Simon Grimm explores the future of React Native, focusing on animations, game development, performance improvements, and new ecosystem tools.

Key highlights:

• Reanimated 4 release: features and roadmap.
• Precompiled React Native for iOS arriving in 0.81.
• Expo Router gains native tabs support.
• Building 2D games with Matter.js + Skia.
• UX enhancements like Glass Buttons in Expo UI and extended keyboard controls.
• New Expo community examples: AWS S3 uploads, GraphQL integration.
• Krystof Woldrich joins Expo’s team.
• Major rewrite of Nitro Image for faster media loading.
• Discussion on Claude Code and its evolving AI role in development.

On July 31, 2025, Node.js v22.18.0 “Jod” (LTS) was officially released, marking a significant update in the long-term support branch. This version introduces type stripping by default, enabling Node.js to execute .ts files directly without prior compilation—so you can run TypeScript code with node file.ts out of the box. While experimental and limited in syntax support, this feature can be disabled using --no‑experimental‑strip‑types.

Beyond TypeScript support, the release includes several quality‑of‑life enhancements: CLI support for import.meta.main, updated dependencies (such as sqlite and Acorn), and expanded watch‑mode documentation. Although this entry focuses primarily on the type stripping feature, minor improvements across the runtime further stabilize the LTS branch as a production-ready platform.

Node.js v22 remains in Active LTS through October 2025, providing a stable and feature-rich option for production apps; this release underscores the project's ongoing evolution toward seamlessly supporting modern JavaScript and TypeScript workflows.

This announcement introduces TanStack DB 0.1 (beta), a client-side database layer built on top of TanStack Query. It adds collections, live queries, and transactional mutations, enabling reactive, relational data handling directly in the browser. With differential dataflow at its core, it updates only what changes, delivering sub‑millisecond query results even across datasets with tens of thousands of records.

The post highlights powerful integrations: you can continue using REST or GraphQL with Query; or plug into sync engines like ElectricSQL to keep collections automatically up-to-date. TanStack DB handles optimistic writes with automatic rollback, supports joins across collections, and allows incremental adoption—layering the new system into existing apps one collection at a time.

Practical use cases include real-time dashboards, collaborative UIs, and high-interaction apps where render performance suffers under heavy state usage. With the beta available now, developers are encouraged to explore its low‑latency, reactive architecture and begin migrating parts of their tanstack-query–powered codebases.

This page introduces Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview, unveiled on July 29, 2025, featuring two major components:

• Notebook Kit, an open-source CLI and Vite plugin for converting the new HTML‑based notebook format into static sites, enabling self‑hosting, version control, and build workflows.
• Observable Desktop, a macOS authoring app that supports vanilla JavaScript, enhanced AI workflows, and local-first editing workflows that will later merge with Observable's web platform.

Notebooks 2.0 adopts a simple, human-editable HTML file format with <notebook> and <script> cells, uses plain JavaScript modules (no proprietary dialect), supports standard import syntax for libraries, and reintroduces themes and styling for layouts and customization.

The technology preview is open for feedback; the web-based editor and collaboration features are planned next.

In this insightful video, the host delivers a head‑to‑head comparison between Zod and Valibot, two popular JavaScript/TypeScript validation libraries. Viewers learn how each library handles schema definition, runtime type validation, error reporting, and optional-field support—all explained with clean examples and a focus on clarity and brevity.

The walkthrough covers bundle size, with Valibot’s modular "pipe"-style schema definitions offering a significantly smaller footprint than Zod’s full bundle, and performance benchmarks showing Valibot often outpaces Zod in initialization speed. The video also explores customization workflows—including custom validators, JSON schema generation, and how each library enables effective TypeScript integration.

A highlight moment features praise from Zod’s creator, who called the video “incredible... succinct and clear,” underlining its value as a practical resource for developers choosing between the two libraries.

AudioTee.js brings system-wide audio capture to Node.js developers on macOS by wrapping a bundled Swift binary built with Core Audio taps. The library streams system audio as PCM‑encoded chunks via an EventEmitter interface, making it easier to pipe live audio into tools like speech recognition services.

It offers a familiar API pattern: developers can configure sample rate, chunk duration, optional process filters, and muting of the output audio. The underlying binary remains lightweight (under 600 KB), cross-platform across Intel and Apple silicon Macs, and emits fixed‑size audio buffers according to event timing parameters.

The article also outlines current limitations—AudioTee.js requires macOS 14.2 or later, captures only from the default output device, and outputs in mono PCM. Despite these constraints, the author views this as a long-awaited, native way to access system audio, inviting early adopters to try the beta version and contribute feedback or feature requests.

The hosts Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert welcome Tim Farnam, creator of Hot Page, an editing-first tool designed to empower users to learn web development and reduce dependency on large platforms. The discussion delves into Farnam’s journey from traditional print and web news to launching a tech-forward creative tool.

Tim walks through how Hot Page works—including its intuitive page editing interface, use of utility classes over inline styles, and handling of JavaScript + style changes in real time. While not a heavy CMS, it supports repeating elements and page prototypes, delivering a streamlined authoring experience with intention and agility.

The hosts also explore broader topics like design philosophies (e.g., web components, visual styling), how changes are persisted, and their beta release plans. Live editing, aligned with user flow and a code-first mindset, underlines how Hot Page aims to simplify content creation without sacrificing developer control.

Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski share actionable techniques for maximizing productivity with AI-powered coding tools—including Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, and Windsurf. They begin by advising developers to scaffold applications manually to maintain context and recharge ownership over generated code.

The hosts cover advanced prompt crafting: being clear, breaking down tasks, adding <XML> or <tags> to define context more precisely, and building reusable rule sets (e.g., Cursor rules or Copilot rules). They also explain how to automate rule generation from existing codebases and store rules in llm.txt files for consistency across projects.

Further insights include methods to maintain AI chat quality over time: tagging relevant files/functions, feeding execution or error logs back into AI, and avoiding overly long chat sessions by starting fresh threads for new features. These practices help remedy AI drift and improve feedback loops.

JavaScript developers often write repetitive conditional logic when assigning default values or updating state based on truthiness. This post introduces the ES2021 logical assignment operators—||=, &&=, and ??=—which combine a logical operator with assignment to streamline these patterns and make code more readable and intentional.

The author breaks down each operator:

- ||= assigns the right-hand value if the left-hand side is falsy.

• &&= updates the left-hand side only when it’s truthy.
• ??= assigns only if the left-hand side is null or undefined, preserving falsy-but-valid values like 0, false, or "".

Support for these operators is solid across modern platforms—Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Node.js versions 15+—though they are not available in Internet Explorer. The post also warns against using optional chaining (?.) on the left-hand side of these expressions, as that usage is not valid syntax. Overall, the operators offer concise syntax with real-world benefits for prop defaults, config management, and frontend state mutation workflows.

This open‑source CLI tool helps developers analyze and visualize dependencies in JavaScript and TypeScript projects. With support for CommonJS, ES6, AMD, CoffeeScript, and Vue inputs, it lets you create dependency graphs, enforce architecture rules, detect circular couplings, and generate structured reports based on custom rules.

It includes real‑world usage examples with visual graphs from popular projects like Chalk, Yarn, and React, showing how teams can map their own codebases into clear module diagrams. The tool’s rule engine is highly customizable—allowing constraints such as “controllers must not depend on views” or cycle detection rules—all configurable via a JSON- or JS-based config file.

Version 17.0.0 is the most recent release that introduces enhancements like dropping support for older Node.js versions and performance-optimized reporting modes. It remains actively maintained with frequent updates and community engagement.