Hi there,

If you're new here, welcome to the Top 3 in Tech newsletter. Every other week you'll get an email like this from me with coding advice and updates from the tech world.

So without further ado, let's just get started with this weeks exciting new releases eh?

1. The Future of Front-End Development

Front-end web development has changed a lot throughout history.

In the early days of the web, HTML was simply used to display text/images and link between pages. Today we can use modern JavaScript frameworks and libraries to create interactive 3D experiences and games right in the browser.

I personally love this transition, because it gives me (the front-end developer) way more power and flexibility. And who doesn't want to build cool stuff with the hottest tools!

But there's one obvious limitation the front-end hasn't really been able to solve:

Data persistence.

If you need user logins, data storage or anything like that in your app, you're shit out of luck as a front-end dev. And most apps aren't that interesting or useful without it.

So, why am I bringing this up now? Well, because Vercel (the company behind NextJS) has just revealed 4 exciting new features as part of their hosting platform all involving data storage:

1. Key/Value store
2. Postgres SQL database
3. Blob storage
4. Edge config

What these really do is make it so much easier to add persistant data storage to any front-end application, whether it's NextJS, Nuxt, SvelteKit or something else. Because these frameworks all have great methods for running server/backend code (either directly in components with React Server Components or through serverless functions), connecting to a DB and storing data is now just a few lines of code.

I really believe stuff like this is what will truly give front-end developers superpowers. Anything to make it easier to build useful, real-world applications is great news for us. And that's exactly what all these new features will do.

Key/Value storage and Postgres database are currently in public beta, while Blob storage is in private beta. But I definitely recommend giving them a shot for your next project - just to experience how simple it can be to connect your app to a real, scaleable data persistence solution.

​Read more about the new storage features on the landing page​

Or check out this video or this video for more details.

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2. NodeJS 20

In the same vein: as front-end frameworks get more powerful and allow us to run server code, it's important to remember that most of this server code is ran using the NodeJS runtime. NodeJS comes pre-built with a standard library to do stuff like read from the file system, hook into the operating system and other cool features. And as of a few weeks ago, the newest LTS (long term support) version 20 was just released 🥳

This release comes with a bunch of new features and performance upgrades. So even if you're not directly working with NodeJS, the update will make any frameworks/libraries you use run faster - and who doesn't love free performance upgrades!

​Read the announcement blog post here​

3. ViteJS 4.13

And to round off this weeks newsletter, here's another update you might not care about but will directly benefit from:

ViteJS, the front-end build tool that all major front-end frameworks are now built upon, also got a cool new performance-focused upgrade. Vite is quickly becoming the industry standard for build tools (bye bye webpack, you won't be missed), and comes with a giant ecosystem of plugins on top of a great out-of-the-box feature set.

So again, even though it might not look super exciting, updates like this make your development workflow faster by default. Let's go, technology!

​Read the details of how much faster Vite 4.13 is here​

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​That's it for now! See you in 2 weeks ✌️

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— Mads Brodt