March 24, 2025

Frontrunners and Truffle Oil Potato Wedges

Hey friends,

I had a lovely time in the DC area last week at Frontrunners 2025. We had a nice variety of speakers and topics:

• Kilian Valkhof, maker of Polypane, reminded us of the Rule of Least Power and that HTML and CSS can handle more than we think.
• Kito Mann showed us the power of web components and Lit, the spiritual successor to Google Polymer
• Tony Bradley introduced us to Entity-Component Systems in TypeScript and how that may be all you need for games. (Well, that and maybe Pixi.js)
• Courtney Yatteau showed us some ways to handle complex tasks in mapping with Esri.
• Alex Riviere gave a rundown of all the exciting new features in CSS including custom properties, container queries, and much more.
• Zach Krall talked about speech-as-interface and demoed some upcoming web APIs that will assist us in building spoken interfaces.
• Steve Drucker showed us an implementation of using an LLM as an alternate interface to a booking form through a Vue/Node/Amazon Bedrock stack.
• Shri Khalpada extolled the virtues of creative coding as a way to give back and combat the "enshi#%ification" of the web and how p5 can be a helpful tool in that effort.

And I gave my talk on building motion for the web.

There were also cookies the size of my head, 'morning glory' muffins, truffle-oil-fried parmesan potato wedges—oh wait, sorry, this is a web newsletter not a food newsletter...

See y'all next week!