806: The King of Drag and Drop: Alex Reardon

Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

Scott and Wes talk with Alex Reardon from Atlassian about developing drag-and-drop libraries, specifically the challenges with creating efficient and accessible drag-and-drop functionalities for the web. They also explore what it takes to build and implement a system that works seamlessly across various frameworks.

Show Notes

• 00:00 Welcome to Syntax!
• 01:18 Brought to you by Sentry.io.
• 01:51 What Alex does at Atlassian
  • react-beautiful-dnd
  • Pragmatic drag and drop
• 04:38 What makes drag and drop tricky.
• 06:38 Use-cases.
• 10:54 What security is in place?
• 12:30 How to make it feel native.
• 19:20 Is the drag and drop spec ongoing?
• 20:03 How do you build this headless?
• 21:33 How does drag and drop work with frameworks?
• 23:48 Making drag and drop feel the same across mobile and desktop.
• 26:09 What’s the key to really good drag performance?
• 29:58 How do you make drag and drop accessible?
• 34:57 Pragmatic drag and drop code vs application code.
  • Shoelace
  • shadcn
• 40:00 How does testing work?
  • Playwright
  • Cypress
• 43:15 Internal adoption at Atlassian.
• 44:27 Working on high-impact projects.
• 49:15 Versioning and internal adoption at Atlassian.
• 51:29 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs.

Sick Picks

• Alex: Coffee, James Hoffmann YouTube Channel.

Shameless Plugs

• Alex: Dom Events.

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