accessories ever created for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It made games easier, sure, but it also made them more interesting. It presented a new way of thinking about the games that you brought home. But Nintendo didn't like it and the company sued. That device eventually emerged and despite the legal battle, it became a defining part of what made the NES great.

3:33End quote. I loved my game genie when I was a kid and I always wondered how it worked. Ernie's excellent exposition on the history and still relevant impact of the device linked me to a clip from Modern Vintage Gamer that answers the question I've had since childhood but never took the initiative to answer. Your link to that clip is in the newsletter. It's now time for sponsored news. Depot build auto scaling for everyone. Depot just launched general availability for build auto scaling, which dynamically scales your remote build capacity based on workload demand. Whether you're pushing one commit or a hundred, your builds stay fast without managing any infrastructure.

4:15And it's available today on all paid plans. Here's founder and CEO Kyle Galbraith When we first launched Depot, our goal was to make Docker image builds exponentially faster. Why? Because we experienced the absolute drudgery of waiting for container builds locally and in CI. It's the modern-day equivalent of watching paint dry because saving and loading layer cache over networks negated all performance benefits of caching and building multi-platform images required emulation, which brings builds to a crawl. So we built the solution we have always wanted, a fast, shareable, and reliable container build service that could be used from any existing CI workflow or anywhere you are using Docker build.

4:57End quote. Learn more at depot.dev, links, and the newsletter. How Anthropic Teams Use Cloud Code I recently posited on the show that Anthropic may have a virtuous cycle style advantage building cloud code because they are the best positioned to leverage cloud code productively. If true, this post sharing how their internal teams use the tool might become one of the classic blunders. You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this. Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line. Probably not.

5:36Quote, Anthropix internal teams are transforming their workflows with cloud code, enabling developers and non-technical staff to tackle complex projects, automate tasks, and bridge skill gaps that previously limited their productivity. Through these interviews, we've gathered insights on how different departments use CloudCode, its impact on their work, and tips for other organizations considering adoption. End quote. You'll hear from their teams representing data infrastructure, product development, security engineering, data science, growth marketing, and more. The future is not self-hosted.

6:11Drew Lighton did something radical. He built his own cloud. Quote, My wife and I now have a computer in our house that runs open source equivalents to Google Drive, Google Photos, Audible, Kindle, and Netflix. It syncs to all of our devices. It's secured behind our own VPN. And it's wholly, truly owned by us. End quote. After doing all that, he sat down to share with us how he did it, what he learned, and why he thinks self-hosting is not the future we should be fighting for. Quote, Self-hosting is cool. I've had a lot of fun building my home server, and it does give me some peace of mind as a digital life backup.

6:49But if we want to live in a world where we are not bent at the knee to corporate lords and also don't fall victim to the myth of self-reliance and rugged individualism, we need to think radically differently about how we create communal shared internet infrastructure. End quote. What follows are his initial thoughts on what needs to happen instead. That is the news for now, but go and subscribe to the ChangeLog newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on, such as Google announces a new Trends API, reading QR codes without a computer, and enough AI co-pilots, we need AI HUDs. Get in on the newsletter at changelog.news.

7:33Have a great week. Like, subscribe, and five-star review us if you dig the show. And I'll talk to you again real soon.