JS Party: JavaScript, CSS, Web Development · Changelog Media

Create interactive tutorials the easy way

October 3, 2024·51 min·4 clips

Kurt Mackey reveals why deploying a simple sandwich app on AWS is harder than using a dedicated server.

JS Party is the Changelog Media podcast about JavaScript, CSS, and web development. This episode features Jared interviewing Tomek Sulkowski, founding engineer, DevRel, and DevEx at StackBlitz. Sulkowski traces StackBlitz’s evolution from its 2021 origins as a custom JavaScript playground for React, Angular, and Vue—built on SystemJS, requiring per-framework customization—to its current foundation on Web Containers, announced at the same time: an in-browser operating system with a real file system, network layer, Git, and a Node.js runtime capable of running npm packages natively in the browser without a server. This was the technical foundation required to make Tutorial Kit possible. Tutorial Kit is an open source project that allows documentation authors, framework maintainers, and educators to embed fully interactive, editable, and runnable coding environments directly in tutorial pages—without requiring users to leave the page or set up any local environment. Sulkowski describes the user experience: a reader reaches a tutorial step, sees a code editor embedded in the page, can modify the code, and immediately sees the running output in a browser preview panel alongside. This collapses the friction between reading about a concept and actually experiencing it. The episode explores the technical architecture—how Web Containers handle sandboxing, security, and performance constraints in a browser context—and the content creation side: what the Tutorial Kit authoring experience looks like, how authors define steps, and how they can set up environment state at each stage. Sulkowski discusses which frameworks and documentation teams have already adopted Tutorial Kit, including some major JavaScript framework documentation sites. The conversation touches on the competitive landscape of in-browser development environments, StackBlitz’s positioning relative to CodeSandbox and GitHub Codespaces, and the unique affordances of browser-native execution. Tone is technically engaged and friendly, aimed at JavaScript developers who write documentation, build learning materials, or are curious about the architecture of in-browser development tools.

As heard by us

A sandwich app and a billion-dollar company frame the real tradeoffs behind hosting and identity choices.

Hosting a tiny web app can get strange quickly, and Kurt Mackey uses a Braunschweiger sandwich recipe app to make the point. The Fly.io co-founder and CEO sets AWS beside a dedicated Hetzner server, framing the choice less as cloud ideology than as a test of developer…

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Why you'd press play

You get public-cloud friction, a Braunschweiger sandwich app, and a million-user auth free tier in one developer-tools conversation.

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