March 2024: Partial Prerendering is the Next Final Frontier for Web Apps
And also more discussions about AI coders, Google's changing core web vitals, and if frontend devs are viewed as "serious engineers."
Hi all,
Spring has sprung in my corner of the world, and if you know anything about Atlanta, GA in the springtime you know it’s pollen season. 🤧
The light dusting of yellow pollen that coats everything outdoors this time of year is a small price to pay for all the greenery we enjoy 🌳, so while I try not to breathe too deeply when I go outside right now, I’m still thankful for the warmer days. ☀️
But enough about weather, let’s talk tech: I’ve got news about partial pre-rendering in Next.js, hot takes on whether frontend devs are considered “serious engineers”, and an endorsement for CSS viewport units.
Here’s this month’s goodies.
I interviewed the Next.js team about partial pre-rendering and shared my own thoughts on if AI code assistants will take our jobs on the PodRocket podcast this month.
This month I appeared on LogRocket’s PodRocket podcast twice: once interviewing two of the team members behind Next.js’s feature: partial pre-rendering, and then again commenting on timely web development news with some of the other regular PodRocket hosts.
Delba Oliviers and Wyatt Johnson, two of the engineers working at Vercel on Next.js, joined me to describe how partial pre-rendering takes the best of SSR and client-side rendering and blends them together for a superior user experience.
The portions of a page that are static (think headers and footers, static content, and the like) are prerendered and served from the cache while the dynamic content (user specific data, item availability, etc.) are streamed in, all in a single HTTP request. Next’s docs warn that partial prerendering is still an experimental feature, but when it’s ready for primetime, it’s going to be something to behold.
On my other episode, I, along with three of the other hosts, talked about web dev news like Devin, the latest AI coder trying to take our jobs, Google’s new core web vitals metric INP, and an opinion piece about if frontend devs are viewed as “less serious engineers” than, say, backend engineers.
I really enjoyed being a part of both episodes, and I hope you listen to one or both and let me know your thoughts.
CSS viewport units make using CSS even better, and you should definitely be using them.
From the first time I started writing CSS, I was hooked on it. It’s a language that is incredibly powerful, sometimes extremely frustrating, but ultimately makes the web the useful, usable place it is today.
One of the lesser known, but still highly relevant, bits of CSS involves viewport units. They’ve been around for years now, but only recently has their visibility and usage really been growing, and I think it’s due in part to the fact that people just don’t as much about them.
So I wrote an article all about CSS viewport units, complete with interactive CodePen demos, to show how they differ from the traditional percentages, pixels, and rems. Those values certainly still have their place and uses, but viewport units are just another tool that should be in your CSS belt when the need arises.
I hope you enjoyed this month’s edition of “Paige Codes.” Please share with your friends if you did.
See you again at the end of April,
- Paige
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