Episode 64 - Delaney Gillilan

React made a lot of us feel powerful, then maintenance made a lot of us feel tired. Drew Bragg sits down with Delaney Gillilan, creator of Datastar, to argue for a different kind of “modern web” one that keeps the browser’s strengths front and center and keeps your app logic where it belongs: on the server. If you’ve ever looked at your dependency graph and wondered how you got here, this conversation is a reset.

We get concrete about what Datastar is and how it works: a tiny reactive framework built around HTML, data attributes, and signals, with a plugin system that stays out of the way. Delaney explains why most state should live on the backend, why duplicating validation and business rules in the client is wasted effort, and why hypermedia is still the simplest way to communicate what a user can do next. We also unpack the “send strings to the browser” philosophy and how that changes performance, complexity, and even team collaboration.

Real-time is where it gets spicy. Delaney makes the case for Server-Sent Events (SSE) over WebSockets for many apps, leaning on normal HTTP semantics, built-in reconnects, and streaming compression to ship tiny DOM diffs efficiently. From there we talk CQRS as a mental model for command intent vs view updates, plus what this means for Ruby on Rails developers weighing Hotwire, Stimulus, and upgrades. We close with two bold companion projects: Rocket, which makes Web Components more declarative, and Stellar, a Tailwind alternative that uses parametric CSS variables for a modern design system workflow.

If you enjoy deep technical takes on reactive UI, server-driven rendering, SSE, Rails, and modern CSS, subscribe, share the episode with a friend who’s stuck in SPA fatigue, and leave a review with the part you disagreed with most.

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