The Weekly Dev's Brew #11 ☕

Nx 21: A Fresh Pot of Continuous Tasks and Terminal UI

The Nx team has just served up their 21st major release, and it's packed with more flavor than your local coffee shop's special roast. The standout features? Continuous tasks and a gorgeous new Terminal UI that might actually make you enjoy looking at your terminal.

Continuous tasks solve one of the biggest headaches in monorepo development: running multiple long-lived processes together. Need to spin up your backend API whenever you serve your frontend? Now you can simply mark your API's serve task as continuous: true and add it as a dependency to your frontend's dev target. Nx will handle the rest, launching both services in parallel without waiting for the backend to complete before starting the frontend.

But with multiple processes running at once, how do you make sense of all those logs? Enter Nx's new Terminal UI. This split-screen interface shows all running tasks in one panel while displaying logs for your selected task in another. Navigation is simple with arrow keys or vim-style h/j/k/l commands. Press ? for keyboard shortcuts or q to exit.

Other notable improvements include a blazingly fast Gradle plugin (59.6% CI time reduction in testing!), a sleek Migrate UI in Nx Console for stepping through migrations, and support for React Router 7.

Java devs, take note—the Gradle plugin updates make Nx worth a serious look for your projects. When the Nx team tested it on the Spring Boot repo, it slashed CI times from 1 hour 44 minutes to just 42 minutes.

Heads up if you're still using Node 18: Nx 21 requires Node 20.19 minimum as Node 18 has reached end-of-life. There are also a few breaking changes around task runners API, so check the full release notes if you're upgrading.

Quick Sips

• Svelte Summit is happening May 8-9 with talks on everything from Svelte 5 to building cross-platform browser extensions.

• OpenAI is reportedly acquiring AI coding tool Windsurf for a whopping $3 billion, while Anysphere (makers of Cursor) raised $900 million (more details here) at a $9 billion valuation. The AI coding assistant race is heating up faster than your morning coffee.

• Node.js 24.0.0 just released with V8 13.6, npm 11, and AsyncLocalStorage using AsyncContextFrame by default. URLPattern is now available globally too.

• GSAP, a popular JS animation library, is now completely free! Yes, all bonus plugins like SplitText and MorphSVG that were previously Club GSAP exclusives are now available to everyone at no cost, thanks to Webflow.

• React Server Components are getting more attention—Dan Abramov wrote a helpful explainer for Astro devs that clarifies RSC's mental model. If you know Astro, you already understand about 80% of RSC's approach!

Coffee Craft of the Week ☕

Instead of the usual coffee fact of the week I want to try something a little different this time and share one of my personal coffee recipes. Summer's approach means it's time for cold coffee drinks, and the Aerocano is the perfect summer coffee drink. Imagine a chilled, foamed Americano with the velvety texture of a nitro cold brew—without needing any special equipment beyond your espresso machine (because everyone has one of those lying around, right?).

How to Make an Aerocano in 5 Steps:

1. Add cold water and ice to a milk frothing pitcher

2. Pull a short double espresso into a cup

3. Pour the espresso into the pitcher with ice and water

4. Use your steam wand to foam for 6-12 seconds (same technique as microfoam, but brief to keep it cold)

5. Pour into a glass with ice and enjoy!

The result is a refreshing, creamy iced coffee with a beautiful texture that's perfect for those scorching development sessions.

See you next week. Happy coding & brewing!